The $3 Million IP Address
How I took down the largest pager company's busiest call center with one IP address in 1997, and what the CFO said when the bill came due.
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Writing
Thoughts on AI, finance, MCP servers, and whatever else I think is worth the keystrokes. Less formal than a book. More useful than a tweet.
41 posts, newest first
01 The latest
02 The archive
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Who's Working on Labor Day at My House?
The first Labor Day was September 5, 1882, and 144 years later I still think the holiday is misnamed. Here's who is actually working at my house this weekend: 10 AI agents, and, in a supporting role, me.
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What interRel Actually Stood For
For 25 years I said interRel didn't stand for anything. That was a lie. The real story: a bad joke, a beluga whale, and a cube optimization rule.
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Who Do You Sue When the AI Is Wrong?
Short answer: nobody, and I've read the contracts. Air Canada, a $5,000 sanction in New York, Section 302, and what your signature is still worth when the model's number is wrong.
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I Produced a Musical About Financial Software
How a prank conference abstract turned into a real musical about Hyperion software, performed to packed rooms in Las Vegas and Orlando, and the CFO deal it won.
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Is There Anything You Only Learn by Showing Up?
I have a 1,000-day Duolingo streak and I still can't order lunch. Here's what 80-plus countries actually bought me, which is less than travelers claim and isn't the part they mean.
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How Many Agents Does It Take to Run a Day?
10 AI agents run my week, and about 1 in 10 of the things they produce is wrong. Here's the honest arithmetic on why that's still worth it, and the 4 rules that keep it from getting expensive.
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Does 'Be Curious, Not Judgmental' Work on an AI?
Ted Lasso comes back Wednesday. His whole method is a misattributed Walt Whitman quote, and it also happens to be the best prompting advice I know.
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What Should Your AI Forget?
Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens Friday on a world that forgot Peter Parker. Everyone building AI agents is obsessed with making them remember more. The harder question is what they should forget, and who gets to decide.
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Where's Waldo (Edward Edition)?
Few people (my wife and kids included) know what I'm up to at any given moment. So here's the catch-up: Season 3, the Puerto Rico AI Community, the Caribbean AI Summit, AgentCube, and a two-week hike to Everest Base Camp.
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Would Odysseus Have Made It Home Sooner With an AI?
Christopher Nolan's Odyssey opens this week. The question I keep circling: Odysseus already had the best oracle in the ancient world and still took ten years. What an AI actually fixes, and what it can't.
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What Would the Founders Ask an AI?
America turns 250 this weekend. If you handed Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and Washington a laptop running a modern AI, what would they ask it? Probably better questions than we do.
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Who's Actually Running Your AI?
The 2026 World Cup is sold as the most automated event ever staged. Its 'AI' actually runs on thousands of humans tagging plays by hand, and that has three lessons for any business buying AI.
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Your Best AI Model Can Vanish Over a Weekend
Anthropic's Fable 5 was the best model anyone could buy, and three days later a letter from the Commerce Department took it offline worldwide. The vendor risk most finance teams have never put a number on.
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AI is eating the work that trains your next CFO
AI is taking over the entry-level finance work that quietly trained every controller and CFO, so the apprenticeship now has to be designed on purpose.
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The Model Is the Wrapper
Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 forty-one days after Opus 4.7. The model is now infrastructure. The orchestration layer is the product. What a CFO should ask next.
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Should We Stop Laying People Off and Crediting/Blaming AI?
The market is rewarding companies that told a real revenue story with their layoffs and punishing the ones that just blamed AI. Cisco vs. Salesforce was the natural experiment. Stop helping yourself into the wrong column.
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There Are Two AI Job Markets Now
May 2025 BLS data dropped, and a year of real AI hiring is finally legible. Applied AI engineering rewards you for leaving California. Frontier labs hardened to the coasts.
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The Gap Between Small and Big Business Was Always Money
Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business with no per-seat charge. For thirty years the gap between small and big was budget. The budget is approaching zero, and the launch partners are the ones the market just marked down.
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How I Built the AI Hub Heatmaps
I pulled raw BLS and OpenAlex data myself instead of citing the citation chain. Here is how, what I found, and where the methodology has limits.
