Mark Atwood

I audited C2PA when I was at Amazon. We pulled out. The world needs provenance infrastructure. Adobe's version is regulatory capture dressed as a public good.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/c2pa-is-adobes-tollbooth

Most people know not to learn medicine or combat from Hollywood. The problem is everything else.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/what-hollywood-teaches

Your RV, most police cruisers, and that excavator on the job site all start (or open) with standardized keys you can buy online. This isn't negligence. It's a system working as intended, for everyone except you.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/pandoras-box-was-locked-with-a-ch751

Your RV, most police cruisers, and that excavator on the job site all start (or open) with standardized keys you can buy online. This isn't negligence. It's a system working as intended, for everyone except you.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/pandoras-box-was-locked-with-a-ch751

The actual message of the Harry Potter books is not what you think.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-actual-message-of-harry-potter

Ask a science communicator to write a piece arguing that science communication over-indexes on narrative and under-indexes on rigor. They won't. They can't. That essay is an argument against their own career.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-discipline-that-cant-audit-itself

I worked 10-12 hour days as a Principal Engineer at Amazon for seven years. With current AI tooling, I could have done everything that wasn't meetings or actual thinking in about fifteen minutes. The math is uncomfortable.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-fifteen-minute-principal-engineer

Metric defenders keep invoking cooking as the case where "regular scaling" pays off. Problem: scaling a recipe isn't multiplication. Leavening, salt, heat transfer, and evaporation all follow nonlinear rules that no unit system encodes. The elegant x10 helps you with exactly nothing.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/why-si-doesnt-help-you-scale-in-the

Built a federated IRC server by talking to Claude for an hour after the paying gig ended. 8,000 lines of Go. Servers find each other via GitHub PRs. https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/meshircd-a-federated-irc-server-in

Temperature seems fundamental until you ask what it's measuring. Human thermal perception is a multivariate mess: conduction, convection, radiation, evaporation, adaptation. We flattened it to one number because mercury tubes gave us one number. The instrument shaped the concept.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/how-hot-is-it

The metric system isn't rational. It's a fossil record of what instruments a French aristocrat could build in 1790. The kelvin requires water with a specific isotopic composition. The ampere required measuring the force between two infinite parallel wires. These aren't fundamental units. They're historical accidents with good PR.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-metric-system-encodes-18th-century

The metric system assumes you have a scale. The traditional system assumes you have a cup, a spoon, and a stick. Pour a pile, cut it in half with a knife, sweep half away. Halving is the one precision operation available to everyone, everywhere, with whatever's at hand.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-traditional-units

Earth's radio footprint peaked in 1980 and has collapsed 80% since. Nobody decided this. Shannon's theorem did. Some incentive gradients aren't psychology, they're physics.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/incentive-gradients-that-arent-psychology

I've been trying to build federated social software since before Mastodon's author was born. Last night I finally shipped two implementations. https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/two-fediverse-servers-in-one-night

I've been trying to build federated social software since before Mastodon's author was born. Last night I finally shipped two implementations. https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/two-fediverse-servers-in-one-night

“Cyber” is like using “physick” to describe surgery, drug discovery, FDA regulation, food safety, grocery stores, public health, epidemiology, and bioweapons. It doesn’t name a field; it crushes a dozen unrelated disciplines into one antique bureaucratic grunt.

Half the Vance operation is now on the record, with names. The other half is still dark. The dark half is the moat, and moats don't give interviews. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-signature

The 1937 Soviet cohort had two structural successors. One dismantled Deng's succession machinery. The other captured American incumbency until they had to be carried out. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/two-heirs

The 1937 Soviet cohort had two structural successors. One dismantled Deng's succession machinery. The other captured American incumbency until they had to be carried out. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/two-heirs

@geeksam@ruby.social @cstross@wandering.shop my reply to your stance: https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/i-ai-code-all-day-i-hate-talking