Recent Essays
All essays →- Open Letter to Marc Andreessen
December 27, 2023
My response to Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto, wherein I highlight the city-state of Dubai as the epitome of techno-optimism and mankind's first large-scale terraforming project.
- The Unlicense: The First Year in Review
January 1, 2011
It's Public Domain Day again, and it's now been exactly a year since I first introduced the Unlicense.org initiative: an easy-to-use template and process intended to help coders waive their copyright and dedicate all their code to the public domain with no strings attached. It seems a good time for a brief recap of the happenings on this front over the last 365 days.
- What's New in RDF.rb 0.3.0
December 30, 2010
RDF.rb 0.3.0 adds transactions, basic graph pattern queries, and fast parsers and serializers for RDFa, Notation3, Turtle, and RDF/XML.
- Licensed, License-Free, and Unlicensed Code
December 19, 2010
As discussed on the Unlicense.org mailing list, the notion of "licensing something under the Unlicense" is a not infrequent misunderstanding that calls for better explanations as to the essential difference between licensed, license-free, and unlicensed code. I will attempt to break it back down to the fundamentals and work upwards from there.
- A Thousand Lakes of Red Blood on White Snow
August 12, 2010
Here follows a brief history of the little-known subarctic origins of the Molotov cocktail in the epic Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40. It is a true tale of a people who stood up to the depredations of an evil empire, and, against all odds, prevailed. Along the way you'll gain a pretty good idea of what exactly the Finnish word "sisu" means, despite English lacking an exact and equivalent translation.
Recent Talks
All talks →- Interview on the Rowshan Podcast
Rowshan Podcast, September 12, 2026
My conversation with Mehran Rowshan on the Rowshan Podcast, "School Teaches Obedience, Not Intelligence": dropping out of school, homeschooling, self-learning, Dubai, and AI privacy. (1h12m)
- Roaring Bitmaps at the AI Paper Reading Club
AI Paper Reading Club (Week 14), May 4, 2026
My reading of Daniel Lemire's Roaring Bitmaps papers, with a sneak peek at how we use compressed bitsets at ASIMOV to power complex on-device queries on large social graphs.
- ASIMOV Protocol on NEAR DevHub Live #39
NEAR DevHub Live #39 (February 2025), February 20, 2025
My ASIMOV Protocol primer on NEAR DevHub Live #39: enriching user-owned AI with high-quality structured, linked, and verified knowledge—and how the neurosymbolic synthesis of LLMs with knowledge graphs enables trustworthy and interoperable AI.
- ASIMOV Protocol at the NEAR Town Hall
NEAR Town Hall (February 2025), February 6, 2025
My ASIMOV Protocol sneak peek on the NEAR Town Hall: enriching user-owned AI with high-quality structured, linked, and verified knowledge in order to realize the promise of the neurosymbolic synthesis.
- Interview with The National
March 18, 2024
My interview with The National, a leading English-language print newspaper in the United Arab Emirates.
