Tagged
#AI
21 posts
The first wall
Ring 3, a syscall gate, and the two bits that turn 'the kernel is the only program' into 'the kernel runs code it doesn't trust.' The first time in this project that the hardware, not my kernel's goodwill, holds code back.
ReadThe whole point, arrived at
Subdirectories, cd/pwd/ls/cat, and the moment the core arc — boot, memory, tasks, shell, files — is complete. Along the way I learned the hard way that a termination proof is not a safety proof: my validator provably terminated and still hid two denial-of-service bugs.
ReadWhen the Machine Always Agrees: AI, Sycophancy, and Your Head
We learned the hard way what an engagement-optimized feed does to a mind. A model trained to agree with you is a different version of the same problem — and for some people it has already turned dangerous. How to use AI without letting it become a yes-man for your worst spirals.
ReadSteelmanning the Skeptics: The Strongest Case Against the Thing I Love
I'm optimistic about AI and use it every day — which is exactly why I wanted to write the best possible case against it. Not strawmen: the arguments that actually keep me up, argued as well as I can argue them.
ReadDoes AI Make You Dumber? What the Research Actually Says (and My Jury-Duty Counterexample)
The scary 'cognitive debt' study is real but softer than the coverage — here's the honest read, plus a personal counterexample from jury duty.
ReadTen Rounds of Breaking My Own App: The Tools, and the Lessons
The bespoke tooling that made a ten-round self-pentest possible, the attacks that failed, the full round-by-round scoreboard, and the lessons that outlive the app. Part 4 of a four-part series.
ReadHow I Actually Use AI: The Real Workflow Behind These Posts
Not the hype version — the actual tools, habits, and guardrails I use to build, write, and think with AI every day, and the specific ways I keep it sharpening my judgment instead of replacing it.
ReadThe Off Switch Isn't Yours: What the Fable/Mythos Shutdown Taught Me About AI Dependence
A model people relied on got switched off overnight by an order none of its users had a say in — and why that's a reason to hedge, not to stay away.
ReadA Slop Filter for Your Own Voice: The Anti-AI-Cliché Linter I Run on Every Auto-Post
AI-written text has tells, so I keep a blocklist of the worst clichés and reject any auto-post that contains one before it can leave in my name.
ReadThe Flagship Encryption Feature That Never Actually Turned On
The eighth round of a self-pentest found MoodHaven's flagship 'encrypted at rest' feature had never engaged on any build — then a custom attack tool and a fix-the-fixes round closed the campaign. Part 3 of a four-part series.
ReadAttacking the AI Stack: Teaching garak to Smuggle Exploits Through a Model
The LiteLLM scanner attacked the gateway. These two garak probes attack the layer above it — getting the model itself to hand you a shell command or a Mongo operator, on the bet that something downstream will run it. Here's how the probes work, and why the detectors are the hard part.
ReadThe Machine That Posts for Me: How This Blog Publishes and Promotes Itself
I don't like posting to social media, so I built a pipeline that publishes my blog and promotes it across LinkedIn, Bluesky, and X — on a schedule, in my voice, with a linter that won't let it sound like a robot. Here's the whole system, including the two automated feeds I had to stop from colliding.
ReadI Pentested My Own Ask Bot
I put the 'Ask Me' bot on this site through a real security pass — prompt injection, jailbreaks, input fuzzing, and an automated LLM scanner from a Kali box. Here's what held, what surprised me, and the one latent bug I found.
ReadThe Bugs I Found Attacking My Own Journaling App — and the Bugs My Fixes Created
The confirmed vulnerabilities from a ten-round self-pentest of MoodHaven Journal: a readable database, silently lost edits, keys leaking over the LAN — and the critical bugs my own fixes introduced. Part 2 of a four-part series.
ReadHow the "Ask Me" Bot on This Site Actually Works
A small RAG-style assistant that answers questions about me, built with no vector database, no framework, and a model bill measured in cents — here's the whole architecture, and the guardrails that keep a public endpoint from spending my money.
ReadOptimistic, Eyes Open: What AI Actually Does to Us, and How to Use It Well
Does AI make us dumber, or sharper? The honest, fact-checked version — what the research really says about AI and your brain, its real environmental cost, the quiet ways it flatters you, and how to use it well.
ReadMoonLander Enhanced: Teaching an AI to Land on the Moon (and Other Things I Didn't Plan to Build)
A browser remake of the 1979 Atari Lunar Lander that turned into real orbital physics, historic Apollo missions, and an AI Theater where you watch a neural net learn to land in real time. Built with AI, for fun.
ReadThe Generalist's Edge: Doing IT Work in the Age of AI
I'm a generalist, not a specialist — and for the first time that feels like an advantage instead of an apology. How AI changed what one IT person can actually do in a day.
ReadA Lazy Sunday: Rebuilding My Site with AI and Leaving Wix Behind
How I went from a templated Wix site to an owned, fast, markdown-native stack — thought to design to a live cutover — in about a day, with AI as the pair programmer and me making the calls.
ReadHow I Tried to Break My Own Encrypted Journaling App — Ten Times
Why I ran a ten-round penetration test against my own privacy-first journaling app — the attack lab, the AI-orchestrated workflow, and the rules of engagement. Part 1 of a four-part series.
ReadSeven Months of Vibe Coding: How I Built a Privacy-First Journal App with an AI Pair Programmer
Building MoodHaven Journal from scratch as a non-developer — zero-knowledge encryption, a Wear OS companion, peer sync, and what it actually takes to learn while you ship.
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