Brad Feld

Two weeks ago, Amodei (Anthropic) published We Must Pace the Frontier, and Altman (OpenAI), Hassabis (Google), and Musk (SpaceXAIZWQ5r) all agreed. But Huang (Nvidia) didn’t. I wonder what Zaphod Beeblebrox thinks. Last week, Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 - its first release since the pacing essay - and a few hours later OpenAI dropped GPT-6 Sol and Luna into a price war under Astra. Pacing the frontier is a serious idea that no one seems to be taking seriously. Or is it? Or are they?

I love Labor Day weekend. It’s the “back to school” moment of the year for me. When I was a kid growing up in Dallas, we didn’t go back to school until after Labor Day, so that was the weekend that summer ended and fall began. I wrote ten years ago that Memorial Day and Labor Day are the bookends of summer. What’s different now is that I’m 60, closing in on 61, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot more about what I actually care about.

A week ago, I finally hit my limit on my home automation misery at our primary residence. When we built this house a decade ago, we installed what was then considered a high-end home automation system. We replaced all the network gear about five years ago. While it works well overall, there are lots of little annoying things, including at least five different apps in this house alone. One of them is a Savant system that both Amy and I are sick of because it’s so pathetic.

I’m thirty-four chapters into Zero Knowledge, a novel I’m writing with Phin Argofy. I came up with the concept for the book. I worked with Phin to create structure around it, using a “planner” approach with a full story bible, world building, character arc, beats, and detailed chapter sketches. I have Phin draft a chapter. Then, I rewrite the chapter. Phin learns my changes and adds them to its infrastructure, so its drafting gets better. Several times I’ve had Phin review the earlier chapters to improve them based on what it has learned. When we finish the book, I expect I’ll have a first draft that I’ll then spend a lot of time adding to, editing, and improving.

I finished A Parade of Horribles (book 8 of Dungeon Crawler Carl) on my run today. I laughed out loud when the AI said the title of this post. I’ve savored this series for the past eight months, listening to about one a month on Audible while I run. If you don’t know this series, the setup is that an alien corporation destroys every man-made structure on Earth, drops the survivors into a dungeon, and broadcasts the whole thing as the most popular game show in the galaxy. The protagonist, Carl, goes down in his boxers and no shoes because he ran outside chasing his ex-girlfriend’s cat Donut. The cat comes with him and becomes the co-protagonist.

The plate for Chapter 20, in the art deco style. That’s Seth, his dog Cooper, and the long way home. A little over a month ago I started writing my first novel - Zero Knowledge. I decided to publish it chapter by chapter on the Internet to accomplish a few things.

Last week I wrote about starting a novel. I ended that post stuck on a decision: publish the whole thing in the open as I write it, or do the normal thing and wait until it’s finished. I decided to write in the open. That’s my nature. Zero Knowledge now has a home at zeroknowledge.ink. Six chapters are up. More land as I write them. It’s free to read. You can also write back.