Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
The compiler was supposed to end programming too
In 1954, IBM said FORTRAN would virtually eliminate coding and debugging. An essay on what the numbers say about AI and software work in 2026, how the bottleneck moves when code gets cheap, and a guess at a developer's Tuesday in 2031.
14 min · 3,332 words
What I learned from six months of being stupid on purpose
A recent finance graduate reflects on six months of deliberately putting themselves in situations where they knew the least, teaching themselves software from scratch, and how getting comfortable with feeling stupid led to faster learning and a startup incubator acceptance.
13 min · 2,965 words
Dima Bolkunov argues against relying on AI to write text for others: AI averages away an author's style and the empathy it enables, loses precision because it must fill gaps with ambiguous wording, removes the self-critique that writing forces, and shifts effort from writer to reader, so the writer's time savings evaporate on the readers' side.
2 min · 409 words
Superhuman Hardware Design Is The Easy Part
a16z partner Christian Keil argues frontier AI models will soon become superhuman at hardware design, but that the lossy interface between digital designs and physical atoms means building, testing, measuring and iterating real hardware will lag, shifting the frontier to manufacturing, procurement, data capture and process knowledge held by technicians.
12 min · 2,770 words
An essay on mathematicians' emotional reactions to AI-generated proofs, from Terence Tao's call for etiquette and Hugo Duminil-Copin's account of panic to spiritual angst and humility, set against the 1976 four color theorem and other industrializing disciplines, arguing the romantic era of mathematics is ending.
8 min · 1,738 words
The Land Within Us: How People Shape the Earth—and Are Shaped in Return
Gayil Nalls, founder of the World Sensorium / Conservancy, draws on the Amazon documentary Yanuni and new Nature research on the forest of knowledge to argue that biological and cultural diversity sustain each other, and that regenerating land also means regenerating Indigenous knowledge, attention and responsibility.
10 min · 2,196 words
The unknown painter behind Manhattan’s Gilded Age interiors
Jane Coombs profiles James Wall Finn, the largely forgotten muralist whose ceilings adorn the New York Public Library's Rose Main Reading Room and other Gilded Age Manhattan rooms, and pieces together how he won elite commissions.
6 min · 1,287 words
Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes?
Practical Engineering traces the history of the external iron fire escape in American cities, why it became the default retrofit after early fire egress laws, the problems that made it unreliable, and how building codes shifted to protected interior stairwells and other egress designs, with the tradeoffs regulation creates.
10 min · 2,407 words
Paul Tyma remembers his 30-year friendship with tech writer and broadcaster Bob Cringely, from a 1996 phone call praising his Java book that led to building the Pronto magazine-delivery system, through years of startup-idea emails, a visit to Sun Microsystems over a C# column, and a VH1 geek interview, reflecting that Cringely's true gift was on camera.
7 min · 1,668 words
Ben Congdon argues that AI agents are structurally well suited to monitoring production systems, building on Anthropic's description of Claude "superfans" that watch single components, with a change-point monitoring case study and thoughts on why agentic monitoring can catch subtle issues traditional alerts miss.
8 min · 1,948 words
Clockwork Mechanics, Maintenance, and Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages
Karl Peeter Valk argues on the JHI Blog that the mechanical clock became a potent metaphor in the late Middle Ages not because of its perfection but because of its imperfections, tracing the image through Nicole Oresme, courtly culture, and Henry Suso's Horologium Sapientiae.
11 min · 2,527 words
Steve Krouse, a programmer and soon-to-be father, asks what education is for in the age of AGI. Drawing on Neil Postman's The End of Education, Edison's failed prediction that technology would replace teachers, and the Lindy effect, he reflects on why schools endure, how AI undermines 'earning a living' as a purpose, and proposes crafting education's purpose together with children.
4 min · 993 words
What requirements don't you have?
Sean Goedecke argues that elegant software design comes from identifying requirements you can drop, such as fresh data, concurrent writes, or low tail latency, citing Unicorn, S3, StatsD, SQLite, and Cursor's git backend, and warns that unchecked consistency demands petrify systems.
5 min · 1,096 words
William Gibson and the trademarking of Cyberspace™
A short essay on William Gibson’s coining of “cyberspace,” how the word entered culture, and the odd history of attempts to trademark it.
2 min · 526 words
To Make, or to Buy: The Economics of Decision Models
Parth Parikh explores the economics of decision models like Jev, whose outputs are choices, scores or abstentions rather than free text, formalizes decision hierarchies using Chow's reject rule to decide when a cheap model should defer to a costlier one, and speculates on multimodal and on-device uses.
16 min · 3,592 words
Writing is no longer proof of work
Sean Goedecke argues tech companies rely on writing as evidence of compliance, effort, and expertise, much like Bitcoin relies on proof-of-work, and that LLMs are eroding that signal, leaving engineers to save real effort for writing meant as communication.
6 min · 1,283 words
Outside the Scope of Our Support
A blind Android user's account of reporting a TalkBack-breaking bug to Google Disability Support, getting told the issue was out of scope, and arguing that accessibility support routes must not bounce real product defects away from engineers.
12 min · 2,810 words
Bitter Lessons and Premature Optimizations
Veit Heller revisits Knuth’s ‘premature optimization’ line and Rich’s Bitter Lesson, arguing that the shape of efficiency arguments—not just the slogans—matters when building AI systems and robots.
7 min · 1,668 words
The History of Development of Norton Commander
Dr Nikolai Bezroukov's Softpanorama chapter recounts how John Socha's Norton Commander defined the Orthodox File Manager paradigm—from VDOS and NC 1.0 in 1986 through the cult of NC 3.0 to NC 5.5—and why the dual-pane OFM design still shapes file managers decades later.
81 min · 18,563 words
Making Chicken Transparent Using Dorito DustModifying the optical properties of biological tissues with tartrazine
CasualPhysicsEnjoyer walks through a Nature paper on making live tissue optically transparent with absorbing molecules such as tartrazine (the yellow dye in Doritos), then recreates and explains the physics at home: refractive-index matching, complex permittivity, and why a yellow dye can open a window into chicken meat.
15 min · 3,512 words