Philosophy, technology, and code—sometimes together, sometimes apart—through essays, blog posts, and projects exploring how ideas evolve.
Does Time Flow? The A-Theory and B-Theory of Time
Published on September 28, 2026
Right now feels special. This moment, the one you're reading these words in, has a quality that yesterday's moments have lost and tomorrow's haven't yet acquired. The past is fixed, the future is open, and the present is where you actually live. This is so obvious that it can seem strange to question it. Yet a century of debate in the philosophy of time has done exactly that, and the disagreement it produced (between what philosophers call the A-theory and the B-theory of time) turns out to matter for physics, for how we build software, and for how we think about our own lives. The distinction traces to the British philosopher J.M.E...
When Silence Speaks: The Philosophy of Absence of Evidence
In the realm of logic, epistemology, and scientific inquiry, few principles are as misunderstood—and misapplied—as the relationship between evidence and absence. The phrase 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' has become a philosophical cliché, often invoked to defend beliefs that lack...
Optimizing AWS DynamoDB Performance: From Table Scans to GSI Queries
While building a blog API that needed to retrieve the 5 most recent posts, we encountered a classic database performance problem: the inefficient table scan. What started as a simple requirement—"get the last 5 blog posts"—became a practical lesson in understanding data access patterns and the...
From Ideology to Infrastructure: How AI is Becoming a World-View
We are witnessing a profound shift in how artificial intelligence shapes not just our tools, but our fundamental understanding of reality itself. What began as computational algorithms has evolved into something far more significant: a new lens through which we interpret existence, knowledge, and...
The Original Trolley Problem: A Primer for the Digital Age
This is Part 1 of a 7-part series exploring how the classic trolley problem manifests in modern technology. Imagine you're standing by a railroad switch. A runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks toward five people who will certainly die if it continues. You can pull a lever to divert the...
In 1670, French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal proposed an argument that would echo through centuries: even if you're uncertain whether God exists, you should bet on belief. The reasoning was simple but profound. If God exists and you believe, you gain infinite reward (heaven). If God...
The Prisoner's Dilemma: When Rational Choices Lead to Collective Failure
In 1950, mathematicians Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher at RAND Corporation created a game that would become one of the most studied problems in social science. Two prisoners, separated and unable to communicate, each face a choice: betray the other or stay silent. If both stay silent, they each...
Does the Block Universe Explain Time, or Explain It Away?
Published on September 28, 2026
There is a move in the philosophy of time that can feel like a magic trick, and like a good magic trick, the interesting part is figuring out where the deception happened. The move goes like this: time doesn't really flow, the future already exists just as much as the present, and the overwhelming sense that moments come into being and slip away is an illusion produced by how conscious observers are wired. This is the block universe, the picture associated with the B-theory of time. It is elegant, it fits neatly with modern physics, and a great many philosophers and physicists accept some version of it. It also seems, on first encounter, to leave out the single most obvious thing about time: that things happen...
Living with the Question: Intelligence, Understanding, and What We Owe Our Machines
Published on June 20, 2026
In 1980, a philosopher imagined himself locked in a room, shuffling symbols he didn't understand, producing perfect Chinese he couldn't read. Forty-six years later, we've built the room. It sits in data centers, answers our questions, writes our code, drafts our emails, and passes our exams. And we still don't know whether anyone is home. John Searle's Chinese Room argument was designed to refute a specific claim: that running the right program is sufficient for understanding...
What Would Count? Criteria for Machine Understanding
Published on June 19, 2026
In March 2023, researchers at Microsoft published a paper titled "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence" about GPT-4. They documented the system solving novel problems, reasoning about spatial relationships, writing working code for tasks never seen in training, and even displaying what looked like theory of mind. Their conclusion was carefully hedged but unmistakable: something that resembled general intelligence was emerging from a language model. Critics responded immediately. Pointing to the Chinese Room argument, they noted that behavioral evidence, no matter how impressive, cannot prove understanding...
