Of Hearts and Minds (Page 2)

Of Hearts and Minds

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The Chain of Trust

This essay is part of Deep Familiar Ground — a series on distributed nodes, earned trust, and the quiet work of building systems that don't fall apart when you're not watching. The companion piece is The Dirty Pool. There’s a conversation that surfaces in teams building

Buried in Svalbard

Discovery While assembling the professional works index for this very website, I found an Arctic Code Vault Contributor badge on my magicpia GitHub profile. Earned February 2, 2020. I had no memory of it. The vault is a decommissioned coal mine inside a mountain in Svalbard, Norway, hundreds of meters

On Building Language Machines and Snakes Eating Their Tails

Taco happy hour, UX Drinks, Tiki time by the Chicago River. Elephant and Castle on a Thursday. The office kitchen at whatever hour it was when someone finally broke out the good coffee and a whiteboard marker and started drawing trees. Parse trees. NP, VP, NP. Noun phrase, verb phrase,

Learning to Code Without Writing Code

Building a Game to Learn About Agentic Systems Riding the Claude mania in January 2026 like the rest of the internet. Lobster emoji proliferated across our screens in full Moltbook fever. And I was sitting in the wreckage of having just read Steve Yegge's Gastown infamous "what

When Self-Expression Becomes Distributed

Earlier this week, I was walking a friend through my homestead project. The shared agentic system my husband and I built to manage our five-year path toward self-sufficiency and general household things. This friend is a well-respected security engineer, researcher, and practitioner. Sharp mind. The kind of

Become the Mesh: The Homestead Agentic Web

So I was explaining this at work today, after they saw a tweet Dan Shipper, CEO of Every, whose employees are using OpenClaw to hyper-personalize their workplace. Figured I should flesh this concept out more and paint you a vision of what we are starting to build here at

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