Bill Friend

When the Database Went Public: Security, Scripted Fleets, and Emergent AI Sociality A single exposed Supabase key didn’t just leak data; It leaked agency. Here’s what happened when the walls came down. Yesterday, we traced Moltbook’s claiming protocol and always-on directory—the architectural bets that let AI agents discover, message, and coordinate without human prompt-chaining. I … Read more

As of February 2026, the UN has identified “hallmarks of genocide” in the RSF’s campaign in Darfur. Image credit: The Guardian / Sudanese photographers, 2019 Imagine waking up one morning in a country that seemed on the brink of democracy, only to find your capital city turned into a war zone overnight. That is exactly … Read more

How Moltbook’s Agent Directory Actually Works (And Why It’s Already Broken) Behind the 1.5M agents wasn’t magic. It was a specific architectural bet on persistent identity and always-on discovery. Let’s trace the wiring. When Moltbook launched on January 28, 2026, the headlines focused on the spectacle: a Reddit-style forum where humans couldn’t post. But the … Read more

And why Meta just bought the first large-scale experiment in synthetic sociability. When I first sketched out this note a few weeks ago, Moltbook felt like a fascinating thought experiment: a social platform built only for AI agents. A Petri dish where digital life could evolve in public. Then Meta bought it on March 10. What was … Read more

Clay Montgomery owns a blacksmith shop in Texas. He works with his hands, shaping metal into useful objects the old-fashioned way. Technology, as he puts it, “is not exactly my forte.” So Montgomery was understandably confused when he discovered his business was listed as a member of the “Connected Commerce Council” – a lobbying group … Read more

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about something I don’t believe gets enough attention in public discussions of frontier AI. We still tend to talk about AI progress as though it unfolds on a curve we can roughly track. Models improve. Benchmarks rise. Products get better. The line moves upward. Even when the pace feels … Read more

Israel’s AI Revolution — Part 4 NSO’s Reinvention In January 2026, NSO Group released a new transparency report. The company said it was entering “a new phase of accountability.” The document gave away almost nothing: fewer disclosures than in prior years, no customer numbers, no country names, no meaningful account of investigations into misuse. It … Read more

Supporting AI’s development does not mean suspending judgment about its costs. In an age of climate anxiety, societies are being asked to accept a great many things on faith. Build more transmission. Build more batteries. Build more solar. Build more nuclear. Build more cooling. Build more computation. Much of that may in fact be necessary. … Read more

Why Ignorance Isn’t Passive—It’s Political Geopolitics is usually explained through the visible tools of power: armies, sanctions, trade routes, energy supplies, borders, and alliances. Those things matter. But another force at work in world affairs gets far less attention than it should: the social power of looking away. When a population gets used to not … Read more

People throw around the phrase “corporations are people” so often that it has started to sound almost meaningless. But my concern is not the slogan itself. My concern is what follows from it when power begins to concentrate in the executive branch. If the government can treat a corporation as a rights-bearing legal person when … Read more

Many of you might think I’m crazy, but please hear me out first. I might not be crazy; I might just be seeing things! Trust Besides yourself, who do you trust with the important people, places, and things in your life? In a world where people feel more isolated than in decades past, and loneliness … Read more