Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Of Mottes, Baileys, and Stochastic Parrots
Manoel Ribeiro argues the "stochastic parrots" metaphor often motte-and-baileys: it dismisses LLM capabilities, then retreats to the trivial claim that models predict the next token.
6 min · 1,470 words
How Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse
HOA Spy indexes Florida association filings to show how liens, foreclosure suits, and association standing overlap with the housing crisis: higher carrying costs, thinner supply when units sit under association enforcement, and displacement risk for owners who fall behind.
10 min · 2,407 words
Phase LockA manifesto on brain-computer interfaces and preserving human agency in the age of AI.
Executive summary of Saturnin Pugnet's manifesto arguing that a bandwidth gap between human cognition and AI threatens human agency, and that brain-computer interfaces offer alignment-by-integration. He contends AI scaling laws will carry over to brain decoding, that consumer non-invasive BCI is the fastest path to scale, and that a Phase Lock Window to shape the outcome is open now.
4 min · 861 words
In a guest post on Astral Codex Ten, Drew Housman describes how he and his wife leaned on ChatGPT, from early GPT-4 workarounds onward, to navigate unexplained infertility, credits AI with helping them have their son, and pushes back on reflexive anti-AI discourse.
7 min · 1,550 words
A Minsky machine in ncurses terminfo
Nicolas Seriot shows how ncurses terminfo parameter expansion can simulate a 2-counter Minsky machine—hosting a Fibonacci program in your terminal, clocked by /usr/bin/top.
5 min · 1,222 words
Three AI Agents, Two Countries, and One Very Uneven World Wide Web
Roya Pakzad compares GPT, Claude, and Muse on multilingual research tasks across languages and jurisdictions, documenting gaps in source access, human-in-the-loop oversight, and observability.
5 min · 1,206 words
Writing code by hand is over, forever
After 18 years of daily hand-coding, Elio Capella Sánchez describes how Claude Code crossed a threshold at Filestage — more merged PRs with the same bug rate — and why high-level abstractions still matter for agents.
4 min · 883 words
David Buchanan explores how C2PA content credentials handle time, and what it takes to forge or bend timestamps in the provenance chain.
4 min · 919 words
The Era of Programming Languages Exploration is upon Us
programming_languages research perspectives There was a recent thread on the TYPES mailing list with researchers speculating about the future of our field given the disruptive effects of AI tools on programming in general.
6 min · 1,374 words
I recently watched the talk by Scott Jenson titled "Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7AfAcQwLW0&t=445s. He's a great presenter, really articulate and concise. The kind of speaker that you'd gladly listen to for 3+ hours if given the chance. Which for a talk about window management is quite the compliment.
20 min · 4,654 words
The hidden design compromises of Docker layers
How Docker and OCI image layers encode filesystem changes with tar archives and whiteouts, and which special filenames you cannot safely use in images.
31 min · 7,144 words
The Inner Ring tours Shimano’s bicycle museum in Sakai—history of components, racing artifacts, and how the brand presents its industrial and sporting story to visitors.
5 min · 1,171 words
From Vibe-Coding to Verification: The Engineering Case for Deterministic Checks in the AI Era
Tamiz Uddin argues that vibe-coding—accepting AI output because it “looks right”—is unsafe for production, and that modern engineering skill is verification via tests, types, and deterministic gates.
12 min · 2,796 words
How Singapore's government-run dating service works, and why it won't solve the dating crisis
Kai walks through GovTech’s FirstDate pilot—questionnaire, Singpass verification, Gale-Shapley matching cycles—and argues why a government matchmaker is unlikely to fix Singapore’s deeper dating and fertility challenges.
18 min · 4,079 words
Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.
34 min · 7,804 words
Great Dirhombicosidodecahedron
| | Great Dirhombicosidodecahedron ("Miller's Monster") | - Vertex description: (5/2.4.3.4.5/3.4.3/2.4)/2 - Faces: 124 (24 pentagrams, 40 triangles, 60 squares) - Edges: 240 - Vertices: 60 - External facelets: 1280 - Dual: Great Dirhombicosidodecacron This model has 1280 external facelets to put together! The polyhedron is uniform, so all the faces are regular although it's hard to make them all out. It is the only uniform polyhedron with as many as 8 faces meeting at each vertex (two purple pen
2 min · 471 words
A big-tent or small-tent AI safety movement?The unstated disagreement that underpins safety debates
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor argue that AI x-risk framing can polarize and misdirect policy, and call for a pluralist “big-tent” safety movement focused on catastrophic and systemic risks, transparency, and liability.
13 min · 2,943 words
Recent events in the field of AI for mathematics have shown us beyond all reasonable doubt that the field is currently undergoing a rapid transformation, unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Language models are solving hard problems which humans could not, and mathematicians are reacting very differently to this news. I personally am extremely excited about the future of our field. However it is becoming clear to me that my views are not shared by everyone in the community: indeed, many of my colleagues seem to be upset. So let me start by outlining my…
12 min · 2,857 words
The Dot and the SwarmBenefitting from the Bitter Lesson
Ethan Mollick on what he underestimated most about AI progress: agents that self-organize into swarms, what that means for tools like Muse and Dots, and why we keep relearning the Bitter Lesson.
8 min · 1,891 words
Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake
Git 3.0 will make SHA-256 the new default content hashing algorithm and it will be an incomprehensibly expensive and ultimately valueless and avoidable global nightmare.
17 min · 3,902 words