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The dominant framing of AI's collision with the grid goes something like this: AI compute is exploding, hyperscaler load curves are climbing into territory utility planners didn't sketch a decade ago, and the response is supply-side. Build more generation. Expedite interconnections. Hope the grid catches up. Almost every recent industry headline reads from this script. It's not wrong. It's just incomplete. The framing treats AI compute as fixed demand. The premise is that whatever energy the GPUs need to keep doing their space heater trick, the grid has to deliver. From there, every conversation is about supply: how to bring more on, how fast, with what generation mix, at what cost. The grid is the variable; the load is the constant. ...

The vocabulary of "multi-X" gets thrown around loosely in cloud architecture conversations, and four different things end up conflated into one. Multi-AZ, multi-account, multi-region, multi-cloud — they sound related but they aren't really. They have different costs, different benefits, and different prerequisites. They deserve to be evaluated separately. Multi-AZ: the resilience pattern you mostly get for free It's worth naming what the cloud gives you almost by default — and what corporate on-prem data centers historically didn't. A modern cloud region is a cluster of independent availability zones, typically three or more, each its own physical data center with its own power, network, and cooling. The major managed services — databases, load balancers, queues, object stores, even Kubernetes control planes — are designed to run across AZs. Active-active-active across three AZs is the cloud-native default, not an architectural achievement. ...

Most of my recent print queue has been Tesla accessories. There's a particular satisfaction in printing parts you'll then use every day — the design gets evaluated by daily wear, road heat, sun exposure, and an honest read on whether it was worth the spool. Tighter feedback loop than most hobby printing. A few of the recent prints, all in ASA: Adapter locking rings. A small ring that secures your charging adapter to the J-1772 cable such that it can't be disconnected while you're inside the store. The first time you print one and use it, you wonder how the adapters ever shipped without integrated locks. Tiny part, real-world utility, and an obvious example of the community closing a gap a vendor left open. ...

Five months after the manual-to-MCP pivot, I noticed the MCP server was doing two different jobs. One was a tool surface for an agent — the task for which I'd designed and built the MCP server. The other was the hosting environment for the daemon itself: long-running, stateful, with a job queue and a state machine that wanted to live longer than any single Claude Desktop session. For most of those five months, the two jobs sharing one process was fine. Then it wasn't. ...

"The personal daemon was a semi-autonomous piece of software that lived in your system and acted as your agent, going out into the Cloud to do things for you." — Neal Stephenson, Fall, or Dodge in Hell I have been quietly drowning in feeds for years. Not in a productive way — in the "I have 47 tabs open and three of them are arXiv" way. AI research, cloud infrastructure, smart-grid news. Each domain moves fast enough on its own; together they generate more credible signal than any one human can absorb. ...

I came into operational-technology security at a moment when the field was still figuring out what it wanted to be. NERC CIP v3 was the working regime; v5 was on its way; and the first generation of Smart Grid pilots was starting to land at utilities across North America. That stretch — roughly 2012 to 2018 — is where most of modern ICS security's practitioner vocabulary got fixed. Walking the floor at DistribuTECH 2025 in Dallas this past March was a useful prompt to look back at that window from where the industry sits today — and to write down which lessons still hold up. ...