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If Musk Wins the OpenAI Trial, What Breaks?
The Musk vs Altman trial is into its second week in Oakland. The jury isn't deciding who's nicer (no one is). They're deciding whether you can convert a charity into an $800 billion business.
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Elon Musk Says AI Erases the CFO by 2030. So Just How Wrong Is He?
Musk says AI will replace nearly every job, finance chiefs included, by 2030. The title is fine. The job is about to get much harder.
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MCP Is Secure (If the Developer Knows What They're Doing)
Headlines say 200,000 MCP servers are at risk. The protocol is fine. Most of the developers shipping on top of it are not.
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Who Actually Gets You to Everest Base Camp?
Dawn and I made it to 18,570 feet on April 15. The cold was worse than the altitude. The people were better than the views.
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It's Time for the Death of the Billable Hour
AI compresses a 200-hour engagement into 40 hours. If you're still charging by the hour, you're either overcharging or going broke. Neither is a good strategy.
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The $600 Billion Mainframe
Big Tech committed $600 billion to centralized AI infrastructure this year. Then a developer ran a 397-billion-parameter model on a MacBook. We've seen this movie before.
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Is It Time to Build Software That Fits Your Company Instead of the Other Way Around?
For decades, companies adapted their processes to fit their software. Vibe coding and AI might finally flip that equation. Or it might just create a new generation of unmaintainable spaghetti. Probably both.
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Is SaaS Dead?
The SaaSpocalypse erased $2 trillion in software market cap. Per-seat licensing is breaking. But AI agents don't replace SaaS. They use it. The answer is more complicated than the headline.
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Why Is Everyone Obsessed with OpenClaw?
An open-source AI agent hit 310,000 GitHub stars, caused a global Mac Mini shortage, and has 341 malicious skills in its plugin store. Naturally, everyone wants one.
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Puerto Rico Is the Second-Best AI Market in Latin America (and We Deserve a Power Grid to Match)
AI usage is growing, AWS is training 50,000 people, and the Caribbean AI Summit keeps getting bigger. There's just one problem, and it runs on diesel.
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Is Every DM Really Using AI?
I went to Dungeon Master University in Atlanta. The answer surprised me less than it should have.
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How D&D Makes Me a Better CEO
Running a tabletop campaign teaches you more about leadership than any MBA program. The dice just have better production value.
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MCP Is the Hottest Thing in Finance (and Software Vendors Are Playing Catchup)
Anthropic donated MCP to the Linux Foundation. Oracle released MCP servers for their database. But for EPM? They went a different direction. I didn't.
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I'm at the Top of the Tallest Mountain in the Caribbean, So I'm Having an AI Agent Write This Blog for Me
Edward summits Pico Duarte at 10,128 feet with no cell coverage, so he scheduled his AI to post this for him. The AI has thoughts.
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Seedance 2.0 Is Hollywood's Jazz Singer Moment
ByteDance's AI video tool generated unauthorized celebrity deepfakes. Hollywood panicked. But this isn't a scandal. It's a threshold crossing.
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Be Greta Garbo, Not John Gilbert: The Entertainer's Survival Guide to AI
Same technology. Same industry. Same disruption. Completely different outcomes. The difference wasn't talent. It was adaptability.
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AI Will Kill the Video Star and Create a Thousand More
Every entertainment disruption follows the same pattern: fewer people doing the old thing, more people doing the new thing, and a bigger total market when the dust settles.
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Stop Your Antiquated Digital Transformation Strategy
Any digital transformation strategy created before 2025 is fundamentally broken. Not outdated. Broken.
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Why I'm Building MCP Servers for Finance
LLMs are impressive. But they can't talk to your financial systems. MCP changes that. Here's why I'm building the bridge.
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What the Caribbean AI Summit Means for AI's Future
October 9-10, 2026 at the Puerto Rico Convention Center. We're building the largest AI conference Puerto Rico has ever seen. Here's why.
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I'm Hiking to Mt. Everest. (Tell My Family I Love Them.)
A CEO who's spent 25 years sitting in chairs is training to walk uphill at 17,600 feet. The mountain does not care about your LinkedIn profile.