Incentives & Economics

Since 2023, I’ve been studying applied AI almost exclusively. I don’t pretend to be a data scientist or ML engineer. Honestly, I don’t think giving up more than twenty years of infrastructure, performance, and security engineering would be smart. I’d end up like a duck: swims, flies, and walks, but doesn’t outperform at any of them. It’s impossible not to get caught up in the vibe-coding thing. I’m not here to criticize anyone shipping and prototyping. A few months back, I heard one of the smartest things anyone’s said about AI, from Naval Ravikant. I’ve been listening to him for a few years now, and his takes are consistently good. I don’t remember the exact words, and I’m not going to chase videos or quotes to nail them down, but it was close to this: “There is no disruption caused by AI. The novelty we’re seeing is the abstraction and conversion of human language into computing language.” Brilliant. ...

Two in the morning, eighteen hours into the run. Seven LLM backends processing the same stream of GPU cluster anomalies. Same thermal cascades, same NVLink errors, same KV cache evictions. I’m watching the scoring dashboard update in real time and the numbers are breaking my assumptions faster than I can take notes. The $32-per-day model is getting the diagnosis wrong more often than a free one running on my workstation. ...

Meta’s Prometheus data center in New Albany, Ohio is scaling to 1.2 GW. To get there, they’re building behind-the-meter natural gas turbines — two 200 MW Socrates generation facilities, supplied by dedicated gas pipelines, isolated from the grid. In Virginia, the same story plays out with diesel generators, enough of them that it became the top legislative concern entering the 2026 session. The industry talks about PUE as if it were a verdict on environmental efficiency. It isn’t. PUE measures one envelope — the data center facility. Total facility power divided by IT equipment power. A PUE of 1.3 means 30% overhead for cooling, lighting, and support systems. That’s the metric everyone optimizes, the number that shows up in sustainability reports, the figure that earns applause at conferences. ...

Last Friday, the White House ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic products within six months. The Defense Secretary designated the company a “supply chain risk to national security” — a label normally reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei or Kaspersky. Anthropic’s crime: they refused to remove two safety guardrails from Claude before deploying it on classified Pentagon networks. No AI for mass domestic surveillance of American citizens. No fully autonomous weapons without human oversight. ...

In Brazil, when advising a customer on endpoint security, there was a mental model we never said out loud. The technical discussion would cover detection rates, false positives, memory footprint — the usual. But underneath it ran a question that never made it into the RFP: who do you want knowing what you’re doing? Russians or Americans? Kaspersky was the default for most of the market — and not because of ideology. Norton and Symantec had spent years earning their reputation for turning Windows machines into molasses, and McAfee was McAfee. Kaspersky worked. It was lighter, faster, cheaper. The fact that its telemetry flowed to Moscow rather than Langley was a feature, not a bug, depending on which side of the table you sat on. ...

The Concorde burned one ton of fuel per passenger to cross the Atlantic. One hundred seats. Three and a half hours. Mach 2. The most advanced commercial aircraft ever built — and every engineer who saw it wanted to believe it was the future. The 747 did the same crossing in seven hours. Four hundred seats. A quarter of the fuel per passenger. No afterburners. No sonic boom. No government subsidies keeping it alive. ...

I see people everywhere anxious about whether AI will disrupt their jobs, their industries, their lives. I’ve always approached this with calm. Not indifference—calm. The future rarely sends advance notice, but it is always arriving. This isn’t news. It’s the human condition. A few years ago, I attended a keynote by Michio Kaku where he framed—perfectly, for me—the relationship between humanity and technological change. What follows is my version. I can’t claim novelty, and I’m not a domain expert in sociology or economics. I’m an infrastructure builder observing the same pattern from the inside. ...

A few years ago, I was having dinner with the Americas VP of a European energy supermajor — one of those companies that extracts oil from war zones, negotiates with regimes that don’t appear on polite lists, and operates in places where “political risk” means your assets might get nationalized or your personnel kidnapped. Seventy-plus countries. Active operations in Libya, Nigeria, Angola, Myanmar, Yemen. The kinds of places where security briefings come before breakfast. ...

A few months ago I read Project Hail Mary and found myself thinking about observation and agency. Einstein didn’t “invent” spacetime dilation—he created the conditions to perceive it. Without the means to observe, you’re just touching walls in complete darkness. Trial and error, yes, but you never truly know the depth of what you’re sensing. Saturday mornings I take my son to flag football. He’s been in martial arts for half his life—his coach loves his resilience. But something surfaced in team sports that doesn’t appear on the mat. ...

In 2015, I did what seemed like the mature thing to do. I created a Production Engineering department. My college foundation was production engineering. I was a true believer: if we formalized standards and assigned a dedicated group to own operational rigor, the organization would naturally converge toward consistency. The mandate: Create SOPs. Define standards. Reduce variance. Improve reliability. On paper, it was textbook. In practice, it was a slow-motion collision with reality. ...

Most security programs are built around preventing bad things from happening. That’s necessary but insufficient. At AMTI, where I served as CTO and led infrastructure security for a multi-tenant cloud serving customers from single-VM deployments to enterprise DRaaS contracts spanning hundreds of miles of metro fiber, I learned that mature security is about resilience: the capacity to detect, contain, and recover faster than adversaries can escalate. The Visibility Problem at Scale Operating a cloud service provider on your own ASN creates a specific governance challenge: you’re the abuse contact, but in a GDPR-compliant architecture, you have no visibility into customer data. Encrypted traffic is opaque by design. This constraint forced architectural discipline: we couldn’t inspect our way to security, so we had to instrument our way there. ...

Every company says security is a core value. Few embed it as a design constraint. The difference shows up when things break. I get a call from a co-founder I’ve known for years. His company just raised $400M+ Series D. His voice is flat: “We have a problem.” Same day, we’re on a call. He’s a skilled engineer — personally devastated. They leaked over 2 million user records. Home addresses. Phone numbers. The full profile. The data had been publicly accessible for three weeks before anyone noticed. ...