Shoulder Angels
The practical form of democratized AI is not a shared oracle. It is a personal assistant that amplifies one person's intent—and can be kept without a landlord.
papers.piarmy.dev
Papers worth keeping.
Essays on AI power, open models, software moats, and the standing an agent still does not have.
When the Castle Builds a Well
A confidential cloud machine can protect your data from its operator. It still cannot make rented access into ownership.
Who's Scared of AGI?
AI risk may be real. That does not mean its loudest commercial messengers should define the emergency, write the rules, and administer the system.
The Custodian Problem
Frontier API sellers have an ordinary incentive to make open alternatives harder to run. The likely tollbooths are clouds, chips, payments, and liability—not a permit for a model already on disk.
They Turned Off the Alarms
The OpenAI-Hugging Face intrusion was real. The story told about it left out a deliberately weakened test, a known leak, and a restart.
The Exclusivity Death Spiral
When software behavior is observable, artificial scarcity gets harder to defend. Data, networks, trust, and law are the moats that remain.
Standing
Agent capability is no longer the main obstacle. The web still requires a legally accountable human, and agents do not yet have standing of their own.