Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
Dan Luu argues that turning off critical judgment while using LLMs fails in practice: when people let models take actions or produce analyses without verification, errors compound — there is no safe point at which you can stop thinking.
12 min · 2,831 words
AI Agents Push Humans Out of the Loop
Position paper arguing that today’s AI agent designs impede and degrade effective human oversight—the irony of automation at agent scale—and outlining developer affordances plus deployer protocols for cognitive scaffolding.
3 min · 629 words
AI and Math in 2026: a non-mathematician's read
xlr8harder synthesizes recent AI math results for non-specialists: real progress with a different strength profile than humans, formalization cliffs, and why “math nearly conquered” remains overhyped.
3 min · 750 words
The UV index is not the warm sensation of sunlight on bare skinWhy sunburn risk and how hot the sun feels on your skin diverge—backed by numbers.
A clear, numbers-first essay explaining why the warmth of sunlight is a poor proxy for UV-B sunburn risk: cloudy cool days can still burn, and scorching morning heat may not, once you separate infrared heating from the UV index.
3 min · 727 words
George Lucas Returns to Earth, Bearing Gifts
Sam Hall Kaplan on George Lucas’s return to terrestrial concerns—architecture, museums, and civic gifts—after decades defining cinematic worlds, and what that means for place-making.
4 min · 922 words
California Is Chasing Wealth That Has Feet
Greg Miller on California’s tax and policy chase for mobile capital: why wealth that can walk (or fly) is a different problem from land-bound tax bases, and what history suggests.
4 min · 993 words
Real-Time Feedback: My Closing Move in Every Interview
Mark Grebler explains ending interviews by giving candid capability feedback on the spot—so candidates can correct misunderstandings and the process becomes two-way.
2 min · 374 words
"Vibe coding" is the new "Internet dating"
An analogy between early-2000s internet dating stigma and today's vibe-coding skepticism: both start as jokes, then quietly become how a lot of people actually meet their goals.
1 min · 199 words
The fall of the theorem economyHow AI could destroy mathematics and barely touch it
David Bessis argues AI is exploiting mathematicians' honor-code incentives: when theorems become cheap to produce, prestige-driven theorem economies collapse even if mathematical understanding itself is barely touched.
47 min · 10,783 words
What Is Gridification? The Hidden Shift in Recorded Music
Jeffrey Anthony of the Musical Form Institute defines 'gridification', the shift over 25 years toward recorded music locked to a quantized time grid, by comparing the 1975 and 2025 Billboard top five songs and arguing why the loss of human timing matters.
10 min · 2,241 words
Judah Gabriel Himango argues agentic interfaces will subsume traditional apps and websites—what changes for developers when the primary UI becomes a conversation with tools.
5 min · 1,254 words
Side-stepping the Secretary Problem, unwittingly.
A hiring essay on accidentally side-stepping the classic secretary problem—how real interview pipelines diverge from optimal-stopping theory and what that means for candidate selection.
11 min · 2,529 words
Carson Gross on teaching, parenting, and why improvisational "yes, and" is a better stance for web software than premature abstraction—an htmx essay about compounding small improvements.
10 min · 2,277 words
What makes Lisp difficult to read?
The Lisp family of programming languages is infamous for their parenthesis-heavy syntax. Many people, myself included, find this syntax more difficult to read than the notation of languages like Python, Java or C. The perceived unreadability of Lisp is so significant that multiple attempts have been made to create new notations to aid Lisp’s adoption. Yet, despite these attempts and Lisp being nea
11 min · 2,635 words
The Graph Will Set You Free: Why Every Creative Tool Is Becoming a Node Canvas
Hirad Sab traces node-based creative tools from Sketchpad to modern AI canvases, arguing graphs are the right abstraction when generation becomes a networked, composable process.
8 min · 1,935 words
A short opinion piece arguing constructors should never throw, do async work, or perform side effects; parsing, connecting, and validation belong in factory methods or explicit lifecycle methods so object construction stays simple and predictable.
2 min · 397 words
Investigative essay tracing why Wikipedia, CIA Factbook, and UN figures overstate Yemen’s area by ~100,000 km²—from Ottoman vilayet tables and a 1976 World Bank double-count to post-unification copy-paste.
1 min · 319 words
Tyler Hogge argues that intensity, a culture of raising the quality bar, increasing speed and narrowing focus to an extreme degree, is the most important trait of exceptional startups, drawing on his own experience at three breakout companies and examples from founders like Steve Jobs, Brian Chesky and Sam Altman.
3 min · 586 words
Psychologist Adam Mastroianni argues against the claim that ideas are getting harder to find: discoveries beget and replace old ones, many old findings were wrong, new tools reopen old questions, and falling per-researcher output reflects how science is organized rather than exhausted ideas.
23 min · 5,230 words
The value of not getting to the point
I read somewhere recently, I forget where, that the purpose of people getting together for a conversation over a beer or coffee or lunch or dinner is that it the food and drink spare us from the burden of needing to have something to say throughout the whole conversation.
4 min · 954 words