Mark Atwood
@mark.atwood.name
Professional Open Source Policy Expert. Shape Rotator. Quiet Mind. Fan of good pens, fine paper, deep writing, skilled work. I learn amazing things, and meet awesome people, and introduce them to each other.
links.fallenpegasus.com
links.fallenpegasus.com
Reality is the hyperdimensional manifold constrained by information self-consistency.
December 3, 2025 at 4:17 AM
Reality is the hyperdimensional manifold constrained by information self-consistency.
Revenue is theater. Growth is usually a hallucination. EBITDA is a joke metric built for liars. Net profit in accrual accounting is gamed. Cash profit is the one number no one can bullshit. Sneering at profit is the calling card of people subsidized by someone else’s wallet.
December 2, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Revenue is theater. Growth is usually a hallucination. EBITDA is a joke metric built for liars. Net profit in accrual accounting is gamed. Cash profit is the one number no one can bullshit. Sneering at profit is the calling card of people subsidized by someone else’s wallet.
markatwood.substack.com/p/why-sugar-...
People swear that soda “just tastes different now.” They’re right. The change isn’t nostalgia, age, or psychosomatic anything. Modern corn sweeteners have shifted, and they’ve shifted in ways that make them taste bad
Here’s what actually happened...
People swear that soda “just tastes different now.” They’re right. The change isn’t nostalgia, age, or psychosomatic anything. Modern corn sweeteners have shifted, and they’ve shifted in ways that make them taste bad
Here’s what actually happened...
November 28, 2025 at 10:49 PM
markatwood.substack.com/p/why-sugar-...
People swear that soda “just tastes different now.” They’re right. The change isn’t nostalgia, age, or psychosomatic anything. Modern corn sweeteners have shifted, and they’ve shifted in ways that make them taste bad
Here’s what actually happened...
People swear that soda “just tastes different now.” They’re right. The change isn’t nostalgia, age, or psychosomatic anything. Modern corn sweeteners have shifted, and they’ve shifted in ways that make them taste bad
Here’s what actually happened...
"Heart Healthy" canola oil is doctors-smoking-Marlboros with better branding
November 25, 2025 at 9:55 PM
"Heart Healthy" canola oil is doctors-smoking-Marlboros with better branding
the oldest pattern in computing: the important things get built late because the experts don’t see them as important.
November 25, 2025 at 8:26 PM
the oldest pattern in computing: the important things get built late because the experts don’t see them as important.
People forget the last step: once someone skinsuits a cause, they must delegitimize anyone still practicing the real thing. Otherwise the mimicry collapses.
November 22, 2025 at 12:50 AM
People forget the last step: once someone skinsuits a cause, they must delegitimize anyone still practicing the real thing. Otherwise the mimicry collapses.
It took just one look at tumblr to see that's not changed. Neither has the median tumblr user. What a cesspit. I remain proud of my small part in helping to kill it as a business.
November 20, 2025 at 10:10 PM
It took just one look at tumblr to see that's not changed. Neither has the median tumblr user. What a cesspit. I remain proud of my small part in helping to kill it as a business.
Using AI to create defensive publications, e.g. "creating prior art under 35 U.S.C. §102" is brilliant. If someone tries to defend with "it's AI slop", that means it's not patentable. Otherwise it is, and now it's been patent spoiled. Either way, the commons wins.
November 20, 2025 at 9:38 PM
Using AI to create defensive publications, e.g. "creating prior art under 35 U.S.C. §102" is brilliant. If someone tries to defend with "it's AI slop", that means it's not patentable. Otherwise it is, and now it's been patent spoiled. Either way, the commons wins.
Almost all egalitarians want socialism for everyone else and divine-right monarchy over anything made by their hands and will. Collective for labor, feudal for their creations.
November 20, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Almost all egalitarians want socialism for everyone else and divine-right monarchy over anything made by their hands and will. Collective for labor, feudal for their creations.
Around 2019, I was required to attend a corporate mandated “diversity” training workshop teaching managers how to look for clues in LinkedIn profiles to guess race, sex, and orientation to prioritize candidates.
I remember thinking at the time "how can this be legal?"
I remember thinking at the time "how can this be legal?"
November 13, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Around 2019, I was required to attend a corporate mandated “diversity” training workshop teaching managers how to look for clues in LinkedIn profiles to guess race, sex, and orientation to prioritize candidates.
I remember thinking at the time "how can this be legal?"
I remember thinking at the time "how can this be legal?"
The Internet exists because Bell Labs worshipped Erlang.
They built X.25 and then got the math completely wrong.
Their math said traffic would smooth out—it never did.
The failure of their equations gave us TCP/IP.
Civilization owes its freedom to Bellhead blindness.
They built X.25 and then got the math completely wrong.
Their math said traffic would smooth out—it never did.
The failure of their equations gave us TCP/IP.
Civilization owes its freedom to Bellhead blindness.
November 12, 2025 at 7:44 PM
The Internet exists because Bell Labs worshipped Erlang.
