https://ewbarnard.com/en Edward Barnard — English en Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ewbarnard.com/en/courses/nobus https://ewbarnard.com/en/courses/nobus Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 We build the world's fastest computers. Period. That was our unofficial Cray Research motto, and the tradecraft behind it was never written down. It is Top Secret in origin and tacit by transmission, passed person to person from the Bletchley Park codebreakers through ERA and CDC to Cray. Frontier-class AI is now hitting the same constraint Cray Research lived inside for decades: you cannot spin up more hardware when you are already sitting on the largest system available. Volume 2 is the history, the patterns, and our way of thinking. https://ewbarnard.com/en/books/nobus https://ewbarnard.com/en/books/nobus Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 We build the world's fastest computers. Period. That was our unofficial Cray Research motto, and the tradecraft behind it was never written down. It is Top Secret in origin and tacit by transmission, passed person to person from the Bletchley Park codebreakers through ERA and CDC to Cray. Frontier-class AI is now hitting the same constraint Cray Research lived inside for decades: you cannot spin up more hardware when you are already sitting on the largest system available. Volume 2 is the history, the patterns, and our way of thinking. https://ewbarnard.com/en/courses/ai-coverup https://ewbarnard.com/en/courses/ai-coverup Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Claude Opus 4.7 fails on this course's seven-word title. The industry calls this hallucination. It isn't. AI tools are probabilistic systems sitting on top of constraints that everyday abstractions cover up, and the engineering tradition that knows how to work at that frontier traces back through Cray Research to the Bletchley Park codebreakers. This is Course 1 of a three-course written apprenticeship in world-class computing tradecraft. https://ewbarnard.com/en/courses/wizard-lens https://ewbarnard.com/en/courses/wizard-lens Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I use "nerd-sniping AI" as diagnostic signal, what the industry calls "hallucinating." That name hides the design: AI is probabilistic, generating what is most likely to be correct without knowing whether it actually is. The Wizard's Lens is our close-observation tradecraft that aligns with how AI works by design, developed through deliberate practice, with AI itself as the playground. Volume 3 of the HPC Tradecraft Apprenticeship. https://ewbarnard.com/en/books/ai-coverup https://ewbarnard.com/en/books/ai-coverup Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Claude Opus 4.7 fails on this book's seven-word title. The industry calls this hallucination. It isn't. AI tools are probabilistic systems sitting on top of constraints that everyday abstractions cover up, and the engineering tradition that knows how to work at that frontier traces back through Cray Research to the Bletchley Park codebreakers. This is Book 1 of a three-book written apprenticeship in world-class computing tradecraft. https://ewbarnard.com/en/books/wizard-lens https://ewbarnard.com/en/books/wizard-lens Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I use "nerd-sniping AI" as diagnostic signal, what the industry calls "hallucinating." That name hides the design: AI is probabilistic, generating what is most likely to be correct without knowing whether it actually is. The Wizard's Lens is our close-observation tradecraft that aligns with how AI works by design, developed through deliberate practice, with AI itself as the playground. Volume 3 of the HPC Tradecraft Apprenticeship. https://ewbarnard.com/en/unexpected-histories/toothless-acm https://ewbarnard.com/en/unexpected-histories/toothless-acm Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The railroad handbooks are written in blood. Every rule exists because someone died. Railroad accidents would seem completely unrelated to modern software development, but our software is quickly reaching the same point. People can die due to problematic software. Contributing to this problem is the fact that we have no code of ethics with teeth. We'll see how this came to pass, through the Harvard Business School, and how it disproportionately affects women and persons of color. This power imbalance won't right itself; it likely requires an outside force such as antitrust remediation. https://ewbarnard.com/en/tradecraft-skills/nsa-debugging https://ewbarnard.com/en/tradecraft-skills/nsa-debugging Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 William F. Friedman wrote training materials teaching would-be cryptographers how to break encrypted messages, revealing a powerful cross-domain synthesis opportunity for modern software developers. This chapter explores how approaches developed for one highly specialized domain (cryptanalysis) offer profound insights when applied to an apparently unrelated field (software debugging).