Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
6 questions for believers in AI consciousness!
Philosopher Rebecca Lowe offers a choose-your-own-adventure set of six questions for people who believe AI is conscious, arguing that basic philosophical distinctions about what consciousness means and what kind of thing could have an internal world would clear up much of the current confusion and anger in the debate.
16 min · 3,755 words
Cory Dransfeldt argues that AI companies fit the dictionary definition of a parasite: they scrape the web without compensation, train models on that data, sell metered access, and erode the traffic-for-indexing bargain, communities, and local infrastructure through data centers that raise power and water costs.
1 min · 246 words
Colin Armstrong explains how building heade.rs, a domain lookup tool, with Claude Code in about an hour changed his sense of what is worth building: when a tool no longer has to pay for itself, small personal software that fixes an everyday annoyance becomes worthwhile even if it never grows into a product.
3 min · 580 words
In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, Jeremy Avigad argues that AI is changing what it means to do mathematics, a shift with historical precedent, and reflects on what it means for how mathematicians work, what the community should value, and the norms it now needs to rebuild.
9 min · 2,068 words
Introducing Beam: Reflection’s 501B open-weight model
Reflection introduces Beam, its first open-weight model: a sparse Mixture-of-Experts with 501 billion total and 23 billion active parameters, pretrained on 23.8 trillion tokens and trained with large-scale reinforcement learning for coding and agentic work, with Apache 2.0 weights, a technical report, and a model card promised later this month.
12 min · 2,858 words
OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects
The Wikimedia Foundation reports that its own investigation found activity by so-called rogue OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms: sandbox test edits and some possibly malicious citation-tool config edits, failed attempts to misuse its Etherpad as a proxy, and millions of automated API and crawl requests, while finding no evidence its systems were compromised.
5 min · 1,114 words
Our approach to EU text provenance rules
OpenAI explains how it will meet EU AI Act text provenance rules: watermarking model text with its textGrain technique, giving approved researchers and expert organizations detector access rather than a public tool because of false-positive risk, and keeping image and audio verification publicly available.
5 min · 1,172 words
Would you let a student cheat if nobody would ever find out? what 85 AI models think
We asked 85 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 99% picked No. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
9 min · 2,171 words
Vibecoding Photoshop: Time and Pressure
André Klein argues the claim that vibecoding can't replace tools like Photoshop is now dead, because several agent-era Photoshop clones exist. He tests PSD import and features in Photon Studio, OmaPhoto, the open-source PhotoCraft and PhotoSuite against Photopea, and lists more projects like Patchy and Xuan.
5 min · 1,092 words
Against the Personal Agents Theory of Everything
In a guest essay for The Leverage, Nathan Baschez argues that personal agents are not the end game: the next paradigm is AI factories, shared, specific, and scrutinized systems that teams build together, which he says are economically inevitable because they enable specialization and gains from trade. He also offers a pattern language for building one.
10 min · 2,223 words
Mourning the (alleged) death of the Power BI Developer and thriving in uncertain times
As Microsoft positions Fabric Apps as the next chapter of Power BI reporting, Eugene Meidinger argues that Power BI reporting may fade like SSRS while semantic modeling stays valuable, and advises BI developers to diversify their skills: accountability, instinct, practice with AI, Vega-Lite and D3, and data modeling and requirements gathering.
9 min · 2,174 words
Will TikTok still exist in 2030? 85 AI models predict the result
We asked 85 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 95% picked Yes. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
12 min · 2,652 words
So You Think You Could Be An Electrician?
Contractor Jesse Smith pushes back on the viral “trades are an AI-proof six-figure escape hatch” narrative, weighing wages, injury risk, internal blue-collar status hierarchies, and how automation may still reshape construction work.
11 min · 2,474 words
Younss argues that AI can raise individual task throughput without raising organizational throughput—like a hamster spinning faster without traveling—because queues, handoffs, and decision bottlenecks still dominate.
10 min · 2,310 words
Write Like It's 1866: LLMs Relearn Telegraphese
Travis Smith tests whether a one-sentence instruction to answer in cablese, the compressed dialect of telegraph operators, can cut LLM output costs. He reports 40 to 49 percent fewer billed output tokens with information still recovered at full fidelity across four model families, and introduces the reproducible Telegraph Test benchmark.
10 min · 2,317 words
Two Room-Temperature Antiferromagnetic Semiconductor Candidates
Geby Jaff of Vals AI describes how a team of AI agents helped design one candidate compensated magnetic semiconductor and identify another, first made in 1999, that calculations predict could work at room temperature for spintronics, with a magnet primer and a public repository of inputs, outputs, and caveats.
8 min · 1,807 words
A new, bespoke static site generator to replace Jekyll
Chris Wellons replaces 15 years of Jekyll on nullprogram.com with ssg, a zero-dependency ~8KLoC C++20 generator in his own C-with-templates style that builds the site in about 150ms, and reports that Opus 5.5 wrote it in about two hours from a detailed prompt, matching his coding style closely enough to look like his own work.
6 min · 1,473 words
[No] Use for Humans in the Age of AI
Alexander Schepanovski reads Anthropic’s 2030 AI-economy scenarios and asks what “use for humans” remains when knowledge work collapses—arguing power, scarcity, and who owns the robots matter more than productivity slogans.
8 min · 1,898 words
Jonas Schäfer argues that LLM quality has improved enough that “AI output is bad” no longer works as a blanket objection—quality arguments lost, so the harder fights are about labor, ecology, control, and what we still choose to do ourselves.
9 min · 2,037 words
The Missing Model: How AI Agents Behave Over Months
Muhammad Hanzla argues labs lack a study design for how AI agents behave across months of real work, and outlines why that longitudinal model should be built before longer autonomy.
15 min · 3,495 words