I build the custom software your business needs but couldn't afford before. Solo, fast, built to last. "Gloria Dei est vivens homo." - Saint Irenaeus of Lyons
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Joined April 2017
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Here's an easy hack to help you get better results on any AI assisted project you're working on. Create a stupid rule.
"The is the Stupid Rule - please invoke it upon my request: If you cannot explain to a stupid person why the current approach/explanation makes sense — in a way that gets them on board — then stupid wins by default, and the burden is on YOU to design a stupid-compatible approach."
That's it. Just put that into that chat session, or create as a Skill if you're using Claude Code. Then, when your questions get answered with long, complex, way over your head explanations you don't just accept them and move on. You ask for the response to be run through the stupid rule.
Why This Works:
Einstein once said “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.” AI is smarter than you. It's smarter than me. It's smarter than any of us. Here's the danger, smart people (and machines) don't just use the intelligence to convince other people (and machines), they also use it to convince themselves.
AI may be smart, but it has no reasoning, no judgment, no "gut feelings" or intuition. And high intelligence, unbounded, is foolish; Einstein knew it long before the age of AI. Expertise tells you where the answer should be, and that "should" is a frame. The more you know, the more of the frame you stop questioning, because you are sure of it.
The Stupid Rule exposes the frame, strips away the fancy language that hides bad assumptions. You've seen the Idiot / Genius Bell Curve meme right? Here's the thing about that meme, it's actually meant to be a circle. Someone cut the circle and stretched it out, but in its original form the idiot and the genius overlap at the same point. They're the same thing. Force the AI down one slope of the Bell Curve and it goes down the other one too, automatically. Try it out on your next project!
Let's be honest, in 2026 the news isn't **really** the news unless you have a collection of opinionated pundits arguing with each other.
At @brickfeednews we're no different - eight opinion columnists, new pieces every day! Come join the debate!
brickfeed.news/opinion.html
Dear World - I humbly present to you @brickfeednews
Brickfeed was created by an unemployed software engineer (me) on a Friday afternoon, mostly because I could. It's a way to make the news a little less, awful.
Check out Brickfeed: brickfeed.news
The AI Dungeon Master That Finally Remembers You brickfeed.news/s/article-03.…
HEY FRIENDS! ARE YOU TIRED OF DROWNING IN AI SLOP??
DON'T BEAT 'EM, JOIN 'EM, WITH NEW SLOPIFY!!
Slopify takes a normal paragraph and "enhances" it with AI, over and over. Each pass piles on more emojis, more hollow enthusiasm, more "here's why that matters 👇," until the thing turns into the exact engagement-bait that's clogging up everyone's feed.
It's a joke, obviously. But a few real things ended up underneath it.
For one, it's a working demonstration of model collapse — the failure mode where models trained on their own output keep degrading across generations (Shumailov et al., Nature 2024). Run a paragraph through enough passes and you can watch it happen. This will be LinkedIn in a few years...
It's also about as small and readable as a Claude Code skill gets, so if you've ever wanted to see what one actually looks like up close, there's a SKILL.md, a slash command, and some worked examples you can read top to bottom in one sitting.
And past that, it's mostly just a way to laugh at the slop instead of drowning in it.
Requires a Claude subscription (or API key), runs in the browser or in Claude Code. Repo, docs, and a before/after are here:
github.com/kbennett2000/slop…
Awhile back I was working on a reverse engineering project in a small niche industry. It involved reverse engineering a 35 year old piece of consumer silicon. It was a tough problem to solve and I tried throwing the kitchen sink at it. Multiple AI models, nearly unlimited access to the most powerful models and tooling, you name it.
The tougher the problem got, the more firepower I threw at it. And I noticed along the way that the returns weren't just diminishing, they were getting worse. It threw me for a loop for a few days - at one point I was running analysis decisions through eight different engines, see where the converged and where they disagreed. Everything was so well formed and so well argued it was impossible to see I was sinking deeper and deeper into the pit.
When I finally found my way out of the pit it wasn't by throwing more compute at it, and it wasn't using a stupider model either; it was realizing that my framing of the problem had been off all along.
That experience has changed the way I'm seeing AI now. Everyone is rushing into the fray to have technology-focused conversations when the real results don't come from more raw power. Results are directly determined by the amount of computing power you can apply to a properly framed problem.
In response to this I've created a **governing framework for AI-enabled development and engineering projects** that prevents exactly this sort of problem and its downstream effects. If your organization is looking at jumping into (or already has) AI-enabled dev/engineering and you're trying to avoid becoming the next AI horry story headline, we should talk.
Anyway, I'm sharing my analysis of the framing problem, in case it resonates with anyone here...
"As best I can time it, not accounting for any pauses in the exchange of dialogue between Jesus and Paul and according to Paul's writing in his Letters, the conversation lasted approximately one minute, maybe a few seconds less. Yet a world was changed because of that one-minute conversation. It was one great paramount minute in the history of humankind. That minute determined the destiny of countless millions of people yet to be born. No event short of the birth of Jesus Christ himself has affected the life of humankind on this earth as powerfully as the commands given and accepted in that one minute."
-- Johnny Cash, The Man in White
"We shall never cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
-- T. S. Eliot
"He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden."
-- Plato, The Republic
"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular."
-- Adlai E. Stevenson Jr., Speech in Detroit, 7 Oct. 1952
"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Oh the things we take for granted...
A lady is playing piano at Charlotte airport. It reminds me of my childhood. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, everything was political. I had to beg for permission from my neighbor to listen to 1 min classical music on their radio. We were too poor to afford a radio. #communism
Kris Bennett retweeted
Just received this note from a SpaceX engineer helping on the ground in North Carolina.
@FEMA is not merely failing to adequately help people in trouble, but is actively blocking citizens who try to help!
“Hey Elon, update here on site of Asheville, NC. We have powered up two large operating bases for choppers to deliver goods into hands. We’ve deployed 300+ starlinks and outpour is it has saved many lives.
The big issue is FEMA is actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping. We are blocked now on the shipments of new starlinks coming in until we get an escort from the fire dept. but that may not be enough.”
How many of you have heard the origin story of money? You know, the old tale about two people who want to transact in a scenario where #bartering won't work; a cobbler needs to eat every day, but a farmer only needs a new pair of shoes every year. This pr…lnkd.in/gZtYiJi3