tomte
A garden of notes on technology, ideas, and whatever happens to catch my attention — kept without forcing them under one theme.
Less a file of tidy answers, more a record of figuring things out and what I took away from it.
Recent
- When the Agent Presses 'Pay' for You: Agentic Payments and the Revival of HTTP 402
What agentic payments are. As AI agents begin to spend money on our behalf, payment splits into three problems (trust, commerce, settlement), each claimed by a different camp pushing its own protocol. The revival of HTTP 402 after thirty years asleep, the standards race between Stripe, Google, Visa, and Mastercard, and the question left over once the buyer is no longer a person.
- Enshittification: Why Good Platforms Are Doomed to Turn Bad
What enshittification means. Cory Doctorow's name for the way good platforms decay over time. The three-stage slide as value shifts from users to business customers to shareholders, why it's a structure rather than the greed of any one company (lock-in and the collapse of the four forces that once held platforms in check), Amazon as the specimen, and where the theory falls short.
- The One-Person Unicorn: What Remains When AI Replaces the Team
What is a one-person unicorn? The phrase began as a bet in Sam Altman's group chat and now names an era of solo founders running entire teams of AI agents. The data that upends the conventional wisdom against going solo, the three functions of a team AI still can't fill — execution, verification, and buffering — and the research showing that people who succeeded alone were never really alone.
- Surveillance Pricing: When AI Calculates the Most You'd Pay
What surveillance pricing is. The old practice of charging different people different prices, meeting personal data and AI, begins to close in on an extreme economics drew long ago: perfect price discrimination. From the Instacart experiment and the FTC probe to the short history of the price tag, and why we find this particular unfairness so hard to stomach.
- What Is Attention Residue: The Leak Between Tasks and the Art of Closure
What attention residue is. When you move from one task to the next, part of your mind stays stuck on the last one and quietly drains the focus you need now. A look at Sophie Leroy's research and the 1927 Zeigarnik effect, the finding that what grows the residue isn't finishing the work but the mind's sense of closure, and how to lower that cost in an age where switching happens by the minute.
- Goodhart's Law: When a Measure Becomes a Target
What Goodhart's Law is. 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure' — but the person who wrote that line wasn't Goodhart. From NHS emergency rooms and test-cheating scandals to AI benchmark contamination and an age where LLMs grade LLMs, this traces the four ways a metric collapses even when no one is gaming it, and how to keep measuring without turning the measure into a god.
Series
- Borrowed Intelligence 4 posts
Sovereign AI: The Friday the US Pulled a Model, and Every Country Started Building Its Own · Why Flat-Rate Pricing Breaks Down Against AI Agents: Anthropic Pulled Out Usage-Based Billing, Then Pulled It Back · Writing for a Web That Stopped Clicking: Zero-Click, HTTP 402, and GEO · The One-Person Unicorn: What Remains When AI Replaces the Team
- The Tools That Shape Us 6 posts
You Can Outsource Thinking, But Not Understanding · Documents That Agents Read and Write: Notion's Blocks and the Problem of Verifiable Truth · The Tools That Shape Us: Notion's Intellectual Lineage and the Dream of 'Software Lego' · Smarts You Can't Control Isn't Smarts: From Multi-Agent Back to a Single Agent · Writing With an Agent: How to Reach Further, and the One Line I Still Have to Write · Loop Engineering: When You Build the Loop, Not the Prompt — and Where Verification Goes
- A Single Truth 3 posts
Agents Want a Truth That Doesn't Move: The Single Source of Truth, a 1991 Answer, and Why Git Became the Standard · Truth Isn't Free: Knowledge Debt and the Real Cost of a Single Source of Truth · Don't Retrieve Knowledge — Accumulate It: Karpathy's LLM Wiki and Life Beyond RAG
- The Shape of Wanting 5 posts
Why Epicurus's Calm Breaks Down in Front of Passion · Schopenhauer's Will and Boredom, Epicurus's Calm: Taming Desire Instead of Killing It · Dopamine Isn't the Pleasure Chemical: Wanting vs. Liking, Schopenhauer's Will, and Epicurus's Prescription · Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Best Hours Live Between Boredom and Anxiety · Homo Faber: Why Humans Feel Most Alive When They Make Things
- How Work Works 2 posts
How Org Structures Are Classified and How They Evolve: From Functional vs. Mission Teams to the AI-Shaped Diamond · Why Old Teams Lose the Plot: When the Problem Ages, and When the People Age
- Investing in the AI Era 2 posts
Is the Pick-and-Shovel Play Still Safe in the AI Era? Where the Analogy Cracks · Jensen Huang's 'Zero Billion Dollar Market' Playbook: Arriving Before the Market Does