The Trust Problem: When Should We Rely on Systems That Might Not Understand?
Published on June 18, 2026
In May 2023, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York discovered that a legal brief filed in the case Mata v. Avianca cited six court decisions that did not exist. The attorney, Steven Schwartz, had used ChatGPT to research legal precedents. The system produced plausible-sounding case names, citations, and even quoted passages from fabricated judicial opinions...
In September 2022, an image called "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" won first place in the Digital Arts category at the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition. The piece depicted a futuristic royal court in a style that evoked classical oil painting. It was generated using Midjourney, a text-to-image AI system, by a digital artist named Jason Allen who tested hundreds of prompt iterations and performed post-processing in Photoshop. The reaction was immediate and intense. Artists felt cheated...
The Grounding Problem: Can Understanding Exist Without a World?
Published on June 16, 2026
Imagine a dictionary written entirely in a language you don't speak. Every word is defined using other words in that same language. You can follow the cross-references indefinitely, from one entry to another to another, and you'll never learn what any of them mean. You'll learn that word A is defined in terms of words B and C, and that word B is defined in terms of words D and E, but you'll never connect any of them to the world...
Stochastic Parrots or Something More? LLMs and the Understanding Question
Published on June 15, 2026
In 1980, when John Searle published the Chinese Room argument, AI meant expert systems: hand-coded rules that manipulated formal symbols according to human-written logic. The connection to the thought experiment was direct. An expert system literally was a room full of rules for shuffling symbols. Nobody seriously claimed it understood anything. Today's large language models are different in ways that matter...
The Chinese Room: What Does It Mean to Understand?
Published on June 14, 2026
In 1980, the philosopher John Searle published a thought experiment that remains, forty-six years later, the sharpest challenge to the claim that computers can think. The argument is simple enough to explain in a paragraph. Its implications are vast enough to reshape how we think about every AI system in existence. Searle imagines himself locked in a room. People outside slide in questions written in Chinese...
Escaping the Labyrinth: Simplicity as the Ultimate Thread
Published on May 9, 2026
We started this week in the workshop of Daedalus, watching the greatest craftsman in the ancient world build a structure so intricate that even he could barely escape it. We end it in a world where every engineer, every organization, every industry is both Daedalus and Theseus: building labyrinths and trying to navigate them, often simultaneously. The Labyrinth of Crete was built to solve a problem. It contained the Minotaur. It worked...
The Minotaur Learns: When AI Creates New Labyrinths
Published on May 8, 2026
In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" to describe a new way of building software: describe what you want in natural language, let an AI generate the code, and ship it without fully reading what was produced. Within months, the practice had spread from side projects to production systems. A December 2025 analysis by CodeRabbit of 470 open-source GitHub pull requests found that AI-authored code produced roughly 1.7 times more issues than human-written code, with security vulnerabilities up to 2.74 times more common. The finding illustrates a paradox that runs through every application of AI to complex systems. AI is Ariadne's thread, the tool that helps us navigate labyrinths too intricate for unaided human comprehension...
Every day, we publish essays that apply philosophical thinking to the technology shaping our lives. From the ethics of self-driving cars to the epistemology of deepfakes, from game theory in open-source software to ancient Greek wisdom about artificial intelligence—each piece connects timeless ideas to the questions that matter right now.
🚋 Trolley Problem
How impossible moral choices play out in AI hiring, content moderation, predictive policing, and medical algorithms.
Alongside philosophy, we share technical deep dives on cloud architecture, serverless deployment, database optimization, and image processing. We also build interactive games that bring philosophical concepts to life—from a Prisoner's Dilemma simulator to a Skepticism Scale quiz.
Have a topic you'd like us to explore? Whether it's a philosophical concept, a technology ethics question, or an idea that bridges both worlds, we'd love to hear from you. Get in touch and let us know what you're curious about.
