How We Know Us
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What if novelty has a topology?
Exploring Novelty Through Entropy: A Journey in Behavioral Diversity What if we could measure surprise itself? Not the subjective experience of it, but its mathematical essence, distilled into equations that guide us toward the genuinely unexpected? This question led me down a rabbit hole where information theory meets evolutionary computation, where the mathematics of uncertainty…
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The Anvil vs. The Shield: What Mike Tyson and Floyd Mayweather Teach Us About Strategy
When I was in high school, everyone talked about Mike Tyson. I didn’t know much about boxing, but we all knew about Mike Tyson. His power was legendary: getting hit by him was described as “getting struck in the head by a good-sized anvil dropped from five feet.” From the moment he turned professional in…
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What if productivity is the wrong ROI?
The harsh reality: Companies may be repeating the exact same mistake that wasted trillions during the PC revolution. They’re deploying generative AI for management convenience instead of operational transformation and they’re about to discover why Paul Strassmann’s framework determines who wins and who gets left behind in the AI revolution. The Authority Behind the Framework…
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Working with Claude “styles” to Conjure an Octopus
I’ve been tinkering with Anthropic’s optional writing styles in Claude to express a more creative, thought provoking, rather than definitive voice. I’m getting closer to what I want. Here’s an example, I’ve asked it to explain what an octopus is to someone who has never seen one. Imagine if intelligence itself decided to abandon the…
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How Corporations Maintain Their Core Identity While Adapting to Market Changes
Bottom Line Up Front: The most resilient corporations maintain organizational invariance by preserving their fundamental identity, core competencies, and strategic framework while adapting surface-level operations to dynamic market conditions. This principle explains why some companies thrive across multiple market cycles while others lose their way during periods of change. The Strategic Paradox of Modern Business…
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vec2vec attacks
The emergence of vec2vec translation capabilities fundamentally disrupts the security model of vector databases that relied on embedding opacity. Previously, raw embeddings were considered computationally intractable to reverse-engineer or meaningfully interpret without access to the original model and training process. The End of Embedding Opacity Vector databases have historically operated under an implicit security assumption:…
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Selling is not the opposite of buying
Customers buy software, but they’re sold promises.
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The Four Myths: Why No One Wants To Buy Your Lousy Software
It doesn’t matter if your software is amazing, no one wants to buy what you’re selling. Customers don’t care what features it has, not really. They care what it can do for them. It’s not until you really spend time with customers that you can find that magical “market fit” and understand the difference between…
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Alpha and Beta of Software Risk
When you customize software, you create more unique risk, and remove yourself from the pool of shared risk. Shared risk is good, as there’s a good chance someone else might encounter a problem before you, and collectively you can encourage the vendor to fix it. Selective unique risk is good because it can be a…
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Control Charts and GTD
I wrote this some while back during my eighth week using Todoist as my task tracking software. Every time I pick up a new one, I start over with what I remember from half-heartedly working through David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. It just happens that about four weeks into using Todoist, I started reading…
Got any book recommendations?