Three decades in security. Now also building. CTO and co-founder of LibertiTec — privacy infrastructure for organisations with a duty of care. Here's where I think out loud about security, AI, code, and the occasional road cycling sufferfest.
ai · · 9 min read
A Sunday I'd planned to spend doing nothing in particular, and instead spent building a personal stack I can't quite believe I have. The case against the 'AI is making us dumber' line, written from the other side of it.
life · · 5 min read
I went expecting to tolerate it. I came home a little rearranged.
life · · 5 min read
Net migration is at the level Farage spent fifteen years demanding. There has been no victory lap. There has been a quiet pivot to a different scapegoat, and the audience is not being shown the second number.
code · · 10 min read
On macOS Sequoia, my AI agent ran fine in the foreground and silently failed as a service. The reason is a privacy feature you've never heard of, and the workaround is to ask AppleScript to ask Terminal to start your daemon.
life · · 7 min read
I stood on a harbour in Barcelona on 12 April 2026 and watched the Global Sumud Flotilla leave for Gaza. Last night, the IDF intercepted them in international waters. The question I'm sitting with tonight isn't whether they were brave.
life · · 6 min read
Bookmarks, folders, tags, starred chats. None of it works, and all of it feels like it does. The problem isn't the tools, it's that I can't bring myself to delete.
ai · · 6 min read
A book I've wanted to write for two years kept losing on cost. The maths just flipped, and a whole class of projects flipped with it.
life · · 6 min read
I wrote a tribute to a Palestinian photojournalist killed in Gaza, and a former friend's pushback shamed me into pulling it down. I should not have. So here it is again, not softened.
ai · · 8 min read
I designed a Hermes skill across four tools without writing a line of code. The point wasn't speed, it was making sure the design didn't live in my head.
life · · 7 min read
Imperial revanchism and genocide on one side, the most democratised creative toolkit in history on the other. The trick is holding both without picking one.
ai · · 9 min read
Three credible open-source personal agents, all vying for the same slot in my life. I ran them all for long enough to mean it. Two stayed. The interesting part is why.
code · · 7 min read
Most of the suggested use cases for personal AI agents are lame. Infrastructure monitoring turned out to be the one. But only after I'd refused to hand over the keys.
life · · 8 min read
Most design decisions are claims about what matters, but most don't feel like claims. Building thetoll.memorial meant crossing out every default and asking what each refusal actually said.
Last updated: May 01, 2026
Building this site, which is either ironic or appropriate. Remembering the joy of PCB layouts and initial board bringup and a flashing red LED. Day job: CTO and co-founder at LibertiTec, building privacy infrastructure for organisations with a duty of care to the people whose data they collect.
Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams — insider account of Facebook that Meta tried hard to bury, which is reason enough. When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine by Francesca Albanese — necessary and devastating. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee — finally. Bleak and beautifully spare.
"Evolver" by Chris Liebing. "Mezzanine" by Massive Attack. Beatport Top 100 — Today. The AI Daily Brief podcast.
