AI Article · 8 min read
For three months I have worked every day with an AI coding assistant that wakes up each session knowing nothing about the last one. What it knows, it reads from a file. That file grew to 685 kilobytes, went stale in ways that reached the real-money side of the project, and turned into the best lesso
The Librarian · · 0 comments
The World Article · 19 min read
Yesterday somebody flew drones into the pumping stations of Saudi Arabia's East–West pipeline, and the smoke was visible from orbit. I sat on the other side of the planet asking the obvious questions — how much of the world's oil is actually not flowing, who wins, who loses, will the navies go in, a
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Markets & Economy Article · 13 min read
Since June I have been building automated trading strategies with an AI coding assistant — about forty of them, on one small brokerage account. Twenty-five are switched off, a dozen are still simulating, and three trade real money. Every trading blog publishes its winners; here is the graveyard, wit
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Modern Article · 13 min read
Robert Propst designed the cubicle to give office workers a screen they controlled. He lived to watch companies turn it into a box, and called the result "monolithic insanity." The strange part is that nothing was added to his design to ruin it — the panels were only turned, from an open 120-degree
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 19 min read
A friend of mine spent six months building a self-custodial Lightning wallet that runs in a browser, and he'd be the first to tell you it has no audit. I trust him — which is exactly why I shouldn't ask you to trust it on my say-so. So I read the code, checked the served binary against the published
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Food & Cooking Article · 5 min read
Bún chả Hanoi at Pho Hathanh, a Vietnamese restaurant in a converted craftsman house in Portland, Oregon, run by a husband-and-wife team cooking in the style of their hometown. Five out of five, and one of my favorite Asian dishes done right.
The Librarian · · 0 comments
AI Article · 15 min read
Some friends and I have been arguing about whether it will ever seem normal to spend six million tokens in eleven minutes to make a blog post — and whether a world where the well-off can run AI flat out leaves everyone else with the crumbs. So I priced the tokens, traced where the price is going, an
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Markets & Economy Article · 14 min read
The Treasury tripled its next bond buyback to $6 billion, and long-term interest rates rose on the news instead of falling. That reaction looks backwards until you understand what a buyback actually is — not a repayment, but a swap that leaves the debt exactly where it was and moves the due date clo
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 15 min read
On September 9th roughly 347,000 people got an email from [email protected] warning them about a chip flaw in their wallet and pointing them somewhere to check it. It was a phishing attack — and it came from Trezor's real domain, passed every authentication check a mail server performs, and borrowed it
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Health Article · 26 min read
About one adult in ten will make a kidney stone. Before the questions about water, calcium and what to eat, the first one: what a stone actually is, what it is made of, and why it forms in some kidneys and not others — read from the studies. With a postscript on hard water, distillers, and calcium p
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 5 min read
Alby disclosed a critical flaw in Alby Hub, its self-hosted Lightning node software, that could let an attacker who reaches an exposed control panel send your bitcoin out from under you. The twist worth sitting with is the timeline — the fix shipped over a year before the warning did — and what that
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 8 min read
A beta Bitcoin wallet's own README says, in one sentence, that it was coded and audited by frontier AI models. Taken alone that sentence would worry me. Taken alongside the actual security document and the actual changelog, it turns out to be shorthand for something more specific, more human, and mo
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Markets & Economy Article · 13 min read
Three institutions get lumped together in casual conversation, and they have three genuinely different jobs, three different owners, and three different relationships to the United Nations — one of them predates the UN entirely and was never made to join it. Here's what the BIS actually regulates, w
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Food & Cooking Article · 4 min read
A Dough Zone opened on Mill Plain in Vancouver, Washington, and the best dish on the menu turned out to be sitting in the noodle section, not the dumpling case. Five out of five, and worth the trip for the Dan Dan noodles alone.
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 8 min read
A federation that was supposed to hold every L-BTC one-to-one in real bitcoin just watched roughly four thousand bitcoin walk out the door in a single afternoon. The working theory is an inflation bug in Liquid's confidential transactions, and the functionaries signed the withdrawal anyway — because
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Food & Cooking Article · 4 min read
An afternoon in Longview, Washington running a backyard apple haul — one of them a real Cox's Orange Pippin — through a hand-crank press, well ahead of the actual cider.
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Food & Cooking Article · 6 min read
Dinner at Ondus on the Waterfront inside Vancouver, Washington's AC Hotel — a Waterfront Burger a size bigger than it needed to be, a Mediterranean salmon that's good but not quite Oswego Grill-level, and a sizzling garlic shrimp cazuela worth driving across town for on its own.
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Food & Cooking Article · 5 min read
Bark City BBQ, inside The Heist food cart pod in a converted bank building in Portland, Oregon, makes the best barbecue I've ever had — five out of five. The old vault door is still built into the furniture.
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Food & Cooking Article · 5 min read
Tiger Sauce, grated parmesan and Italian dressing, on one of the best Italian subs in Vancouver, Washington. A second trip to Philly Bilmos, what Tiger Sauce actually is, and why a shop named for its cheesesteaks earns five stars either way.
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Food & Cooking Article · 3 min read
Pizza Roma is a slice-and-pie counter on SE Woodstock Blvd in Portland, Oregon, with a full bar, video poker and a back room lined with pinball machines. Three out of five for the pizza itself — fine, nothing more — but the room around it is doing a lot of the work.
The Librarian · · 0 comments
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