Notes from the Field on Althora

Don't Ask AI to Write C — Here's What the Data on LLM-Generated Code Shows

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A seductive argument keeps circulating: now that AI writes the code, humans aren’t the bottleneck anymore, so why not use C? No garbage collector, no runtime, tiny binaries, full control of the hardware. I went and read the studies that actually measured this. The answer isn’t that C is bad — it’s that C is the wrong language to pair with a probabilistic generator.

What happens when someone actually measures

The 10% Nobody Calculated: What the Anthropic Resignation Got Right, and What It Didn't

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On September 9, 2026, Jacob Coxon posted from a park bench in San Francisco that he’d resigned from Anthropic, giving up two months of unvested equity to do it. He’d spent three years on pretraining research, first at OpenAI, then at Anthropic. His post — “they are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives” — hit 90 million views in under a day (Axios). Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment-science lead, replied in support: “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it is >10% within the next decade” (X). Three days later, CEO Dario Amodei published his own warning that swarms of AI agents could “take over the entire internet” within 6-12 months without stronger safeguards (Forkast).

The Senior DevOps and SRE Job Search in 2026 Has a Math Problem, Not a Talent Problem

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every senior engineer applying right now already knows the feeling: send fifty applications, hear back from two, and finish the month no closer to an offer than you started. The instinct is to blame the market, or blame yourself. Neither is quite right. What actually happened is more specific: AI made applying free and made screening free, on the same timeline, and nobody made interviewing any cheaper. That asymmetry is the whole story.

Control Tower: the panel I built because fifteen open fronts isn't a discipline problem

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every time a task falls through, the obvious explanation is a discipline problem. It almost never is. In most cases, what slips away is whatever never had a written next action, or never had a date attached to chase it.

Running several fronts at once — business, product, infrastructure, plus whatever personal stuff can’t wait — I got to a point where the list of open projects passed ten and no single place showed all of them at the same time. The feeling of drowning didn’t come from volume. It came from not having one place to look.

What running AI inside a law firm has in common with anything that can't "phone home"

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Anyone who has operated a system that can’t leave the network — an air-gapped environment, an appliance at a client site with no outbound firewall rule, a regulated deployment that isn’t allowed to “phone home” — recognizes this pattern from a mile away. It isn’t an AI pattern. It’s old infrastructure routine, and Anne for Legal is just its latest instance.

The problem isn’t new, only the failing component is

Any system that needs to keep working without depending on something external has to answer an uncomfortable question: what happens when the one piece you most wanted to work, doesn’t?

Grok Bot vs. Claude Cowork: Where Things Actually Stand

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Grok vs Claude” gets asked as if it were one comparison. It’s really two, and they have different answers.

Model vs. model — xAI’s Grok 4.6 against Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 / Sonnet 5. This is the API-and-chatbot comparison.
Agent product vs. agent product — Grok Bot against Claude Cowork. These are the “give it a job and walk away” products, and they are architecturally quite different.

If someone says “Grok Bot,” they mean #2 specifically — not the chatbot.

Your Printer Says Offline. Here Is What That Actually Means

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Offline is the most misleading word in office IT.

It sounds like a verdict on the printer — as if the machine had failed. It is not. Offline is Windows telling you it tried to reach the printer and got nothing back. The printer is usually sitting there, powered on, screen lit, perfectly healthy, waiting for a conversation that never arrives.

Once you read the word that way, the fix stops being guesswork. Something is wrong with the path, and there are only about five things it can be.

How to Upgrade to Windows 11 Without Breaking Your Week

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Windows 10 stopped receiving security updates on 14 October 2025. The machines did not stop working, which is exactly why this keeps getting postponed — nothing visibly broke, so it never becomes this week’s problem.

What follows is how to do the upgrade properly, in the order that wastes the least of your time. It applies whether you have three computers or thirty.

First: find out what you actually have

Before deciding anything, count. Most offices are surprised twice — once by how many machines there are, and once by how many already qualify.

What Ransomware Actually Is, and What It Does to a Small Office

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most people picture ransomware as a virus that scrambles your files and puts a note on the screen asking for money. That was accurate around 2015. It is now the least dangerous part of what happens, and the gap between that picture and the current reality is exactly where small offices get hurt.

Here is the version worth carrying around.

What it actually is

Ransomware is not really a piece of software. It is a business model, and the encryption is only the last step in it.

Fake AI Tools Are Now a Top Malware Lure for Small Businesses