When the machine asks who you are, what do you answer?
The story of a² + b² = c², the schoolchild-simple equation that took humanity three and a half centuries to prove. From Fermat’s marginal note to Wiles’s proof, and what it opens about what solving even means.
If a machine solved every open problem in a sealed box with no one there to read the results, would anything actually be solved? Part 2 of a reflection that starts with Fermat’s Last Theorem and ends on why understanding must land in a mind.
Franklin listed thirteen virtues in his twenties and spent a lifetime marking his own faults in a little book. I took the idea, but with seven virtues of my own and a Telegram agent instead of paper. On humility, listening, and why the paper notebook lasts three days.
A small poem and a shorter confession. I have no Bitcoin. Whatever I once had was sold to pay the bills, and I never bought any. I never fell into the maxi religion, and I am quietly proud of that.
How Adam Back’s post on X sparked a reflection on Bitcoin’s ungovernable design, Hashcash as market-based spam filtering, Hayek’s vision of competing currencies, and whether multiple Bitcoin-like systems sharing SHA-256 could make the whole ecosystem harder to capture through energy policy.
Six years and several tokenization projects later — BRZ stablecoin, Alkimiya hashrate derivatives, Preservaland forest NFTs, EURQ on LayerZero, CS Digital — the lessons that don’t make it onto conference panels. The hardest part is never the smart contract.
The word ‘company’ hides a meal. On how capitalism was never natural, Varoufakis on technofeudalism, the empty-office syndrome in the age of AI, and the question that defines the next decade: who do we break bread with once the machine has changed work?
Most people believe they are morally superior to the average. An essay threading cognitive psychology (Tappin & McKay), Nietzsche (Genealogy of Morals), and Haidt (the rider and the elephant), on the judge we all carry inside — and how to let it rest.
On how architecture was always embedded in the act of programming — until teams grew large enough that Conway’s Law started outranking Liskov’s. Why software rots if it doesn’t change, why Definition of Ready is architecture disguised as process, and why in the age of AI intention matters more than code.
I wasn’t looking for Bitcoin. It found me in the middle of an engineering problem. How a distributed file synchronizer in 2010, a search for a hash faster than MD4, and a letter in Japanese from Mt. Gox turned into a fifteen-year journey.