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On the Death of Amazon’s Writing Culture
Former Amazon principal engineer Steve Huynh argues that AI-generated six-pagers are hollowing out the writing culture that once forced clear thinking at Amazon, describes 'AI;DR' and teams that stopped writing entirely, and proposes keeping human writing and reading for one-way-door decisions.
8 min · 1,826 words
How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet
Amanda Shendruk investigates how Amazon’s marketplace and advertising tools push prices up across the web — not just on Amazon — via seller fees, Buy Box dynamics, and price-matching ripples.
5 min · 1,065 words
Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?
Alex Wennerberg argues that rationalist bloggers such as Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky write posts that are far too long, spending effort on layers of detail and nuance instead of questioning their premises, and says what the verbose style lacks is wisdom: the discretion to know which ideas are worth pursuing and what needs saying.
2 min · 371 words
The Politics of the “Non-Political”
Yibin Fan introduces a conceptual review, co-authored with Yufan Guo in Political Communication, of how researchers define the boundary between political and 'non-political' content as political information seeps into everyday life and media.
4 min · 959 words
An Unmade Film Shaped Hayao Miyazaki
Animation Obsessive traces how Hayao Miyazaki's unrealized 1980 adaptation of Richard Corben's Rowlf pulled him out of a creative slump and fed directly into Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, plus animation newsbits.
12 min · 2,656 words
Bark: The Toll-Free BBS for 90s Teens
Topics: Retrocomputing The other day I was thinking about the first communities I found online and, perhaps tangentially, to what degree they influenced the amount of therapy I now require to function normally as an adult. Our family's second computer came from Sam's Club. It was a 386DX with Windows 3.0 but my inner nerd would have nothing to do with cheerful bit-mapped color schemes, preferring instead to exit to MS-DOS and do all necessary computing and gaming from a command prompt and text-based GUIs. Hardware-wise, it looked and felt cheap. The machine was less reliable than the…
19 min · 4,358 words
David Rudnick on the borderline impossible process of designing a bespoke Arsenal typeface
Olivia Hingley interviews designer David Rudnick and collaborator Johnnie Campbell about Rocastle, a bespoke Arsenal typeface: the research, constraints of football branding, and why crafting a club-specific type system felt borderline impossible.
19 min · 4,280 words
Ryan Bigg reflects on applying to hundreds of tech roles after years in the industry, the mismatch between experience and current hiring, and deciding to look beyond tech for what’s next.
1 min · 270 words
How many shots are in the average movie today?
Film-data researcher Stephen Follows counts the shots in 8,770 feature films released between 1930 and 2025 using automatic shot-boundary detection, showing how many shots a typical film has now, how cutting pace has changed over a century, and how it varies by director, genre, runtime, budget and awards.
11 min · 2,614 words
The 1st Time Machines Mogged Mathematicians
Pessimists Archive's Louis Anslow revisits the 1976 computer-assisted proof of the Four Color Theorem by Appel and Haken, the skepticism and outright rejection it drew from mathematicians, how acceptance slowly came, and the parallels with today's debate over AI-generated mathematics.
4 min · 979 words
Did Ente Locker copy my code without attribution?
FairScan's developer Pierre-Yves Nicolas describes finding that Ente Locker's new document-scanning feature, which credited FairScan's segmentation model, appears to reuse several of FairScan's GPL image-processing implementations despite claiming they were written from scratch, and reflects on what that means for open-source motivation.
5 min · 1,231 words
Can Ease of Creation Lead to Decrease in Quality & Value?
Gustavo Pezzi of Pikuma reflects on whether AI tools that make software and games trivially easy to produce will flood the market with cheap, generic work, drawing parallels with past shifts in other crafts and asking what will make people care about what you make.
11 min · 2,431 words
Hittite royal archive found in Turkey
The History Blog reports a large Hittite-period cuneiform archive excavated in Turkey, describing the tablets’ find context, what kinds of administrative and royal records they appear to contain, and why the discovery matters for Anatolian Bronze Age history.
2 min · 549 words
Where is all the new, good software?
Nate Meyvis lists candidate answers to the skeptic’s question—if AI coding is so powerful, why isn’t more great new software obvious—covering quieter quality gains, limited adoption, political bottlenecks, ephemeral and private tools, leisure capture, and AI sometimes reducing software use.
2 min · 511 words
Living in the Weimar era of Ruby
Julik Tarkhanov responds to DHH's RailsWorld vibe-coding keynote, arguing that celebrity disinterest in Rails does not obligate the community to abandon it, and framing a freer, post-celebrity chapter for Ruby.
13 min · 2,998 words
The Toftwood Male Voice Choir: A Mystery Pressed in Vinyl
Amateur radio operator EI3LH turns an impulse-buy vinyl LP by the Toftwood Male Voice Choir into a detective story: tracing the obscure Christian choral record, its pressing, and the people behind a mystery crate-dig find.
9 min · 2,136 words
I admire John Gruber. I think he’s a great writer. I think he’s smart as hell. He’s annoyingly funny, too. I am impressed and inspired by his success with both Daring Fireball and The Talk Show. I get excited when John links to one of my apps or articles. When he linked to my story about relaunch...
4 min · 1,005 words
Do dentists actually know what they’re doing?
In vignettes from age 17 to 33, Parker Tatum recounts jaw pain, night guards, cavities and gum recession, and the conflicting diagnoses of a succession of dentists, orthodontists, periodontists and surgeons who each dismiss the previous one's work, raising the question of whether any of them know what they're doing.
16 min · 3,778 words
David Bushell riffs on the inevitable 'I read your domain as D-Bus Hell' comment, then turns it into a personal essay about naming, identity on the web, and living with a domain that invites the joke.
4 min · 928 words
Rich Whitehouse argues that "artificial intelligence" is a poor label for frontier generative models, criticizes large language models and the companies building them on grounds including copyright, labor and societal harm, and urges readers to stay aware of what they are participating in.
14 min · 3,304 words