Coffee with Claude

After 70 years of discovering that every year brings surprising opportunities and delights, I've found a way to share decades of stories at the speed of morning conversation.

Twenty-one years ago, we built parallel systems to catch when sensors drifted or failed. Now the “sensors” are language models that fail by succeeding too well at the wrong task.

A retired ecologist reflects on collaborating with AI to build observational tools for his granddaughter’s future, drawing lessons from the Reformation and the evolution of scientific practice.

A chance encounter with Robert Whittaker in 1973 set a young wilderness ranger on a path from mountain ecology to pioneering sensor networks—and ultimately to the Macroscope paradigm.

Reading about self-hosting brought a familiar recognition—this "countercultural" approach is just basic engineering discipline learned from decades of field deployments. Systems that require constant connectivity are fundamentally fragile systems, whether in remote wilderness or your living room.