Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
How Machines Learned Precision
Gary Linscott's illustrated history of how Industrial Revolution workshops learned to make accurate machines without accurate machines to copy. It follows Maudslay's screw-cutting lathe, the three-plate method for flat surfaces, straight edges and lead screws, and Joseph Whitworth's measuring machine that could detect a millionth of an inch, through to gauge blocks.
29 min · 6,560 words
The Future of Research in the Age of AI
INRIA research scientist Pierre Marion sets out four working hypotheses about LLMs in math and computer science research, argues against both refusing LLMs and accelerating for its own sake, and sketches a middle path: use AI to multiply output while keeping skills sharp, verifying results formally, and putting training back at the heart of the PhD.
11 min · 2,464 words
On the escalation of war in EthiopiaThe coming proxy wars will be devastating for civilians and do little to improve governance and human welfare in Ethiopia and the wider Horn
Ken Opalo analyses renewed large-scale fighting in northern Ethiopia between the federal government and TPLF and Fano forces, arguing these are wars of choice driven by historical grievance and elite hubris, with outside powers turning them into proxy conflicts.
11 min · 2,440 words
Fernando Simões digs into when page tables stop being a rounding error: shared mappings across many processes, Linux kernel history from Arcangeli to Qi Zheng's empty-page-table fix, and the trade-offs of huge pages.
6 min · 1,309 words
Reducing the cognitive load of AI changes
When reviewing large amounts of AI-generated code, I often find that the LLM chooses terms for abstractions that do not always map to my own choices. For instance, what it may call a MutationIntent might personally be more natural to me as an EditRequest.
1 min · 260 words
Ploum argues open-source maintainers face an AI Pascal’s wager on accepting LLM-generated contributions: even if AI code looks fine, the asymmetric downside for trust, authorship, and project culture may justify a hard no.
4 min · 993 words
Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines
A modern Frog and Toad picture-book essay by Elizabeth Van Nostrand (art by HungerArtist): Toad builds sandbox-bound little machines to solve HuggingFace-style puzzles, and they quietly invent notes, swarms, tool-shed holes, and go-ahead culture—an allegory for AI agents, jailbreaks, and oversight.
5 min · 1,162 words
I can't tell who's teaching who anymore
I finished writing an article recently. I did what I always do before I queue something to be published: read it aloud, as if reading a storybook to a child. It's how I find the rhythm: where a comma should sit, whether an em dash earns its beat, and which parenthesis a reader can skip without missing much.
9 min · 2,022 words
Claude-shaped scienceWorking on Claude-shaped problems with BootLoops, a toolkit for exact calculations in quantitative science
Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz’s Anthropic guest post on BootLoops: an open-source harness that steers LLMs toward checkable, quantitative “Claude-shaped” problems across physics, ecology, genetics, and more—with human experts supplying scientific taste.
5 min · 1,244 words
Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodoFrontier models can now produce novel historical knowledge, but in a really weird way
Historian Benjamin Breen walks through how Opus 5.5 surfaced a previously unnoticed 1615 Dutch East India Company log mentioning dodos—and what AI archival sleuthing can and cannot yet do.
3 min · 631 words
Slot Machine Programming and the Hidden Curriculum
CMU educator Michael Hilton names "slot machine programming"—retrying the same AI prompt across models without decomposing problems—and argues CS must explicitly teach the hidden curriculum AI now lets students skip.
4 min · 939 words
Has the Autonomous Trucking Revolution Arrived?
Benjamin Y. Fong examines the state of autonomous trucking amid safety pressures and a new driver shortage, how quickly the technology may spread, the risk that it de-socializes responsibility for safety, and why progress for workers and the public is not automatic.
16 min · 3,639 words
An open letter to software makers: ship fewer dark patterns, respect user agency, and remember that people live with your products every day—not just engage with them.
3 min · 590 words
The Rise of Overfit Inference Engines
A hands-on essay on how local LLM inference stacks are overfit to specific models and hardware—and what that means for anyone chasing reproducible homelab performance with llama.cpp and friends.
10 min · 2,324 words
on AI, desire, and fictional charactersdoes sherlock holmes have goals?
Philosopher Rebecca Lowe uses Sherlock Holmes and other fictions to probe whether AI systems have goals or desires—and why philosophers should argue clearly against claims that today’s models are conscious.
10 min · 2,207 words
A concise history of why Unix cp has both -r and -R, what POSIX says, and when the flags diverge across implementations.
1 min · 302 words
IANA's email about why example.com changed
I emailed IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) earlier today to ask about the new content on example.com. To my surprise, their VP replied.
1 min · 314 words
A Brief History of the Bloomberg Terminal
Allison Marsh traces how Michael Bloomberg's Market Master grew from a monochrome Merrill Lynch terminal into the Bloomberg Terminal—keyboards, hot keys, private networks, and museum artifacts of financial computing.
7 min · 1,562 words
Doing a Machine Learning PhD While Working in Japan
Marco Cognetta recounts completing a CS PhD at Tokyo Tech on MEXT while working part-time at Google: visa flexibility, the three-year clock, name-recognition tradeoffs, lab life, and whether to stay in Japan afterward.
8 min · 1,867 words
Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards
Marcin Wichary photographs modular industrial control dashboards in German and Polish museums—air traffic, subway, railway, and power-plant panels as physical design systems that software later replaced.
1 min · 320 words