Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Getting out of the way: my robotics crash course
Software engineer Rob Bercik documents a crash course with a desktop robot arm: why LLM-era builders should get out of the way, what broke first, and what physical loops taught him.
8 min · 1,842 words
Ten Lines Of Code That Changed My World
Roel Nieskens picks ten short snippets—from BASIC hello-world loops to JavaScript wat Batman and typography hacks—that shaped how he thinks about programming, fronts-ends, and fonts.
3 min · 689 words
C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
Gustavo Pezzi defends C’s platform-sized integers: how 12–60-bit machines shaped int, why minimum ranges beat fixed widths, and what Lua’s portable C still teaches.
2 min · 486 words
Marcos Magueta borrows a Roman naming practice to argue for clearer software names—how ancient cognomina habits map onto naming libraries, products, and the stories we tell about code.
5 min · 1,232 words
If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?
If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become? Yesterday, I received this email as a response to [You Can't Vibe Code Love](https://blog.codinghorror.com/you cant vibe code love/). It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well.
3 min · 679 words
Several months ago, I decided that AI contributions were no longer welcome in a FOSS project I am building and maintaining - LibreWeddingPlanner. It’s not that it got a lot of contributions with AI — actually all contributions I’ve had are translations and feature requests — but I wanted to avoid future drama and have a position against AI. However, although I was not using AI for my FOSS contributions, I kept using it at work. In my workplace, as well as in many of my developer friends’,…
10 min · 2,190 words
He who does not code, neither shall he eat
You have never heard of me, and depending on who you are, god do I hope you will forget my name as soon as you finish reading this. Quite frankly, I am unimportant. I am not a maintainer of any major Open Source project. My largest Open Source contributions have been completely replaced by better code, and were not meaningful enough to make me qualified to speak on this issue.
10 min · 2,193 words
Arm & SoftBank: Part 1 — Masa comes calling, bearing gifts
Today, something a little different: a joint post in the form of a conversation between Jon Metzler and Babbage.
11 min · 2,555 words
Crazy as it sounds to say this, since it’s all anybody’s been able to talk about for over a year, but the impact of AI on computing hasn’t yet sunk in.
6 min · 1,349 words
Why All Philosophers Ought To Be Radical Naturalists
My last blog posts calling for a scientific turn in philosophy and the abandonment of aprioristic philosophy largely resulted in three responses.
7 min · 1,549 words
I Look, if you are still stuck on “AI cannot really think, it’s just a stochastic parrot”, please snap out of it and lock in, or you’ll keep repeating that line until you find yourself sitting in the corner chair, watching as ChatGPT™ has sex with your wife.
8 min · 1,856 words
LLM Policies: Progress At All Costs
Diego Escalante argues that GNOME and KDE LLM-policy debates are really about whether open-source communities will accept “progress at all costs,” and what values get traded away when AI tooling is waved through.
4 min · 1,003 words
On Ezra Klein’s Podcast With Jensen Huang
Zvi Mowshowitz annotates Ezra Klein’s interview with Jensen Huang: Huang downplays existential risk as “just software,” yet endorses safety standards that would shut down OpenAI and 10x safety spending.
33 min · 7,619 words
I’m Tired of Being on the Network
Mat Duggan on smartphone fatigue: how always-on networks reshaped attention, relationships, and work, and why stepping back from the phone has become a practical form of self-preservation.
11 min · 2,442 words
Alberto Denia argues that agentic coding has made code malleable like clay rather than stone, letting developers model software roughly and refine it, and contrasts two ways of working with the new material: the hands-on artisan and the automated factory, and when each fits.
4 min · 1,015 words
L-systems generate weevils, pizza toppings, and matriarchal lineages
Mark Jason Dominus explores Fibonacci words and L-systems—how the same rewrite rules generate rabbit genealogies, weevil patterns, pizza toppings, and matriarchal lineages.
2 min · 360 words
Your Body Of Work Thinks Back At You
A photographer revisits years of bench photos and finds hostile architecture emerging in the archive—arguing that a body of work can reveal patterns the maker only notices in retrospect.
3 min · 600 words
The next frontier in worm research is to be able to visualise (map) the locations of worms, in-situ, and if possible, at the paddock scale.
6 min · 1,389 words
CS 240 Spring 2026 AI Retrospective
Purdue CS 240 instructor Jeffrey Turkstra reflects on Spring 2026 AI-assisted cheating cases: what went wrong in enforcement, what students actually did, and how academic integrity policy should change.
17 min · 3,997 words
Burke Holland argues chat isn’t always the right interface for AI-assisted development, and walks through canvases as a more tangible UI for building with GitHub Copilot.
5 min · 1,250 words