Technology

An auctioneer friend texted me this week. He wanted to know what computer I use for AI and what my tech stack is. It’s a fair question. A few weeks earlier I’d been on his podcast talking about running a lot of agents at once, and when somebody says that, you picture a server rack in the basement. The computer is a used Lenovo ThinkCentre, the little office kind that sits under a monitor. I put more memory and a bigger drive in it. It doesn’t have a graphics card, because the AI doesn’t run on it. The models run in the cloud. The box holds my notes and a lot of terminal windows. ...

The Observation We require identity verification on the website: a picture of your ID and a selfie. A few customers a week call and say, there’s no way I’m giving you my ID. Almost always, the reason is identity theft. So I ask them, what do you think they do with that stolen identity? They target businesses that aren’t doing identity checks like we do. To that, they almost always go, “Oh, I’ve never thought about that side of it.” Almost selfishly, if you ask me. They’ve only ever pictured themselves as the victim, never the business that gets stuck with the bill. ...

The Observation I was thinking this morning about friction in technology, and how a good customer will leave without a word. A little is useful. Too much, and they just give up. The local coffee shop is a franchise I go to all the time. A few months ago they released a new mobile app to replace the old one. The new one has latency problems. Flaky at best, worse around 8 in the morning, less bad mid-morning. A colleague and I were talking about it in the office. We wondered if the app is silently failing and they don’t even realize they’re hitting a bandwidth wall at the rush. ...

The Observation I was explaining how I take notes to someone on a call. I didn’t start them on my whole digital system. I handed them a pack of habits that fit on an index card. Front: date, plus the idea that stopped them. Back: source, and why it mattered. One idea only. A highlight, a short conversation snippet, a Bible verse, a few sentences that can stand alone. Not a chapter dump. Not a book summary. Not a sticky note you’ll never find again. ...

The observation On July 1, Cloudflare shipped something called the Monetization Gateway. Any site behind their network, which is roughly a fifth of the web, can now charge for anything it serves: pages, datasets, APIs, tools. The mechanics run on HTTP 402, a status code that has sat in the spec unused since the 90s, literally reserved as “Payment Required” for a future that never showed up. An agent requests a resource, gets a 402 with a price, pays in stablecoins, and the content comes back. Sub-second, wallet to wallet, no account signup, no API key. It’s built for machine buyers, and Cloudflare says the quiet part out loud: AI crawlers request content a hundred to tens of thousands of times for every human visitor, and you can’t sell a subscription to a crawler. ...

On June 3, 2026, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, posted a number from his own network’s live data. For the first time in the history of the internet, more than half of all web traffic was not human. Bots, crawlers, and AI agents made up about 57 percent of the requests. People made up the rest. Prince said he’d figured the crossover would come at the end of 2027. Agentic traffic got there a year and a half early. ...

Grafe Auction runs about 290 auctions a year in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. Each campaign takes 10 to 14 days from start to finish. That’s roughly one new marketing campaign going live every business day. Ad copy, search keywords, geographic targeting, photo selection, platform-specific formatting. Every time. For years, each campaign started the same way: a blank page. Someone opens the lot catalog, scans through it, figures out what’s worth highlighting, writes the ad copy, picks the photos, formats everything for Facebook and Google, selects the target markets. Then does it again tomorrow. And the day after that. ...

I was working through the details of bringing a small team in-house. Purchase price, salaries, org chart, who reports to whom. Normal acquisition stuff. And I caught myself thinking about it like a hiring decision. How many people, at what cost, doing what work. But we weren’t hiring. We were acquiring. The distinction matters, and I think it matters more in the auction industry than most people realize. When you hire someone, you’re renting their skills for as long as they stay. The moment they leave, whatever wasn’t documented or embedded in a system walks out with them. That’s not cynical, it’s structural. I wrote about this a few weeks ago in a different context: the relationships someone builds on your platform become yours, but the person is always rented. Everyone is. ...

The Observation I’ve been keeping notes in this vault for two years. Hundreds of calls, meetings, emails, references, thought cards. All wiki-linked, all tagged, all searchable. I thought the value was in the search. Find the note, read the context, prepare for the call. Then we added community detection. A clustering algorithm that groups nodes by edge density. Nothing fancy. Runs in 50 milliseconds. And suddenly I could see that my vault has 32 natural communities. Association operations is one cluster. State chapters are another. Client work is a third. Thought cards live in their own world, almost entirely disconnected from the operational clusters where the ideas actually apply. ...

Definition The agentic shift is not an upgrade to existing infrastructure. It replaces the assumptions that infrastructure was built on. “Each level isn’t defined by what the AI starts doing. It’s defined by what the human stops doing.” – Five Levels of Agentic Commerce “The cost of modern convenience is an involuntary autobiography that someone else owns.” – Digital Exhaust “The agentic web is the marketplace trap with different actors.” – Two Trust Systems ...