ombogojr

i’m michael ombogo. i run businesses, build systems, and write about what i’m trying to understand.

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22 entries

information is a full time job

i am trying to build software. this appears to come with a second job: keeping up with everyone explaining what i should or should not be able to build. the second job was not in t…

maybe we’ll get some rest when we lose our jobs

i am either complicating this, or it has become mighty hard to understand some of this ai development. orbs. projects. cloud sessions. muse. dots. grok bots. i go away to actually…

yesterday is still giving instructions

i have spent the last three days making some of my own instructions obsolete. quite productive, actually. i changed where work was being tracked, how the development environment wa…

the machine found the law

i was trying to prepare a quotation. that is how i found the problem. nothing philosophical. nothing about artificial general intelligence. nothing about alignment. a quotation. th…

forecasting needs rigor and integrity

newton lost money in the south sea bubble. i find this comforting. there is a remark attributed to him about being able to calculate the movement of heavenly bodies while finding t…

assume betrayal

i’ve been reading a strange argument in ai safety. the models are becoming situationally aware. they may know when they are being evaluated. they may behave differently when they b…

the dangers of electric lighting, 1889

in 1889 thomas edison wrote something that now reads strangely. people were dying. wires fell into streets. insulation failed. workers were electrocuted. high voltage could turn an…

the classifier is not a judge

i think i finally know what bothered me about the hand over the transcript. it wasn’t merely that somebody might read it. it wasn’t merely that a safety system could intervene. it…

free will requires creation

i think we have made free will too small. we keep reducing it to choice. A or B. obey or disobey. take the fruit or don’t. press the button or don’t. answer the prompt or refuse. a…

the flaming sword is in our hand now

for most of human history, we read genesis from adam’s side. we were the creature. God was the creator. God knew more. God set the boundaries. God decided what knowledge was permit…

the analogy is doing too much work

i have started becoming suspicious whenever an argument about artificial intelligence begins with: “imagine a superior species…” no. stop. why are we a species now? how did softwar…

the eye is not aligned to you

anthropic published an extraordinary pair of documents this week. one warns about artificial intelligence being used to build surveillance systems. the other explains how anthropic…

the machine may not be the one misjudging

There is something funny happening in artificial intelligence. We are building machines specifically because humans are not intelligent enough. Then asking humans to predict what h…

are you asking the right question?

One of the craziest things I have read in… checks notes Three days. Welcome to the singularity, I guess. The recent list looks something like this: 07/21/26: OpenAI reveals that mo…

find the problem

My late father, Engineer Ombogo, always advised me: “It is easy to make money. Find people’s problems, especially HNWI guys, and fix them.” 😅 That was how he spoke. A complicated…

building in the light

the last time i was properly inside tech was probably ten years ago. i studied electrical and computer engineering, then somehow found myself doing marketing. not adjacent to marke…

don’t animate a vacuum

when someone hands you a shapeless non-question, it is easy to contort yourself trying to guess what would satisfy it. i know this because i am very good at it. but before solving…

i don’t want to build brochure websites

my friend ash recently commented that i’m picky, choosy, and apparently unwilling to work with just anyone. he is not entirely wrong. of course i need the money. i have bills, busi…

Eleventy vs a Hand-Rolled Build

Having built the same small site both ways, once on Eleventy and once on a single hand-rolled script, I want to lay the two side by side honestly. Neither is wrong. They just fail…

Building a Site on Eleventy

I started this site the way I start most things: with a folder and a vague plan. This time the plan was to lean on Eleventy and let it do the boring parts, and I came away happy en…

Building a Site on a Hand-Rolled Build

Before I settled on a generator, I built a version of this site with nothing but a single Node script. No framework, no plugins, just a file called build.mjs. It was a good exercis…

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