PER ASPERA

PER ASPERA

Spencer Morris

I build software. I have for years, mostly alone, mostly on systems where being wrong is expensive: pricing, forecasting, the machinery a business actually runs on.

I did not get here the usual way. That stretch was slower and harder than it needed to be, and it is why I take the long route on purpose now.

What I want next is hardware. Electrical engineering, embedded systems, robotics. The parts of building where the feedback loop runs through physics instead of a type checker, and where being wrong shows up as smoke rather than a stack trace.

So I am starting at the bottom of it. C, written without a model’s help. Thermophysics before prototypes. Reading and deciding in public, including the parts I get wrong.

Almost none of it is built yet. That is what the research is for.

Per aspera ad astra.The hard part is not in the way. It is the way.

THE WORKALL WRITING
001ESSAYEscape VelocityAI reaches economic escape velocity when intelligence stops being the binding constraint and starts recursively lowering the cost of building productive capacity. Almost nothing in the current boom is evidence either way.AUG 26 202611 MIN002PROJECTMusephoriaA peer feedback network for musicians, built on the premise that useful critique has to be engineered rather than hoped for. Two years of mechanism design, four architectural generations, and a lesson about the ratio between the two.AUG 25 20265 MINARCHIVED003ESSAYAuthored Lives in an Uncaring UniverseHappiness is a poor test for whether a life is worth caring about. What survives, once every external source of meaning is dismantled, is the decision to author rather than drift.AUG 25 202624 MIN004ESSAYThe Open-Weight Cyber WindowWhen cyber capability becomes downloadable, cheap, and persistent, the decisive variable is coordination.AUG 14 202624 MIN005ESSAYTrump's Trade War Is a Blunt WeaponThe strongest case for the tariffs is better than their critics admit. It still fails, and the week the policy reversed itself showed why. What America actually needs is a scalpel.APR 14 202513 MIN