Technology

Correction notice — May 26, 2026. This essay was factually reviewed on 2026-05-26 and republished with specific corrections applied. Among them: removed fabricated citations, including an invented robot (“Shumana”), invented Stanford Cart developer names, and a fabricated RAND study author; corrected dates, attributions, and roles for figures including Minsky, McCarthy, Geoffrey Hinton, and the BDI framework’s origins; corrected specific historical details (SNARC’s 1951 build, the Strategic Computing Initiative’s 1983 launch, OpenAI Five’s release year, the DQN Atari count, Brynjolfsson et al.’s citation, and several others); and removed fabricated co-authors from the Silver et al. and Mnih et al. reference entries. A reader who compared the original May 21, 2026 version to the current text would see that the historical claims, attributions, and reference list have been tightened throughout. The work should be read as corrected, not as it first appeared. If you spot a remaining error, please email phil@huffmanwrites.org. ...

I was ready to do something drastic. My machine had been running hot for weeks. Disk usage climbing, performance lagging, the kind of quiet degradation that starts as inconvenience and ends as crisis. I had installed AnythingLLM to test it, decided it wasn’t ready, uninstalled it — and yet the space never came back. The numbers didn’t lie. Something was eating my disk, and I couldn’t see it. The easy answer was staring at me: clean install. Wipe the whole system, start fresh, rebuild from zero. It’s the digital equivalent of the scorched-earth impulse — the one that says, if I can’t understand the problem, I’ll eliminate the conditions that produced it. I’ve done it before. Most of us have. It feels like control. It feels like decisiveness. It is almost always a confession that we have failed to understand what we are actually dealing with. ...

The Stoic CGM A Data-Driven Guide to Reinventing Yourself Executive Summary The Stoic CGM treats continuous glucose monitoring as a practice of self-knowledge—not merely a medical intervention, but a discipline of attention applied to the body’s own politics. It examines what happens when Stoic principles meet metabolic data: how to respond to information without being ruled by it, and how to govern the self when the self is constantly in motion. The core message: the body is not an enemy to defeat, but a system to comprehend. ...