Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Craig Hickman tells how a frustrated preschooler using MacPaint led him to write Kid Pix: design principles, wacky brushes, the Undo Guy, freeware then Broderbund, and how the program became a worldwide hit after John Sculley demoed it at MacWorld.
16 min · 3,696 words
Guan, the solopreneur behind WriteMapper, argues that AI will transform how we work without replacing every tool: each technology shapes what we create, chat is not the best interface for most tasks, and choosing the right tool remains up to us.
2 min · 383 words
Henrik Karlsson reflects on why music moves us so deeply, from a Sámi joik heard on the car radio to how a soundtrack can turn a horror scene funny, and what that says about meaning, emotion and the narrow range of commercial music.
14 min · 3,117 words
AI Safety Is Not A Corporate Plot
Scott Alexander rebuts the claim that AI companies' existential-risk warnings are a ploy for hype, distraction or regulatory capture, arguing that unaffiliated AI researchers are just as worried, that leaders like those at Anthropic and OpenAI voiced the same warnings long before they ran AI companies, and that such a plot would be self-defeating.
14 min · 3,142 words
Karri Saarinen argues that good products carry the perspective of the people who make them, and worries that agent-driven 'software factories', where individuals ship independent changes, dilute that shared point of view into an average of outputs. He hopes easier software-making leaves more room for people to develop and follow a perspective.
3 min · 587 words
Apocalypse Now and ThenArtificial intelligence is capitalism’s final destination
Arundhati Roy’s Equator essay argues that AI is not a neutral tool but capitalism’s accelerating endgame—and calls for political resistance rather than resigned inevitability.
22 min · 4,980 words
AI Can Write the Code. Who Verifies It?
Mihai Avram argues that AI coding agents have outpaced human code review, citing Faros data on rising bugs, review time and incidents, and lays out layered automated verification: AI code reviewers (Claude, Codex, Copilot, Bugbot), CI/CD checks from lint, tests and SAST to architecture review, and when to run them from pre-commit to production.
16 min · 3,785 words
Cory Doctorow explains how Amazon's junk fees and most-favored-nation pricing rules raise prices for shoppers everywhere, not just on Amazon, and argues Expedia has done the same thing to hotel rooms, making travel more expensive for everyone through monopoly intermediaries.
6 min · 1,478 words
My old job feels very distant now
A software developer reflects on how ChatGPT and coding models went from a better Google, to generating copy-pasted specs, to the default way of working, what the author misses and does not miss about the old way of programming, and how quickly both the models and developers have adapted.
9 min · 2,014 words
How Codex HappenedInside OpenAI's comeback in coding, from a failed launch to the app that took over ChatGPT
Dan Shipper's longform traces how OpenAI's Codex went from a rocky coding-agent launch to a dedicated model line and desktop app, growing past 5 million weekly users by June 2026 before merging into ChatGPT—and how Codex and ChatGPT for Work together reached about 40 million weekly active users.
39 min · 8,864 words
Steering AI Beyond AutomationA Research Agenda and Plan for Action
Stanford economist Gabriel Unger and Princeton's Arvind Narayanan argue AI need not be mainly about automating human labor. They set out four research problems for collaborative agents, explain why the automation agenda dominates computer science culture, survey the economics and policy debate, and propose a bottom-up, market-driven path plus targeted policies to steer AI toward augmenting workers.
25 min · 5,650 words
Zach Landes puts TypeSafe's Jev and 13 other decision models through the classic Trolley Problem, comparing how system-one style decision models reason about harm, uncertainty and moral tradeoffs versus conventional chat LLMs.
21 min · 4,916 words
Alex Petros uses the case of a Dartmouth provost whose Washington Post op-ed appeared to be LLM-written to argue that universities should require clear disclosure of how much LLMs contributed to academic work, proposing transparency principles that illuminate AI use rather than ban it.
17 min · 3,922 words
“Men with Queer Nerves”: The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine
Ross Bullen writes for The Public Domain Review about the French-Canadian lumberjacks around Maine's Moosehead Lake who, at the slightest stimulus, would jump, strike out or mimic languages they could not speak, and about neurologist George M. Beard, who first wrote about them in an 1878 essay and linked their behavior to religious frenzy and neurasthenia.
16 min · 3,760 words
The Decoherence Trap: When AI slop drowns out the signal in an endless sea of noise
Maevyn introduces decoherence: the build-up of locally valid but mutually incompatible or redundant models inside a system, so that the cost of change is dominated by translating between them. The essay argues it compounds with a system's rate of change, that AI is producing it faster than ever, and that this rules out a runaway intelligence explosion.
39 min · 8,856 words
Becoming a stranger in my own field
An industry AI researcher reflects on how the social contract of scientific work is changing and what it means to feel like a stranger in your own field.
8 min · 1,873 words
The Emperor Pelican Has No Clothes
Aman Rusia shows that frontier LLMs keep drawing nearly identical SVG pelicans on a bicycle—and contrasts that collapse with diverse human-drawn alternatives, calling it an LLM diversity collapse problem.
1 min · 87 words
A new model for open source: closed to pull requests, open to remix
Geoffrey Huntley revisits The Cathedral and the Bazaar and argues that in the AI era open source needs a new model: keep code open but close it to pull requests, and instead publish guidance so people remix and patch software for their own needs, as he now plans to do with his own GitHub projects.
3 min · 680 words
America Didn’t Lose Its Rare Earth Industry. It Sold It.
Kirsten Asdal, Tom Koch and Tao Tan argue in Lawfare that the U.S. rare earth chokepoint was created by market logic, since China prices for control rather than profit, and that rebuilding American supply needs asymmetric financing where government absorbs downside risk and shares in the upside.
11 min · 2,592 words
Geoff Huston examines the fragility of the ~1.5M km of subsea communications cables underpinning global telecoms — from Taiwan's Matsu Islands outages to repair capacity, sabotage risks and what resilience really requires.
16 min · 3,769 words