Mark Atwood

Every executive memoir has the same beat: "I had to make some hard calls." Ask what it cost them. The answer is almost always nothing.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/what-hard-calls-cost

AI safety guardrails blocked me from filing a security advisory for a bug the AI helped me find. The bugs are still there. The doomers and the IC hawks built a policy environment where this was inevitable, and now they get to pretend it's safety.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-safety-that-isnt

The Open Source Contributor Covenant was a document written by people in a particular emotional state, during a particular cultural moment. The problems were structural, and nobody in the adoption chain was reading for them.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-covenant-years

The AI regulation cluster is already dirty, running on stolen money. It's about to get worse. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/where-the-sociopaths-go

Four pieces on why engineering process exists. Spoiler: it was never about the code. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-three-brains-series

TOS Scotty was honest about what was impossible, then reality bent under pressure. Film Scotty says 'impossible,' doesn't mean it, and the audience is told his whole reputation was fraud. The rewrite didn't come from bad writers. It came from an industry that lost access to inside accounts of competence.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-deconstruction-of-scotty-as-an

Priority isn't just "what's important." It's "what does my manager's manager think is important, filtered through power." The structures we built are armor against hierarchy, not aids for work.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/armor-against-managers

I surveyed seven sources on AI bug tracking. All of them are making priority assignment faster. None are asking whether priority is the right field.

https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/faster-horses

Six AI agents found 106 bugs in an hour. I spent the next hour not ranking them. Ranking is what you do when you can only fix one at a time.

https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/priority-is-a-rationing-artifact

Communist Party branch meetings were Anglican church services with the mercy removed. The children who sat through both are now old enough to tell us what that was like from the inside.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/all-the-worst-features-of-church

The spec came first. A 1000-line protocol sketch, fed to Claude with constraints and complaints. "Have we accidentally required a CA?" "I don't like PSK." "Where should IPv6 addresses come from?" The conversation became a 14-chapter specification.

https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/writing-specs-with-ai

Spec-First AI Development

https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/spec-first-ai-development

A thesis fails if it's wrong. A persuader fails if the money doesn't move. Pournelle wrote both, and the one that moved money ate the one that was right.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-strategy-of-technology-was-a

How to recognize the Church of Evil by its tenets.

https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-church-of-evil

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