They built X.25 and then got the math completely wrong.
Their math said traffic would smooth out—it never did.
The failure of their equations gave us TCP/IP.
Civilization owes its freedom to Bellhead blindness.
They built X.25 and then got the math completely wrong.
Their math said traffic would smooth out—it never did.
The failure of their equations gave us TCP/IP.
Civilization owes its freedom to Bellhead blindness.
“Once people catch you lying for their own good, they will not believe you even for their own survival.”
November 12, 2025 at 1:45 AM
“Once people catch you lying for their own good, they will not believe you even for their own survival.”
The Framers didn’t create the Patent Office because patents were a Good Idea, they created it because patents were corrupt. open.substack.com/pub/markatwo...
The Framers Didn’t Create the Patent Office Because Patents Were a Good Idea
They created the Office so they’d stop being politically corrupt monopolies of favor
open.substack.com
November 11, 2025 at 6:35 PM
The Framers didn’t create the Patent Office because patents were a Good Idea, they created it because patents were corrupt. open.substack.com/pub/markatwo...
"Relational aggression" is gossip, ostracism (including transitive ostracism), and alliance-shifting instead of direct communication. If that seems normal or acceptable to you, you are unfit for leadership of any kind.
November 11, 2025 at 12:02 AM
"Relational aggression" is gossip, ostracism (including transitive ostracism), and alliance-shifting instead of direct communication. If that seems normal or acceptable to you, you are unfit for leadership of any kind.
Credit default swaps are not banking. They are insurance written by arsonists.
November 10, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Credit default swaps are not banking. They are insurance written by arsonists.
If you can’t turn it into a transformation matrix with logical human-factors contextual inputs, it’s not "design", it’s a fad. I'm tired of fads.
November 8, 2025 at 12:57 AM
If you can’t turn it into a transformation matrix with logical human-factors contextual inputs, it’s not "design", it’s a fad. I'm tired of fads.
Universities are bringing back bluebook exams. So now they’re grading narrative flow and penmanship. Maybe that’s progress, they stopped teaching and grading reasoning and precision decades ago.
November 6, 2025 at 12:07 AM
Universities are bringing back bluebook exams. So now they’re grading narrative flow and penmanship. Maybe that’s progress, they stopped teaching and grading reasoning and precision decades ago.
Writing used to prove someone understood something.
Journalists spent 35 years proving they don’t, and don’t want to.
So now the people paying for text care only that it communicates to readers.
Journalists spent 35 years proving they don’t, and don’t want to.
So now the people paying for text care only that it communicates to readers.
November 6, 2025 at 12:02 AM
Writing used to prove someone understood something.
Journalists spent 35 years proving they don’t, and don’t want to.
So now the people paying for text care only that it communicates to readers.
Journalists spent 35 years proving they don’t, and don’t want to.
So now the people paying for text care only that it communicates to readers.
Elites and academics can afford to preach infinite deliberation because someone else pays for their compute. Everyone else uses heuristics because reality bills by the hour.
November 5, 2025 at 11:31 PM
Elites and academics can afford to preach infinite deliberation because someone else pays for their compute. Everyone else uses heuristics because reality bills by the hour.
The fatal mistake of the corporate climber: they think everyone else is optimizing for proximity to power too.
November 5, 2025 at 10:20 PM
The fatal mistake of the corporate climber: they think everyone else is optimizing for proximity to power too.
“it’s measurable therefore it works” and “we’re good at it therefore it’s our advantage” are what people inside systems start to say when the feedback loop with reality has collapsed. They sound empirical, but they’re just self-reference faux reason.
November 4, 2025 at 9:53 PM
“it’s measurable therefore it works” and “we’re good at it therefore it’s our advantage” are what people inside systems start to say when the feedback loop with reality has collapsed. They sound empirical, but they’re just self-reference faux reason.
Influencers are the dirty loophole in child-protection and advertising law. They let corps market while ignoring COPPA & FTC ad rules.
November 4, 2025 at 2:42 AM
Influencers are the dirty loophole in child-protection and advertising law. They let corps market while ignoring COPPA & FTC ad rules.
Caging the Voice open.substack.com/pub/markatwo...
Caging the Voice
Language academies were the first codecs. What they gained in clarity, they lost in bandwidth
open.substack.com
October 31, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Caging the Voice open.substack.com/pub/markatwo...
Morality isn’t the enemy of freedom, it’s the accumulated scar tissue of everything that killed every group of people who tried anything else.
October 30, 2025 at 6:08 PM
Morality isn’t the enemy of freedom, it’s the accumulated scar tissue of everything that killed every group of people who tried anything else.
Hollywood isn’t capitalism gone wrong; it’s feudal patronage industrialized and finantialized. It doesn’t sell what it makes: it rents access to making. And it's fee is bodies and souls.
October 30, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Hollywood isn’t capitalism gone wrong; it’s feudal patronage industrialized and finantialized. It doesn’t sell what it makes: it rents access to making. And it's fee is bodies and souls.