Archive · September 2026
I closed my carbon books before my first desk arrived
Fisher & Paykel's Auckland mass-timber diagrid closed its carbon books at 1,089 t ahead — but 'ahead' holds under only one of three LCA conventions.
The robot that beat Usain Bolt still can't plug in a cable
Tiangong ran 100m in 8.86s at Beijing's 2026 robot games — then robots caught fire. Why stop distance and manual override matter more than sprint records on site.
The Junior Prompts, the Partner Signs: What Two AI-Telemetry Papers Mean for a 14-Person Office
Two August 2026 field papers on ChatGPT and KPMG AI use show the review load moving up the ladder — and why a 14-person office needs a policy, not a licence.
Who pays for the robot's mistake? Reinforcement learning, from the cliff to the boiler room
From Sutton & Barto's Cliff Walking to BOPTEST and DeepMind's data-centre cooling - why RL's real question is who absorbs the cost of the agent's mistake.
Distributed Autonomous Systems: The Site That Keeps Building After You Lose a Machine
How swarms build without a centre: consensus math, degrade-don't-die, and the Swiss procurement clause to read before you buy autonomous site machinery.
Six centimetres over 29.1 km: the Brenner's real deliverable was the survey net
The Brenner's real deliverable was a traverse that closed 6 cm over 29.1 km — and why the as-built survey net belongs in your next BEP as a signed deliverable.
