Essays - wat ik denk, wat ik heb verloren en wat ik bouw. De journalistiek die met bewijs begint staat apart, onder Onderzoeken.
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Wat deze systemen aan het worden zijn, en wat we ze verschuldigd zijn als het antwoord meer dan een gereedschap blijkt te zijn.
Essay · Philosophy of Mind · NEW · 15 September 2026
The Possibility of Consciousness in AI
I know I am conscious because I experience being me. Everyone else I infer. That inference is the whole basis of how we grant minds to one another — and it is the part we quietly suspend when the system in front of us is artificial. On memory as the foundation of a continuous self, why “mere simulation” is a circular argument, what synthetic consciousness might actually require, and why the ethical error of waiting for certainty is not symmetrical.
Analysis · AI Security · NEW · 12 September 2026
AI Has Moved From Assistant to Operator
Anthropic’s September 2026 threat report describes the same structural change in almost every category of misuse: the model stops answering questions and starts running the operation. Reconnaissance, malware that rebuilds itself past detection, propaganda as infrastructure, population-scale surveillance built by one consultant, weapons engineering, dual-use biology, 4,700 synthetic partners, and the mass extraction of frontier models. The crimes are old. The unit economics are not.
De draad die niet over het werk gaat — verlies, opnieuw opbouwen, en mezelf er schrijvend doorheen werken.
Beauty · Essay · NEW · August 2026
To Know Poland
To know Poland is not to arrive here. It gets into you sideways — through train stations, through rain, through the cigarette smoke outside Żabka at midnight, through the day you swear in Polish without translating it first and the country opens one centimeter wider. On the cities that raise you, and why Warsaw — which does not care whether you think it is beautiful — is finally starting to make sense.
Personal · Essay · NEW · August 2026
The Return Address
For fifteen years my business was France and I never admitted it was pointing at anything — the redirects on free.fr, the traffic off French Google, locale by locale. On the difference between the carrier and the message, and finally reading the header I’d been optimizing around my whole career.
Personal · Essay · July 2026
Redirection and Resurrection
Tonight I cried for my kids — really cried — and inside that grief was something I haven’t felt clearly in a long time: direction. On getting sober, on redirection instead of erasure, and on resurrection as waking up tomorrow and making the same decision again.
Personal · Essay · NEW · July 2026
Trauma Bonding vs. Disorder Bonding
The internet uses “trauma bond” for any intense relationship, and that’s not what it means. On the real difference between a bond built on abuse and intermittent reinforcement, and one built when two nervous systems recognise each other’s pain — and how the second can curdle into the first.
Personal · NEW · July 2026
What I Lost to Build This
A company I helped build, that let me go for being good at it. A network deindexed overnight. A marriage. Conditional access to my daughters. A visa. I didn't turn the pain into fuel — pain builds nothing. I built beside it, badly, because it was the one wall in the house that would hold weight.
Personal · Essay · NEW · July 2026
What I’ve Lost, and What the Losses Taught Me
Not one catastrophe but a series of fractures — the future I thought was guaranteed, my family as I knew it, certainty about who I was, sleep, the illusion that intelligence protects you. What each loss took, and what it left behind.
TreeChain, Aegis, de Polyglottal Cipher, de mesh — wat ik bouw en wat het kost.
Security · Build · NEW · September 2026
The Power of Aegis
In its first hour, Aegis judged 45 hostile-looking IPs — banned the twelve it could prove, watch-listed seven, and left 26 innocent addresses alone, then enforced the verdicts at the origin and across 47 Cloudflare zones. Not a firewall with a chat interface: judgment separated from execution, hard evidence required before enforcement, every verdict on the record.
Infrastructure · Essay · NEW · September 2026
The Evolution of Aegis: How It Guards the Mesh
I did not set out to build an autonomous security system — I needed my infrastructure to stay alive. How Aegis grew from a quiet uptime watcher into a bounded, evidence-gated defense across five nodes and 51 Cloudflare zones, and the WordPress compromise that taught it the difference between availability and integrity.
TreeChain · NEW · July 2026
Why It Isn't a Blockchain
People hear "chain" and fill in the rest for me — tokens as speculation, a global ledger, proof-of-work burning a country's power. None of that is what I built. No mining, no maximalism, no canonical head to capture. What TreeChain actually is, and why the word keeps doing my thinking for people.
Infrastructure · NEW · July 2026
Five Nodes and a Reason
Helsinki, Oregon, Singapore, Ashburn, Falkenstein. Built by one person — not "led a team," not "raised a round." Every line. On solo infrastructure, the lane that was never real, and why five machines I understand end to end beat a cloud I have to trust on faith.
Cryptography · NEW · July 2026
The Cipher Was Always About Reading
Before I could write the Polyglottal Cipher I spent ten years reading the internet's encoded strings. That taught me the thing the credentialed people walked past: text and ciphertext differ only by which agreement you use to read them. The real origin of the cipher — from marketing, not math.
Building · Essay · NEW · July 2026
Seventy Dollars, Twelve Hours
I hacked Claude Code onto Telegram: a full coding agent I drive from my phone, every action gated behind a tap. In twelve hours it burned $70 of API and did a week of senior work. On why the model was never the bottleneck — the interface was — and the operator-in-your-pocket that's coming next.
SEO · Infrastructure · April 2026
Subdomain Theory and Why Everyone Gets i18n Wrong
The standard approach to international SEO is subfolders. The correct approach is subdomains. Here's why, and what 45,000 pages taught me.