This week, Brett and Travers welcome David Bauer - a guy who's been programming since 1982, got his AWS account directly from Jeff Bezos in 2005, and ran a parallel simulation on 9.9 million CPU cores. The conversation covers his journey from building the NSA's first cloud in portable data centers to his current work embedding LLMs inside MCP servers for decision governance.

Topics covered:

• David ran a BBS called Texas Outlaws in the 1980s and has been in distributed computing ever since.
• The NSA's cloud computing environment started in tractor-trailers flown to Afghanistan on Antonov cargo planes.
• David got his AWS account from Jeff Bezos before the platform publicly launched - he still has it.
• His PhD work produced a parallel discrete event simulator that ran on nearly 10 million CPU cores at Lawrence Livermore.
• During COVID, his team modelled 5-6 billion people at the individual level to plan PPE and medical staff distribution.
• His current work puts LLMs inside MCP servers to enforce decision governance, audit trails, and data access controls.
• Federated learning with homomorphic encryption lets them train across data silos without centralizing sensitive data.
• The hosts discussed the scaffolding problem — getting AI agents to reliably follow instructions every time, not just three out of five.
• Mamba 3 models released under the Apache license, focused on efficient inference on smaller hardware.
• AWS/Kiro added Qwen, Minimax, and other new models to Bedrock, alongside those from Anthropic.

Full links and show notes at curiousorbit.com