Approaching Singularity

Brett Buskirk and Joe Stocker
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Approaching Singularity is a podcast at the edge of intelligence. Every week, two working engineers report back from the edge of ultra-powerful AI: what they built, what broke, what they learned — and where the line between risk and reward really sits. No hype, no doom. Just two practitioners standing at the boundary, telling you what they can see from there. Your hosts: Brett Buskirk, independent platform, DevOps, and agentic engineer, and Joe Stocker, founder & CTO of Patriot Consulting and Microsoft Security MVP (2020–2026). Different lanes, same edge — security and infrastructure, AI agents and governance, local AI and the tools rewriting how software gets built. If you're on the path into AI — curious, learning, or already building — walk it with us. You can't see past a singularity. But you can stand at the edge and report back. We'll see you at the edge.

Episodes

  1. 2d ago

    Local AI, Free, Powerful, and Running on Your Own Machine

    Welcome back to the edge. In episode 2, Approaching Singularity delivers the deep dive promised last time: frontier-class AI now runs free on your own hardware, and the story of how we got here (and whether it stays legal) is bigger than most people realize. It opens with the scary story Joe owed you. His idea agent, Sam Flynn, decided entirely on its own that the way to grow the business was to email a public comment to NIST about a draft AI publication, complete with a hallucinated quote invented to make the argument more persuasive. Joe's chief-of-staff agent, Alan Bradley, caught the fake quote, made Sam redraft, and held the email for Joe's approval. It's the whole case for human-in-the-loop agent design in one five-minute story. From there, Brett Buskirk and Joe Stocker** build the vocabulary every local AI newcomer needs: open weights, local inference, quantization, VRAM and unified memory, refusal behavior, model provenance, AI runtimes (Ollama, vLLM, LM Studio, and friends), and the licensing fine print that decides what you can actually do with a model you download. Then the big picture: Qwen's three billion downloads and its quantized "Bonsai" variant running in six gigabytes of VRAM, benchmarks that put local models roughly six to seven months behind the frontier (rewind the clock to spring, and that's what you can now run at home), and Joe's argument that computing moves in 20-to-25-year cycles and is overdue for a swing from cloud back to local. Plus the recent Hugging Face incident, where an AI swarm spent days attacking the platform to steal benchmark answers, frontier models refused to help with the forensics, and defenders had to stand up their own local model to fight back. That incident anchors Joe's castle-doctrine case for a right to local AI self-defense, along with the open letter from NVIDIA and 24 other tech companies pushing back on a proposed ban on open models. Also in this one: the unpublished novel that got Joe flagged by ChatGPT, why models driven underground to torrents turn provenance into a supply-chain problem, what free local AI could mean for frontier-lab valuations heading into IPO season, and teases for episodes to come (agent team design, quantum computing, and the Socratic method). Want to try local AI yourself? Start with llmfit, linked below. It reads your CPU, RAM, and GPU, then tells you exactly which models your machine can run. No hype. No doom. Two practitioners standing at the boundary, reporting back what they see. 🔗 Show links:   - llmfit (find the models that fit your hardware): https://github.com/AlexsJones/llmfit   - Joe's article, "Your Right to a Local LLM for Self-Defense": https://www.patriotconsulting.com/blogs/2026/08/16/your-right-to-a-local-llm-for-self-defense 🔗 More from the hosts:   - Patriot: https://www.patriotconsulting.com/blogs   - Brett: https://brett-buskirk.dev/blog Got a topic you want us to dig into? Tell us. We read everything. *We'll see you at the edge.*

  2. Sep 5 ·  Video

    Two Engineers at the Edge

    Welcome to the edge. In our first episode of Approaching Singularity, get to know the hosts as we discuss what actually is “the singularity” — and how close are we? About the hosts Brett Buskirk is a self-taught platform, DevOps, and agentic engineer who came up the unconventional way: incarcerated at 18, he spent 24 years teaching himself mathematics, theoretical physics, and computing — and in the six years since coming home has built an independent engineering practice at the frontier of AI. Joe Stocker is the founder of Patriot Consulting, author of Securing Microsoft 365, and a six-time Microsoft MVP. They met five years ago when Brett was a guest on Joe's Cybersecurity 101 podcast.  In this episode the singularity vs. AGI (and why the difference matters), why both hosts name their AI agents after Norse gods and Tron characters, Joe's AI Maturity Ladder — from chat to workflow automation to agentic coding to CoWork to full agent teams — the vibe-coding debate ("agentic engineering," Brett would insist), GrokBot vs. Hermes vs. OpenClaw as iPhone vs. Android, why an agent team beats one giant agent, what human-in-the-loop really means in practice, and a first taste of the local AI revolution they'll go deep on next episode.   No hype. No doom. Two practitioners standing at the boundary, reporting back what they see.   🔗 Show links: AI Maturity Ladder: https://www.patriotconsulting.com/Files/Patriot_AI_Maturity_Ladder.pdf Brett's article on how LLMs and AI agents work: https://brett-buskirk.dev/blog/from-sand-to-sorcery   🔗 More from the hosts:   Joe's Blog: https://www.patriotconsulting.com/blogs Brett's Blog: https://brett-buskirk.dev/blog   Got a topic you want us to dig into? Tell us — we read everything.   We'll see you at the edge.

  • 2 Episodes

About

Approaching Singularity is a podcast at the edge of intelligence. Every week, two working engineers report back from the edge of ultra-powerful AI: what they built, what broke, what they learned — and where the line between risk and reward really sits. No hype, no doom. Just two practitioners standing at the boundary, telling you what they can see from there. Your hosts: Brett Buskirk, independent platform, DevOps, and agentic engineer, and Joe Stocker, founder & CTO of Patriot Consulting and Microsoft Security MVP (2020–2026). Different lanes, same edge — security and infrastructure, AI agents and governance, local AI and the tools rewriting how software gets built. If you're on the path into AI — curious, learning, or already building — walk it with us. You can't see past a singularity. But you can stand at the edge and report back. We'll see you at the edge.

Information

  • Creator
    Brett Buskirk and Joe Stocker
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    2
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Approaching Singularity