Measurement & Truth

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. ...

I went looking for sustained-load benchmarks comparing MoE and Dense coding models on consumer GPUs. Not demo bursts on a Mac Mini — sustained autoregressive generation on real coding tasks, where architecture and interconnect are the only variables. I found plenty of one-shot numbers. Nobody had published the comparison that matters: same hardware, same quantization, same inference engine, MoE versus Dense, across GPU configurations. Methodology visible. Numbers verifiable. So I ran the tests. Dual RTX 3090s with NVLink, custom liquid cooling, a 6 kW isolation transformer feeding a double-conversion UPS. Not elegant, but thermally and electrically honest — sustained inference loads without throttling, no measurement fiction. The hardware details are below. ...

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. ...

This is the third and final part of a series based on a real-world engagement: a company that scaled from $40M to $1B in annual revenue in just five years, and the security program that had to grow with it. This is a story about building high-performance operating systems where security, standards, architecture, and performance act as enablers rather than constraints. Part 1: Earning credibility before you’ve earned authority. Part 2: Blurring the lines — Security at the SRE and Operations level. Part 3: Wrapping the gift — Transparency and agency. The Quality That Can’t Be Purchased I’ve been writing around this idea for a while — in Cold Aisle Trenches, in why standards fail when you try to impose them, in how defense in depth actually works at scale. The thread is always the same: security can’t be bought. You can’t swipe a credit card and receive “secure” in a box. It’s a quality that emerges — like the lights-out data center you don’t chase but eventually arrive at, because every other piece fell into place first. ...

This is the second of a three-part series based on a real-world engagement: a company that scaled from $40M to $1B in annual revenue in just five years, and the security program that had to grow with it. This is a story about building high-performance operating systems where security, standards, architecture, and performance act as enablers rather than constraints. Part 1: Earning credibility before you’ve earned authority. Part 2: Blurring the lines - Security at the SRE and Operations level. Part 3: Wrapping the gift — Transparency and agency. From Trust to Reliance ...

This is the first of a three-part series based on a real-world engagement: a company that scaled from $40M to $1B in annual revenue in just five years, and the security program that had to grow with it. This is a story about building high-performance operating systems where security, standards, architecture, and performance act as enablers rather than constraints. Part 1: Earning credibility before you’ve earned authority. Part 2: Blurring the lines - Security at the SRE and Operations level. Part 3: Wrapping the gift — Transparency and agency. The Inflection Point A few years back, AMTI was at the heart of a fascinating corporate challenge. I was serving as a fractional CISO and advisor for a company standing at a critical inflection point. ...

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. ...

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. ...

A few years ago, as Field CTO for an enterprise customer, I was pulled into a rescue effort that started the way these stories usually start: pain, urgency, and a narrative that felt convenient. The application hit a bootstorm—150,000+ users slamming it in a short window—and then the predictable second-order effect: every day after that, more tickets piled up. Instability. Session timeouts. Intermittent failures. The kind of symptoms that turn a service into a rumor. ...

1/5 — The Inception Series: Security Assurance — URE Case — 1/5 Start from the beginning: you’re here. Next: 2/5 — Trust Boundaries This is the first of five short posts on Security Assurance Engineering. The goal is simple: separate security intent from security proof, and show what “assurance” looks like when you treat a system as real—owned, changing, and measurable. I’ll use URE as the working surface. URE is the platform where I publish research notes and operating practice generated in my lab—work that started as a few shared threads with friends and peers, and eventually became worth “productizing” into something durable and navigable. ...