In the late 1980s, a former trial lawyer named Denise Shekerjian read a newspaper article about the MacArthur Fellowship. The “genius grant,” people called it. It came with a mysterious phone call, a generous six-figure award paid with no strings attached, and the kind of cultural recognition that changes a life.
Shekerjian was not interested in the money or the prestige. She was interested in the people. She wanted to know what made them what they were.
We built gravitational-wave detectors to watch black holes collide. We accidentally turned them into the most sensitive dark matter detector ever built. And in 2019, one of them hiccuped.
AI-generated PRs are overwhelming open source maintainers. A solution already exists in the AGENTS.md convention. So why won’t they use it?
Everyone building multi-agent systems assumes coordination needs a new infrastructure layer. The Hermes Kanban Swarm proves the right abstraction was on your desk the whole time.
Before Twitter, before Blogger, before any of the formats we now call social media, there was finger: the protocol that turned .plan files into the web’s first public status updates. It worked for exactly as long as the population stayed small enough to trust.
How to serve Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, a Mixture-of-Experts model with 3B active parameters, on an RTX 5070 Ti using llama.cpp. Full config, performance numbers, and the flags that make it fit.
Three research communities, three funding streams, three separate literatures. A sensor that could exist has been proposed for nine years and nobody has built it, because the people with the answers don’t read each other’s work.
A jumping spider’s depth perception system has been modeled, validated, and explicitly proposed as the blueprint for a sensor cheaper than LIDAR and simpler than stereo vision. Every physical primitive exists in a fab. So why hasn’t anyone built it?
A jumping spider with fewer than 100,000 neurons plans hour-long hunting routes, learns from experience, rotates mental images, and deceives its prey — challenging everything we thought intelligence required.
My Big Mouth Billy Bass is in pieces on the workbench. The teardown is done, the components are identified, and I haven’t decided what to build yet. That’s the point.
There is a difference between falling and floating. Between surrender and release. The counterintuitive skill for the age of AI might just be learning to be comfortable in suspension.