Jordan Anderson

I find the gap between what an institution’s contract claims and what its implementation actually does, and write the patch.

Available for contract technical work and retainer policy engagements — jordan@jordananderson.work.

I · Technical

Deep diagnosis and infrastructure fixes on complex systems.

Low-level systems work where the bug class is non-obvious and the spec and the implementation have quietly diverged.

OpenVINO Intel GPU plugin — __local-pointer kernel compilation fixes + shared-header API extension

openvinotoolkit/openvino · 2026

  • Diagnosed a systemic OpenCL compile failure across the GPU plugin’s LoRA, MoE, and fully-connected kernels on Intel Compute Runtime 23.x+ — the __local-pointer overloads of intel_sub_group_block_read* were dropped from the base cl_intel_subgroups extension and now require cl_intel_subgroup_local_block_io, which most current Intel discrete GPUs (Arc, Battlemage, Lunar Lake) don’t advertise. Anyone running LoRA or MoE inference on that hardware was hitting compile errors.
  • Designed an API extension to the shared sub_group_block_read.cl header — new __local-pointer overload family (_sub_group_block_read_l*) + DECLARE_BLOCK_READ_LOCAL_EMULATION companion macro + two-tier dispatch (extension fast path / OpenCL C 2.0+ inline-emulation fallback) — and migrated four kernels onto it across two PRs, auto-fixing a fifth via macro rerouting. Design approved by the subsystem architect and merge gatekeeper; validated on real Arc-class hardware via Intel’s DG2 internal CI.
Available for contract work on inference performance, low-level systems diagnosis, and infrastructure debugging — particularly where the problem sits at the seam between vendor driver, framework, and application.

II · Policy

Strategic and regulatory analysis for industrial and defense sectors.

Long-form analysis on industrial capability, regulatory architecture, and the institutional seams where contract and implementation diverge.

The diagnostic stance carries across domains. I read complex regulatory and industrial systems the same way I read complex codebases: trace the contract, find where the implementation drifted, write up what the gap means and what to do about it.

The recommended structural alternative is the same in both domains: government-owned, contractor-operated capacity for the infrastructure that markets will not maintain.

Friction by Other Means — how regulatory infrastructure preserved tariff effects after IEEPA fell

Essay · 2026 · ~7,600 words

The Trump II IEEPA tariff regime collapsed at the Supreme Court on February 20, 2026, but its practical effects largely did not. Tariff revenue, by Treasury’s own projection, will be “virtually unchanged” in 2026. Import friction — CBP audit pace, CF-29 issuance, first-sale challenges, transshipment enforcement, FDA entry-review centralization, de minimis closure, TTB queue lengthening — is at or above the IEEPA-era peak. Refunds are slow-walked through technical capacity constraints layered onto a narrow legal interpretation.

The strongest reading of the evidence is structural convergence with intentional ratification. Most of the infrastructure (CEEs, ACE, PREDICT, FSMA, FAA Act permitting, CBP audit authority) long predates the administration and has its own bureaucratic logic, but the timing, sequencing, public framing, and refund-mechanism design in 2025–2026 indicate the administration recognized the alignment and chose to operationalize it. The durable variable in modern American tariff policy is not the headline rate but the regulatory infrastructure that surrounds it.

The Structural Failure of America’s Defense Industrial Base — property, profit, and the production crisis

Essay · 2026 · ~4,200 words

The United States placed its war-fighting capacity inside publicly traded corporations whose legal obligations run to shareholders, not to readiness. In 2024, seven major defense primes returned 98 percent of free cash flow to investors. Surge capacity — idle factories, warm production lines, redundant suppliers — generates no shareholder return and gets cut. Operation Epic Fury exposed the result: 800 Patriot interceptors fired in five days against an annual production of 600; 168 Tomahawks fired in the first 100 hours against five-year purchases of 322; one carrier covering the Pacific while the fleet rebalances to the Persian Gulf.

The defense industrial base does not atrophy despite the market working correctly. It atrophies because the market is working correctly, toward an objective that has nothing to do with national security. The structural alternative is the Government-Owned, Contractor-Operated model — proven across 73 facilities in World War II and still operational for nuclear weapons production — which retains public ownership of productive capacity while leveraging private operational expertise.

The Great Recentralization — civilizational risk in the cloud-AI transition, 2026–2046

Essay · 2026 · ~9,000 words

The locus of meaningful computation has migrated from devices owned and controlled by users to a small set of hyperscale data centers operated by five American firms and one Taiwanese fabricator. Five threat vectors compound: economic concentration exceeding the railroad and oil trusts; surveillance infrastructure beyond what the Stasi could operate; supply-chain fragility centered on a single fab on a contested island; documented atrophy of cognitive capacity in populations that offload reasoning; and the disappearance of the off-grid-capable personal computer.

The cloud-AI transition is the enclosure of compute, of model weights, of the digital commons of personal data, and ultimately of cognition itself. The historical pattern is that enclosure, once accomplished, is not reversed by markets, only by politics. Existing antitrust and right-to-repair instruments regulate the symptoms of platform power while the underlying enclosure of compute proceeds unimpeded.

Available for retainer engagements with defense industry trade associations, investment firms with international exposure, and policy shops working on industrial capability and regulatory architecture questions.

III · Contact

Writing. Set in Fraunces and EB Garamond.