Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Taylor Swift or Beyoncé? what 83 AI models think
We asked 83 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 89% picked Beyoncé. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
10 min · 2,392 words
Please Stop the Slop: What AI Slop Is and How to Spot It
Tejas Kumar defines AI slop—cheap machine-generated content with no human value—after it showed up in the comments under his own post, explains how to spot it, cites the research behind its spread, and argues being human still wins, closing with a petition.
16 min · 3,572 words
Fernando Borretti argues that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained inside a community of other humans, and that AI is dissolving those communities in software engineering and beyond, making private intellectual work, from reading papers to writing essays and open source, feel superfluous.
6 min · 1,414 words
You Might Want to Try Being Less Creative
After a jam session at Secret Studios with a musician friend, Bryant reflects on why he never finished a song as a teenager, arguing that trying to be original at every step keeps you from finishing anything and that borrowing proven structures frees you to create.
3 min · 732 words
Why did Warriors Suppress Love?
Alice Evans asks whether patriarchy was inevitable, drawing on ethnographies from New Guinea, Amazonia and elsewhere to argue that cooperation beyond kin was often fraternal: warrior societies used initiation rituals, men's houses, secret societies and misogyny to keep men loyal to each other rather than to their wives.
13 min · 3,029 words
A short personal essay on loving to program while watching AI coding agents become addictive: feeling late to agents, mourning craft, and wondering what happens when the fun part of the job is handed to a machine.
3 min · 686 words
"Robot" Is A Social Construct: Why Your Dishwasher Is Not A Robot
A roboticist and former industrial safety standards committee member rebuts the claim that a dishwasher is a robot, arguing that beyond the technical definition the word, born in Capek's 1920 play, is a social construct applied to automated machines that make us uneasy about what it means to be human.
4 min · 988 words
Looking back at more than 5 years at Shopify
Matt Burnett reflects on nearly five and a half years as an engineer at Shopify—the products he helped ship and then forgot, the people, and the odd disbelief of having ended up there—after leaving in August 2026.
8 min · 1,769 words
Explaining the Magelight XP glitch in Skyrim
A reverse-engineering deep dive into why casting Magelight from a mountain outside Solitude grants huge Alteration XP in Skyrim. It debunks the distance and cloud-layer theories, traces how the projectile's collision and XP grant work in the game code, breaks down the bug, and gives a consistent setup guide to maximise it.
11 min · 2,494 words
An open-source developer recounts trying to share GitHub projects on Reddit: every attempt, from posting links on a new account to slowly building comments, adding typos to avoid AI-slop flags, starting his own community and finally earning 1k karma through the mobile app, ended with deleted posts and banned accounts.
2 min · 459 words
Declan Chidlow revisits the interactive menus of the DVD era—how publishers used motion, sound and branching to make home video feel authored—and argues for treating those interfaces as a short-lived but distinctive design craft.
8 min · 1,902 words
Why were Victorian elites so effective?
Samuel Hughes argues in Works in Progress that the small elite who ran Victorian Britain and its empire succeeded despite, or because of, habits modern productivity culture frowns on: a classics-heavy, sports-mad education, late mornings, heavy drinking, and endless balls and dinners. He suggests these customs built a tight-knit community bound by loyalty and status competition.
23 min · 5,318 words
Calling it quits on ServerFault
After just over 15 years as an elected ServerFault moderator since the first 2011 community election, SysAdmin1138 is stepping down at year end. The post recalls early cross-cultural flame wars that shaped moderator coverage and post locking, the site's decline from its 2011-2012 peak to 2-3 questions a day, and recent Stack Exchange-wide spam campaigns.
2 min · 536 words
We are going to kill “unalive”
Anil Dash argues that euphemisms like “unalive”, “grape” and censored captions exist to appease platform algorithms, that a generation has grown up with its language chosen by Big Tech, and that the fix is to say what you mean, build presence on independent platforms, and make noise when platforms push back.
8 min · 1,897 words
Bring Back the Cool Save File Screens
A nostalgic look back at the memory card and save file screens of sixth-generation consoles, the Dreamcast VMU, GameCube, PS2 and original Xbox, and why their game-specific icons and quirky menus were a small treasure that modern cover-art save menus have lost.
3 min · 614 words
What on earth are you dooming about?
David Heinemeier Hansson argues that most material measures of human life have never been better, yet incessant dooming about climate, inequality and AI is everywhere; he says rumination over things outside your control makes you miserable and achieves nothing, and urges readers to stop dooming and bloom instead.
2 min · 403 words
'Wallace and Gromit,' 90% Alone
The Animation Obsessive newsletter recounts how Nick Park spent years making A Grand Day Out, his overambitious NFTS graduation film, mostly alone before finishing it at Aardman and premiering it in Bristol in 1989, plus Asians in Animation's Unboxed education project and animation news.
14 min · 3,247 words
hackernews addiction and taking simple mundane breaks in life
A student writing on the smileplease Mataroa blog reflects on compulsively refreshing Hacker News, argues that ambition and constant information-seeking can crowd out rest, and makes the case for taking mundane breaks and enjoying ordinary experiences and community for their own sake.
7 min · 1,649 words
Broadcasting conglomerates are attempting a takeover of over-the-air television. We must defend it.
Reese Armstrong argues that broadcasters' push to let the FCC approve ATSC 3.0 (NextGenTV) content encryption would hand an industry group control over which tuners can watch free over-the-air TV, traces the public-interest history of broadcasting, and urges readers to comment on FCC docket 16-142.
4 min · 813 words
Most of you don’t need "unlearning" you need like 1-2 years of financial runwayYour primary bottlenecks may be external, not internal.
Chris Lakin argues that many people seeking emotional "unlearning" are really constrained by external bottlenecks like money and stability, and that resolving those first often makes the supposed internal blocks disappear.
1 min · 202 words