https://hanhdbrown.com/ Essays on AI, aging, and the questions nobody quite warned us about. en Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:22:15 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/on-inheriting-a-name/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/on-inheriting-a-name/ My name is Hanh Dang. I am Hanh D. Brown now. The D is what survived. personal Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/on-reading-what-i-cannot-finish/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/on-reading-what-i-cannot-finish/ Fifteen books I have started multiple times. None of them is the book's fault. The architect in me is still reading them. personal Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/a-short-defense-of-changing-your-mind/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/a-short-defense-of-changing-your-mind/ Most writers write to appease readers. That is not expression. Changing your mind in public is what expression looks like when it has stopped appeasing. personal Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/what-revision-is-for/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/what-revision-is-for/ Revision is the architect's move. Five things it is for. One thing it is not. personal Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/transparent-battlefield/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/transparent-battlefield/ A frozen front line in Ukraine teaches the future of warfare. Big, slow, heat-emitting platforms lose. The fix is procurement, not budget. policy Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/tokenomics-how-budget/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/tokenomics-how-budget/ AI bills come in confusing units. The fix is to budget for the product the business sells: tokens. Cost per token is the only metric that compares two quotes. ai Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/three-questions-job-lives/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/three-questions-job-lives/ Three questions tell you how long your job lives past AI. Name the capabilities. Rank them by AI improvement rate. The slowest one decides. news Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/three-ai-layers-news-skips/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/three-ai-layers-news-skips/ AI news conflates three different capabilities. The most important sentence is usually the one the announcement does not say. Here is the method for reading it. news Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/open-weights-closed/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/open-weights-closed/ Open Artificial Intelligence models win distribution because they ship cheaper and modifiable. Distribution decides the global default. Values ride along with the winner. policy Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/old-venture-capital/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/old-venture-capital/ Old venture capital was a basketball team sized for fifteen winners a year. The redesign that scaled: share economics, centralize control, and grow sideways. news Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/higher-value-work-mother/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/higher-value-work-mother/ AI abundance forecasts assume labor scales. Care work does not. A daughter's hours are the hours the forecast does not see. The wall is closer than they say. aging Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/govern-agent-employee/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/govern-agent-employee/ An AI agent without identity, role, access, audit, performance, and a manager is not autonomous. It is unsupervised. The fix is six primitives and a kill switch. policy Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/extreme-codesign-why/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/extreme-codesign-why/ AI hardware delivers 50x more tokens per watt while spec sheets show 2x. The 25x gap lives in extreme co-design across seven layers, not in any single chip. ai Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/comparative-advantage/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/comparative-advantage/ When AI does ninety-five percent of the task, the five percent that is yours gets levered twenty times. Three categories of work hold their value. ai Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/code-longer-moat/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/code-longer-moat/ For thirty years you could not throw money at a software lead. AI broke that rule. The new moats are supply chain, channel, data, and integration. ai Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/chip-clock-pause-work/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/chip-clock-pause-work/ A chip is not a swarm. A hundred billion transistors pause together a billion times a second. The pause is the work. The slowest part sets the pace. ai Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/ai-safety-say/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/ai-safety-say/ Powerful companies all say the right things about AI safety. The reliable test is action that costs them money, market position, or political standing. policy Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/ai-optimism-grammar/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/ai-optimism-grammar/ AI optimism in 2026 has a grammar. Forecasts read as facts. Product lists pass for forecasts. Four tells let you read any announcement honestly. news Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/ai-blind-spot/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/ai-blind-spot/ AI vendor pitches start with the model. The model is real and not the differentiator. Three numbers tell the rest of the story: 367, 6 versus 1, and 95. ai Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/ai-reinvention-of-computing/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/ai-reinvention-of-computing/ AI is not a faster chip. It is a wholesale reinvention of how computers work, and the sentence the chip-and-forecast discussion does not say is the one that matters most. ai Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/ai-economic-future-weak-links/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/ai-economic-future-weak-links/ A chain breaks at one link and strengthens one at a time. That asymmetry is why AI's economic upside arrives slowly and its downside arrives fast. policy Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/abundance-and-unrest-collide/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/abundance-and-unrest-collide/ Abundance and unrest arrive together in the next three to seven years. The middle of the labor market gets the collision the conventional framings missed. aging Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/ai-people-who-need-it-most/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/ai-people-who-need-it-most/ AI's frontier is being absorbed by audiences that already have power. The people who would benefit most are barely in the design conversation. aging Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/the-room-where-i-write/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/the-room-where-i-write/ I write in a room that smells like a cabin in the mountains. The conditions are not what I thought. personal Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/roman-legion-wrong-shape-2026/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/roman-legion-wrong-shape-2026/ The AI-native company replaces middle-management coordination with recursive loops. Here is the five-layer shape, and what survives inside it. ai Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/what-revision-actually-is/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/what-revision-actually-is/ Editing fixes sentences. Revision rewrites the spec. Most writers spend their careers doing the wrong one. personal Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/the-sentences-i-keep/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/the-sentences-i-keep/ I keep a folder of sentences I have not implemented yet. The fragmentation is the system. personal Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/the-other-twenty-years/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/the-other-twenty-years/ I have been a real estate investor for over twenty years. The homes taught me what the AI models still cannot. personal Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/on-writing-like-you-mean-it/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/on-writing-like-you-mean-it/ The verbs give it away every time. A writer who has decided sounds different from a writer still negotiating with herself inside the prose. personal Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/what-the-machine-cannot-say/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/what-the-machine-cannot-say/ There are sentences only a person can write. They are not the sentences you expect. ai Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/the-model-that-knew-too-much/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/the-model-that-knew-too-much/ I do not accept sentences from the model. I accept audited drafts. ai Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/how-i-make-the-images/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/how-i-make-the-images/ I am a writer who makes her own images. The work is in the prompt, not the picture. ai Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/what-my-mother-did-not-teach-me/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/what-my-mother-did-not-teach-me/ She raised ten of us in a language she hardly spoke. I am still learning. aging Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/why-i-do-this/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/why-i-do-this/ AI arrived in the chapter no one promised would come. That is not a coincidence. personal Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/the-voice-i-was-avoiding/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/the-voice-i-was-avoiding/ I spent a decade writing in a voice that was not mine. Here is what the wrong voice sounds like. personal Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/what-this-is-going-to-be/ https://hanhdbrown.com/essays/what-this-is-going-to-be/ This is what it is going to be. I am telling you now so you can decide. personal Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT