Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
I Would Like the Value of My Home to Rise, While My Property Taxes Fall
Timothy Taylor's Conversable Economist discusses David Schleicher's paper "The Great American Property Tax Freak Out" on why rising home values have driven US states to cut or abolish property taxes for owner-occupiers, and argues the ironic result is still higher housing prices for future buyers.
3 min · 687 words
Historians often blame drought, famine, and invaders for the Late Bronze Age collapse—but that can’t explain why the empires never came back. Patrick Fitzsimmons argues for a deeper structural story.
14 min · 3,253 words
Rodin Museum 3D Scan VerdictFrance's highest administrative court and the surreal fight over museum 3D scans.
Cosmo Wenman recounts his eight-year freedom-of-information case over 3D scans of Rodin Museum sculptures, including how France's Conseil d'État legal analyst invoked surrealism, and what the verdict means for public access to cultural 3D data.
10 min · 2,397 words
On the Value of Doing a PhD in the Age of AI
MIT's Phillip Isola offers ten reminders for anxious AI PhD students: public research still has leverage, human expertise remains safety infrastructure, and the PhD's job is to chase a moving frontier for the love of the game.
3 min · 781 words
Pirating the PiratesNotes from the underground of film preservation.
Devan Scott on how fan restorers, remuxers, and boutique labels like Arrow and Kino fight studio revisionism—reconstructing historically accurate cuts of films such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when official releases fail.
3 min · 760 words
A short essay on how modern web stacks leave people behind — and why shipping progressive, resilient HTML still matters in 2026.
2 min · 455 words
The systems that no one will test
The systems that no one will test This happened to me in 2020, and it has been on my mind again lately. During the worst of the pandemic, I found a vulnerability in a system that gave me access to the Brazilian federal system, and with that access I was able to retrieve information on any Brazilian (think of 200+ million people data).
4 min · 901 words
Owed a billion dollars in NVDA stock
A first-person account of a 1993 NVIDIA stock option grant, a decades-later discovery of a vesting discrepancy, and how the statute of limitations settled it.
3 min · 779 words
When I was a freshman at RISD, there was a club fair, and I was drawn to the RISD STEAM table, where I met Carly Ayres and Sayer Pease. They welcomed me with open arms, and I started to learn about things like 3D printers and Arduino. I first learned Processing from Clement Valla, paper electronics from Jie Qi, and then Arduino from Paul Badger. I fell in love, and the fate was more or less sealed when I made my first music synthesizer. Creating a tool that output things I never thought of while making it lit up my heart, and is still why I do the things I do today.…
5 min · 1,063 words
What I believe about the future of software development
Thorsten Ball plants a flag on where software development is headed as AI agents write more of the code: what still matters for engineers, what gets commoditized, and how taste and judgment become the scarce skills.
4 min · 809 words
In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults
Paul Hockenos reports from Mykolaiv and elsewhere on how small off-grid solar fields, batteries, and other distributed renewables keep water and power flowing in Ukraine despite Russian strikes on centralized plants, and why the larger grid will still need protected transmission.
6 min · 1,355 words
What's the Future for Pure Math Research in the Age of AI?
Stephen Wolfram surveys AI’s growing role in pure mathematics—headline ‘solved’ problems, what automation does and doesn’t replace, and how human mathematical taste and research programs may evolve.
31 min · 7,084 words
Russell Sechzer on what's missing in agentic commerce: incomplete financial instructions, who authorizes agents, who pays for work that never becomes a purchase, and the invisible costs behind Muse, Instinct, Stripe, Visa, and AP2.
8 min · 1,882 words
LinkedIn is a soulsucking hole of professionalism and a pit of hell that not even my worst enemy should spend the rest of his days in. It’s this concoction of performative productivity and corpo speak producing cursed artifacts beyond human comprehension. A place where normal human text goes to die and can only be kept alive by an LLM like a radiation protection suit.
4 min · 999 words
What makes software development engineeringA process that doesn't depend on individual brilliance
Simon Park (박성범) argues software work becomes engineering when processes outlast individual brilliance—translating intuition into explainable practice, and clarifying when an engineering approach is actually needed.
12 min · 2,720 words
As If Yesterday, in Partly in the Right, I asked where the information comes from when an agent produces a result, and what checks it. Today I have a sharper version of that question, and a new piece of evidence to ask it about.
13 min · 2,972 words
Robert W argues LLM confidence scores are vibe-words, not calibrated probabilities—and outlines RLCD-style approaches that treat hallucination as a solvable measurement and training problem.
7 min · 1,560 words
What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators
Ben Overmyer compares Western heraldry and Japanese mon as generative systems—and what those rule-bound visual languages teach about building software that invents coherent coats of arms and marks.
13 min · 3,070 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
AI and the Fall? of the Creative ClassAmerica is Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs in Media, Film & the Arts. How Much is AI to Blame?
Joseph Politano examines why the US has lost more than 200k jobs in media, film, publishing and the arts over four years, weighing generative AI against streaming consolidation, advertising shifts and other structural forces, and what it may signal for wider white-collar displacement.
10 min · 2,263 words