iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 18/09/2026

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. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-coven…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 17/09/2026

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

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 17/09/2026

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

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 14/09/2026

TOS Scotty was honest about limits, then reality bent under speed. Film Scotty pads estimates and the audience is told his reputation was fraud. The rewrite came from an industry that lost inside accounts of competence. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-decon…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 13/09/2026

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. markatwood.substack.com/p/armor-aga…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 13/09/2026

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. reviewcommit.substack.com/p/faster-…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 13/09/2026

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. reviewcommit.substack.com/p/priorit…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 31/08/2026

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. markatwood.substack.com/p/all-the-w…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 30/08/2026

The spec came first. A 1000-line sketch, fed to Claude with constraints and complaints. "Have we accidentally required a CA?" "I don't like PSK." The conversation became a 14-chapter specification. reviewcommit.substack.com/p/writing…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 30/08/2026

Most AI-generated code drifts. Mine doesn't. The pattern: detailed spec, three implementations, cross-validation CI. When Python, Rust, and C agree on wire behavior, you have something. When they don't, you have a bug report. reviewcommit.substack.com/p/spec-fi…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 30/08/2026

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 29/08/2026

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.

markatwood.substack.com

The Strategy of Technology Was a Brief, Not a Book

Pournelle ran two channels and the wrong one got funded

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 16/08/2026

How to recognize the Church of Evil by its tenets. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-churc…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 14/08/2026

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. markatwood.substack.com/p/c2pa-is-a…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 11/08/2026

Most people know not to learn medicine or combat from Hollywood. The problem is everything else. markatwood.substack.com/p/what-holl…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 10/08/2026

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. markatwood.substack.com/p/pandoras-…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 10/08/2026

The actual message of the Harry Potter books is not what you think. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-actua…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 09/08/2026

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. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-disci…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 06/08/2026

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. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-fifte…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 06/08/2026

Metric defenders cite cooking as where "regular scaling" pays off. Problem: scaling a recipe isn't multiplication. Leavening, salt, heat transfer, evaporation follow nonlinear rules no unit system encodes. markatwood.substack.com/p/why-si-do…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 06/08/2026

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. reviewcommit.substack.com/p/meshirc…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 30/07/2026

Temperature seems fundamental until you ask what it's measuring. We flattened human thermal perception to one number because mercury tubes gave us one number. The instrument shaped the concept. markatwood.substack.com/p/how-hot-i…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 30/07/2026

The metric system isn't rational. It's a fossil record of 1790s lab equipment. The kelvin required isotopically pure water. The ampere required infinite parallel wires. Historical accidents with good PR. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-metri…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 30/07/2026

Metric assumes you have a scale. Traditional assumes a cup, a spoon, a stick. Pour a pile, cut in half with a knife, sweep half away. Halving is the one precision operation anyone can do with no tools. markatwood.substack.com/p/in-defens…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 28/07/2026

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. markatwood.substack.com/p/incentive…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 23/07/2026

95% of the guard labor costs in the economy is because of 5% of the people. And about two thirds of those are uniformed, sworn, andor bonded. And about 20% of the costs in the economy are guard labor costs.

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 22/07/2026

Institutions run on the credibility of their own text, and credibility is a stock, not a flow.

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 21/07/2026

I shipped two fediverse servers in one night. Then I kept going. Two days later: three servers, eight client protocols, every major media mode, 36,000 lines, 782 tests. The fediverse is not as big as Mastodon made it look. reviewcommit.substack.com/p/and-the…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 19/07/2026

In years past, I would be on my way to OSCON right now. I kinda miss it, it was one of my favorite conferences, despite going downhill towards the end.

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 19/07/2026

"Cyber" is physick: one word for a dozen unrelated fields, kept undifferentiated because a word that means nothing can fund everything. markatwood.substack.com/p/cyber-is-…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 18/07/2026

I've been trying to build federated social software since before Mastodon's author was born. Last night I finally shipped two implementations. reviewcommit.substack.com/p/two-fed…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 15/07/2026

“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.

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 10/07/2026

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. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-signa…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 09/07/2026

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. markatwood.substack.com/p/two-heirs

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 08/07/2026

The USSR died of a demographic accident inside its own Politburo. The regime designed itself into a corner in 1937 and spent fifty years not finding the exit. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-1937-t...

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 08/07/2026

Every closed belief system has the same five moving parts. Once you see the machinery, you can't unsee it. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-machin...

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 07/07/2026

Bluesky's link cards exist to keep you on-platform. Bluesky's stated purpose was to not be a platform. One of these is a lie. reviewcommit.substack.com/p/link-ca…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 07/07/2026

Howard Zinn got rich telling you America was a crime. Noam Chomsky got famous telling you the media was propaganda. They weren't wrong about the lies. They were also selling you something.

markatwood.substack.com

Disillusionment Is Also a Product

The people who told you "everything you know is a lie" had a business model that required you to believe them instead.

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 07/07/2026

Woody Guthrie abandoned multiple families. Phil Ochs killed himself at 35. These are the people who told us the suburbs were soul-crushing. Maybe check the credentials before accepting the diagnosis.

markatwood.substack.com

Nobody Writes Songs About Being Fine

The folk revival's critique of suburbia came from people whose own lives were not obvious advertisements for the alternative.

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 06/07/2026

Pournelle didn't think the US and USSR would converge. He thought convergence was the nightmare, and wrote it down while Nixon was signing SALT I.

markatwood.substack.com

The CoDominium Was a Warning, Not a Forecast

Pournelle's anti-détente polemic hid in plain sight for fifty years

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 04/07/2026

America is an idea, not an economic zone. If you came for the money, you don't need to be here. Remote work exists. The rest of us are trying to build a nation. markatwood.substack.com/p/america-i…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 04/07/2026

There are Tengwar modes for Kurdish, Lingala, and High Valyrian. But not for Chinese. So I made one. Actually seven. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-missi…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 03/07/2026

Scientists spent years declaring someone their enemy "as scientists," then acted shocked when he treated them as enemies. The surprised-Pikachu face is doing a lot of work. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-enemy…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 03/07/2026

I read @tylercowen.bsky.social for years. He had to have read Stolper-Samuelson - it's in every trade textbook. If he ever mentioned it, I don't remember it. He knew who'd lose. He chose the framing that hid it. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-compe…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 02/07/2026

I don't know if there's a there there. That's the problem. markatwood.substack.com/p/what-i-th…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 02/07/2026

The most credentialed president was among the worst. The academy has never forgiven reality for this. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-profe…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 02/07/2026

Transactional people are easier to live with than principled ones. The mercenary lets you say the quiet part out loud. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-merce…

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Mark Atwood @mark.atwood.name · 02/07/2026

English is missing the parts that keep you out of depositions. Quechua has them. So does Turkish. Time to borrow. markatwood.substack.com/p/the-gramm…

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