Sep 23, 2026
The Bottleneck Moved
AI does not eliminate bottlenecks. Once a model becomes capable enough, the constraint moves downstream to verification, permissions, workflow, and human attention.
Blog
Essays, notes, and project updates.
Sep 20, 2026
How a Racing Stripe Became a Language
In 1967 the U.S. Coast Guard adopted a new diagonal "racing stripe." Within a generation, coast guards around the world were speaking variations of the same visual language.
Sep 10, 2026
GitHub's Ongoing Actions Outage
I have two little production systems running in GitHub Actions. One, Krigsbot, wakes up every morning, looks for environmental and polar news, makes some editorial decisions, and queues a day's worth of…
Sep 3, 2026
The Sky Is Falling
The BBC published a story this morning about the Netherlands moving part of its national gold reserve from North America to London. BBC article Ordinarily, this would not be particularly exciting. Central…
Aug 25, 2026
A Maintenance Plan for Memory
The United States maintains thousands of buoys. They are numbered, charted, lit, and serviced on a schedule. Every one of them says some version of the same thing, which is that the…
Aug 11, 2026
The Fatal Image Is Now Open
I have built a virtual museum exhibition. This was not the plan. Judith and Holofernes: The Fatal Image is now open at judith.jameshoward.us. It brings together 58 works depicting Judith, Holofernes, and…
Jul 30, 2026
Effective Challenge Is Now Optional
On April 17, 2026, the Federal Reserve Board, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took the most battle-tested governance framework in American finance and…
Jul 27, 2026
When Every Bank's AI Fails Together
Financial regulation is built on a useful fiction: that banks make mistakes independently of one another. This assumption underpins diversification requirements, stress testing methodology, and most of what the Federal Reserve does…
Jul 22, 2026
What We Do Now
The history of artificial intelligence is a history of a moving target. The first machine decision was a thermostat closing a circuit. The field got its name at Dartmouth in 1956 and…
Jul 8, 2026
The Naming Problem
In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, in a six-game match. It was treated as a milestone in artificial intelligence. Researchers debated what the victory meant about…
Jul 3, 2026
Cramér's V and the Missing Half of Chi-Square
You are auditing a loan approval model for demographic fairness. You build a cross-tabulation of predictions against a protected category and run a chi-square test. The result comes back p Effect Size…
Jul 1, 2026
Attention Is All You Need
In June 2017, eight researchers associated with Google posted a paper on machine translation. Its title, "Attention Is All You Need," was a provocation directed at the field's dominant architectures for sequence…