The last mile of physical AI
What my SousX food robots taught me about failed grasps, crushed produce, cleanup, and the distance between a demonstration and a useful product.
The longer arguments15 pieces
Essays.
Arguments developed at the intersection of engineering, commercialization, and human judgment. Written to be questioned and revised.
Uncharted Territory: Hacking Drug Shortages Through Persistent Invisible Physics
Hours waiting for tests. Days investigating deviations. Batches worth $120,000–$3.6 million at stake in our customer-discovery synthesis. Original prototype and tablet-test images show why we pursued electromagnetic sensing.
The next dollar should buy an answer
An innovation portfolio becomes more useful when it records the uncertainty each project must resolve—and what happens after the answer arrives.
How do you scale a person’s judgment?
Capturing decisions, learning the reasons behind them, and earning bounded authority—without turning a leader’s preferences into unquestionable rules.
A bridge is a working relationship
Cross-border collaboration becomes valuable when someone carries a shared problem through the differences in context, incentives, and execution.
Good enough is a decision
A personal rule for distinguishing consequential choices from decisions that merely offer endless opportunities to keep searching.
Capitalism eats policy for breakfast
An entrepreneurial argument about incentives, its strongest institutional objection, and a harder test: does a business become more valuable as the customer’s life improves?
Scaling sustained scarcities
Essential needs endure even as their bottlenecks change. The opportunity is to build repeatable supply, finance it through credible future payments, and leave the next generation with fewer unavoidable burdens.
You have five seconds. Have fun.
A passing intention is easy to lose, and a reactive mind can be profitable. On attention, neurochemistry, advertising, recurring revenue, and interfaces that help us recover the room to choose.
An open door is only the beginning
Scholarships, mentors, and institutions matter most when an opening becomes a real chance to contribute. A reflection on receiving support, mentoring others, and combining care with honest standards.
A patent is not a business strategy
Lessons from building the work around inventions: understand the technical contribution, document it precisely, connect it to products and partners, and keep the customer’s problem in view.
Seeking Alpha Is for the Birds
Why enduring constraints in energy, health, materials, and safety are my starting point—and why scarcity alone does not establish an investment.
The unfinished work of becoming myself
My CCL exercises and career experiments are teaching me to make purpose concrete: in the work I choose, the promises I keep, and the ordinary days I actually live.
America's Physical-AI Challenge: The Cost of Learning
America's model strengths do not guarantee a speed, cost, or quality advantage in physical iteration. A case for testing US-led partnerships, with Egypt and Si-Ware as a concrete example.
Autonomous mining: from the pit to the power system
A personal journey through autonomous mining, the economics of a complete operation, and what Caterpillar’s public investor reports reveal about growing demand for power.
✳
This notebook grows through observations, experiments, and revisions.
Earlier publications keep their original dates in Selected work.