Cyrus Radfar

Two essays argued there's a tradeoff GDP can't see: a society's power to take up the new against the debt that freezes it.

GDP and the balance sheet book the loan, the payment, the house, all of it as strength: the account holds the debt on the asset's side.

Turn a photo into a black-and-white coloring page, then color it online.

Four companies spent more than $380 billion building the machines for the future last year.

Every fifty years a new kind of gold appears, and we ride past the thing worth keeping to go dig it up.

I'm a builder, and I'm about to stop building to drive my family through every national park in the country.

Sandboxing is thirty years old and has barely changed.

The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009.

BYD's claim of 500 kilometers of range in five minutes is real, independently observed, and on a $27,400 sedan.

A breakdown of the supply chain behind the AI buildout: a 38-year-old transformer, a single steel mill in Butler, Pennsylvania, a 5-year wait on turbines, half a million missing electricians, and a lengthening list of people who said no to the check.

The loom is a computer.

My kids can refuse to play each other's game.

The history, the stigma, the neuroscience, and what it's like to have a brain that doesn't run on importance.

A simple slash command that forces your agent to walk you through decisions one at a time instead of dumping a plan you won't read.

Defect rate per line rises with codebase size.

Pretext measures text 300x faster than the browser by replacing layout reflows with arithmetic.

AI agents fail in production because of mutable state, hidden dependencies, and side effects the agent can't see.

An AI agent overwrote hours of uncommitted edits.

KV cache quantization explained: why compressing LLM memory below 4 bits breaks attention, and how Google's TurboQuant (PolarQuant + QJL) fixes it.

For sixty years, self-improving AI was the apocalypse scenario.

A response to the idea that the best engineers optimize systems — and why I look for something different.

A speed reading tool that flashes one word at a time against a 3D canvas.

Gilens and Page found US citizens have near-zero impact on policy.

AI labs trained on everyone's data without asking.

An exploration of how ideas form, find each other, and grow — rendered as a particle flow field.

Zero-blue night filter for macOS, Linux, and Windows.

A kitchen-sink post that exercises every typographic element — headings, blockquotes, images, code, lists, and more — so the design configurator has something real to chew on.

America's energy and water infrastructure cannot sustain AI buildout without radical change.

Coding productivity metrics are rising, but the real question is whether human judgment is becoming more valuable.

High taste is a superpower in review, but a liability during creation—separating judgment from making is the skill creators need most.

Raw compute scaling is hitting limits; the next breakthroughs require hardware-software co-design and specialization.

Code generation speed isn't the bottleneck—understanding and verifying AI-generated code is, and current tools optimize the wrong 5% of development.

Uncertainty has shaped human decision-making for millennia—from ancient dice to modern language models—teaching us to work with randomness, not against it.

Reflecting on D&D world-building skills and what generative world models mean for the future of storytelling and creative expression.

Using agentic development to prototype Swift apps that solve personal problems with privacy, ownership, and connection at their core.

As AI handles optimization, human superpower shifts to ideation and the courage to create badly—making and learning without measuring.

The real opportunity in AI is disrupting incumbents and creating new products, not building more AI platforms.

Mobile blindsided many companies that moved slowly; AI will repeat this cycle—start small, measure, and upgrade every quarter.

Learning at speed to build AI-enabled products that return people to the real world, moving beyond screens.

Framework for understanding AI autonomy levels outside self-driving, from copy-paste to full autonomous systems.

A rap parody celebrating AI Paired Programming—the synergy between humans and AI in software development.

Willpower and resilience are finite resources that must be managed strategically, not glorified into burnout.

Economic pressure and frozen job markets will drive a new generation to build, sparking another wave of founder-led disruption.

Most individual contributor developers will need to re-skill within five years as AI agents take over execution work.

Conway's Law shows why organizations keep building what they did yesterday—and why Tesla's system reimagining beat a hundred years of optimization.

Sora's outputs remain largely unusable at current pricing; the model needs dramatic improvements in consistency to justify its value.

The raw material constraints for 10B humanoid robots by 2040 are severe—especially lithium and rare earth elements.

San Francisco's tech community gathering places have vanished, taking with them the energy that built the startup ecosystem.

Understanding that AI agents represent a fundamental shift beyond smarter tools—a genuinely new form of intelligence with exponential capability.

Binary neural networks achieve comparable performance to 16-bit models while using 3x less memory, 4x less GPU resources, and 100x less energy.