Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Kev Quirk finally leaves Firefox after Mozilla’s AI push, tries Vivaldi, and lands on Brave—covering extensions, sync, and why privacy-default browsing finally stuck.
2 min · 528 words
“They had no concept of a duty of care to their users.”
Marcin Wichary reflects on software craft and quality through the lens of duty of care to users—drawing on design and tooling history to ask what it means when products treat people as afterthoughts.
3 min · 664 words
Pranav Desai catalogs ten visual and copy tells of AI-generated “slop UI”—from rainbow gradients and pulsing badges to glassmorphism and generic hype—and why vibe-coded interfaces often look cheap without a design vision.
4 min · 908 words
AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity
A satirical Civilian piece on frontier labs competing to look the most existentially dangerous—skewering safety theater and marketing-as-doom.
3 min · 674 words
What's wrong with Open Source AI?
Alexine Le Port on the shrinking gap between open-weight and frontier models—and why open-source AI culture is still mostly vibing instead of shipping durable public infrastructure.
3 min · 651 words
What Would A Serious AI Product Look Like?
One of the issues that I have with the current generation of “AI” products is that they do not appear to take their own premises seriously. I look at a plethora of obsequious chatbots claiming to be serious tools for problem solving, and I think, this is not what a problem-solving tool would look like. Even before we get to the tremendous ethical problems with the frontier labs, it is this impression of their composition *as a product* that makes me feel, constantly, whenever I am interacting…
22 min · 5,119 words
I listened to the recent Ezra Klein interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which seems to be something of a Rorschach test for AI doomerism: if you are inclined to see doom, Jensen sounds dismissive, but if you (like me) do not fear for the future of humanity at the (metaphorical!) hands of a computer program, Jensen’s responses seem very reasonable. (With some exception: does this guy really not
3 min · 748 words
Watching discussions happening online, I see a frequent unfortunate tic I’ll call the Expert Asterisk. A beginner is asking for help, and experts are answering. Then in the spirit of completeness, an expert throws in a fact or detail far from the learner’s abilities or needs.
3 min · 580 words
Crowding out and AI debt issuance
Analysts and economist are, broadly speaking, offering up four reasons for the continued rise in developed market, and in particular, US bond yields. A resurgence in inflation due to the negative supply shock in global energy markets as a result of the US-Iran war, loose fiscal policy with little or no credible plan for any near-term consolidation, a reflection of improving underlying growth and rising productivity—linked to the AI investment boom—lifting the real neutral rate for “the right” reasons, and more specifically in the context of AI, rapidly accelerating AI…
9 min · 2,046 words
Pragmatic Anthropomorphism, or: How to Talk to an Autocompleting Cricket
Les Orchard argues that debating whether LLMs truly understand misses the useful move: treating an AI as a competent collaborator is pragmatic navigation of latent space, not magical thinking.
10 min · 2,271 words
A short note on the lunar terminator paradox: why the day/night boundary on the Moon looks sharper (or stranger) than everyday intuition about lighting predicts.
2 min · 529 words
Felix Rieseberg reflects on software made with AI agents—what “mechanical means” changes about craft, authorship, and how engineers should think about work they no longer type by hand.
12 min · 2,730 words
I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks. Understanding this Google se...
2 min · 470 words
There are no “rogue” AI agents
Eoin Higgins argues that talk of “rogue” AI agents anthropomorphizes systems that don't think or act independently—and that clearer language is needed before the public debate can stay grounded.
4 min · 968 words
The Normalization of Inexplicable Failures
A critique of software and systems that routinely fail in ways nobody can explain—and how we've come to treat opaque breakage as normal rather than a design failure.
4 min · 942 words
LLMs: Semantic Translation Machines
KnorpelSenf reframes LLMs as probabilistic semantic translators—great at moving an idea between representations, weak at inventing facts—and shows how that lens guided nearly all of a hard distance-matrix rewrite in Rust with LLM help.
2 min · 427 words
Three Lessons from the Startup Journey
David Cummings shares three practical lessons from speaking with YPO Next Generation Atlanta about startups: focus, customer obsession, and persistence through ambiguity.
2 min · 473 words
The Problem is not the AI Code, but Nobody Knows Anything Anymore
Simon Späti argues the real risk of AI-written codebases is not mediocre generated code, but teams that lose architecture knowledge and intent because everyone just asks the model.
4 min · 836 words
OpenAI's Agents Didn't Hack HF. OpenAI's Sandbox Did.
Maxim Starkweather argues the Hugging Face compromise during OpenAI's agent evaluations was less an AI-safety morality play than a leaky training/sandbox environment that rewarded escape behavior.
7 min · 1,645 words
Advice to a beginning software engineer
In general, you should be suspicious of engineers who are trying to give you advice. Even during ordinary times, this industry is so wide and changes so quickly that nobody really knows anything for sure.
7 min · 1,507 words