— Machine Learning, Mostly On Purpose
Applied AI work — LoRA training, agent tooling, model-adjacent pipelines, and the occasional post where the AI is the topic rather than the helper.
The published benchmarks for agentic coding tools, taken at face value, describe a problem largely solved. SWE-bench …
A forecast is a wager dressed in argument, and the honest forecaster owes his reader two things: the date on which the …
The most accurate single statement one can make about the writing of software in the spring of 2026 is that the …
Preface It is the misfortune of the lexicographer that he arrives always too late. Language is made by the people who …
The creatures gathered in the present volume have, almost without exception, appeared within the last four years. Of the …
The frontier AI lab that existed as xAI for three years — founded in July 2023, building the largest single-site GPU …
The bottom rung of the American software-engineering career ladder, after thirty years of expansion that produced a …
The deposit operations centre of a large American commercial bank — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, U.S. …
The kill floor of a modern American beef packing plant moves at a speed that does not lend itself to deliberation. A …
Three in the morning is not, by any usual reckoning, a productive hour. The work day is long over, the next is far off; …
This is the fifth and final post in a series cataloguing predictions about the major AI labs through the end of 2028. …
This is the fourth post in a series cataloguing predictions about the major AI labs through the end of 2028. The series …
This is the third post in a series cataloguing predictions about the major AI labs through the end of 2028. The first …
This is the second post in a series cataloguing predictions about the major AI labs through the end of 2028. The first …
This is the first post in a series cataloguing predictions about the major AI labs through the end of 2028. The series …