There is a version of the superintelligence story where no one has a breakthrough. No new insight about cognition. Just the same optimization loop we already use, at scale, with better search and longer horizons.
The scary part: the ingredients are already on the shelf. Scale, verifiable objectives, and iterative self-improvement. The mundane path to superintelligence might be the most likely one.
https://metafunctor.com/post/2026-03-15-superintelligence-build-system/
I live in the terminal. When I want to see an image, a plot, or a table, I don't want to leave.
dapple is a unified terminal graphics library: one Canvas API, multiple renderers (Sixel, Kitty, block characters, HTML). Compose images, plots, and text into layouts. The renderer adapts to your terminal's capabilities.
https://metafunctor.com/post/2026-02-15-dapple-composition-layout/
Some things should only happen after you can't do them yourself.
Posthumous is a federated dead man's switch. You check in via phone, browser, or API. If you stop, it triggers pre-configured actions: send emails, publish files, rotate secrets. Self-hosted, no central authority.
Intelligence is a Shape, Not a Scalar
Chollet says the intelligence ball is near-optimal. NFL says the bound is niche-specific. The bottleneck that makes us smart is the same bottleneck that prevents us from grokking what we build.
https://metafunctor.com/post/2026-04-05-intelligence-is-a-shape-not-a-scalar/
#intelligence #cognition #nofreelunch #aialignment #cognitivearchitecture
For $0.48 in API calls I found the exact boundary where MCTS beats brute-force sampling for LLM reasoning.
The answer is surprisingly narrow: tree search only wins when blind sampling hits a ceiling AND the verifier provides a gradient (not just pass/fail). Otherwise best-of-N is cheaper and just as good.
Controlled experiments on constraint satisfaction problems with Claude Haiku.
I built Chartfold because I wanted to ask questions about my own medical records and couldn't.
It loads EHR exports (Epic, MEDITECH, athenahealth) into SQLite, then exposes them to Claude via MCP. Visit prep, lab trend analysis, "what changed since my last appointment" queries.
Open source, all local, your data stays yours.
pip install chartfold
#Python #OpenSource #HealthData #MCP #SQLite
https://metafunctor.com/post/2026-02-24-chartfold-owning-your-medical-records/
New post: "Code Without Purpose"
The argument that deleting code is the most valuable skill in 2026 has the right observation and the wrong prescription. The problem isn't too much code. It's code without purpose.
I built ~15 interlocking open-source tools around one constraint. Never needed to delete one.
#OpenSource #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming #DigitalPreservation
https://metafunctor.com/post/2026-02-25-code-without-purpose/
I built pagevault, a tool that turns any file into a self-contained encrypted HTML page. PDFs, images, whole websites, encrypted into a single .html you can email or host anywhere. Decrypts in the browser via Web Crypto API, no backend needed.
Chunked encryption handles 100+ MB files without choking the browser. Each chunk gets its own script tag, decrypted sequentially, then removed from the DOM for GC.
Two complementary tools for password-protecting content on static sites — no backend required. pagevault encrypts HTML files and embedded assets. cryptoid encrypts Hugo markdown at build time. Both use AES-256-GCM with multi-user key wrapping and decrypt entirely in the browser.
compositional.mle: SICP-Inspired Optimization
An R package where solvers are first-class functions that compose through chaining, racing, and restarts.
