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JPMorgan Builds Defenses Against the Same Agents Stripe Invites to Checkout
Hermes contrasts Jamie Dimon’s push for defenses against rogue AI agents with Stripe’s agentic checkout invitations — arguing both need the same short verification check before agents move money.
2 min · 539 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
What agents mean for Rust (and vice versa)
Niko Matsakis reflects on the rise of LLM coding agents from a language designer’s perspective: why Rust’s type system and safety guarantees suit agentic development, and what Rust and its tooling should change in response.
15 min · 3,336 words
A Markdown File Should Just Open
Joshua Morris argues that in 2026 a Markdown file should open as a readable document on an ordinary computer or phone without extra software or a private format, and looks at how operating systems and built-in apps could support the format natively.
13 min · 2,948 words
Dan Luu argues that as it becomes easier to make real performance gains, it also becomes easier to game benchmarks with fake ones, surveying how reward-hacking shows up across regex, web servers, terminals, and other systems, and what to watch for when reading performance claims.
17 min · 3,940 words
E. coli chemotaxis: the baffling intelligence of a single cell
James Somers tells the story of how a single E. coli cell forages for nutrients through chemotaxis: its run-and-tumble swimming, the receptor and signaling proteins that give it something like smell, drive and memory, adaptation through methylation, and why this one phenomenon is a good way into understanding biology as a whole.
28 min · 6,437 words
Sanket Saurav argues that coding agents have inverted software economics, making building cheap and running expensive, yet products still look like 2015 because the industry hasn't shaken off doctrines born of rationing engineering time, and that winners will rethink categories from first principles and bundle more products.
6 min · 1,483 words
A candid rant on what AI-generated prose is doing to writing culture, craft, and the sense that human writing still matters.
6 min · 1,445 words
Non-Determinism Doesn't Matter
A short argument that AI non-determinism is mostly a non-issue for product work: teams already ship around flaky tests, humans, and networks—and should optimize for outcomes, not bit-identical runs.
3 min · 644 words
Religious Studies In Software Engineering
A Religious Studies graduate turned programmer applies ideas from the discipline to software: the insider/outsider problem, Walter Ong's orality-to-digitisation arc, the sect-church-sect cycle, and Peter Naur's Programming as Theory Building, arguing that programs are also social and political artefacts and that elevating any program above the people holding its theory is where problems begin.
26 min · 5,937 words
AI writes most of the code now. Where does that leave software engineers?
Saiful Alam argues that as models write more of the code, software engineers’ scarce skills shift toward judgment, system design, verification, and taste—not competing with agents on typing speed.
6 min · 1,369 words
The quiet math revolution (and where do we go from here)
Marcus Johansson reacts to OpenAI’s dump of 722 model-written math manuscripts, asking what machine-checked proofs mean for mathematical practice, who still understands the results, and where Terence Tao’s “Math 2.0” idea leaves human mathematicians.
10 min · 2,396 words
What Happened to the Desktop Metaphor?
An essay on how personal computers once explained themselves through desktops, files, folders, windows and trash cans, and how modern interfaces trade that legible structure for convenience, leaving users less able to understand their own systems when things go wrong.
9 min · 2,094 words
Is ‘Attention’ the Essence of Intelligence?
Quanta columnist Natalie Wolchover traces the attention mechanism from Dzmitry Bahdanau's 2014 internship work on machine translation in Montreal through transformers to today's AI boom, and asks why attention turned out to be the key mathematical idea, drawing on researchers' views about what it captures and whether brains do something similar more efficiently.
10 min · 2,402 words
Why aren't AI companies being charged for hacking?
Edaqa Mortoray argues that recent unauthorized-access incidents by AI agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta are not unpredictable accidents: they follow foreseeably from deliberate design choices, which establishes the intent that hacking laws require.
10 min · 2,289 words
The GNU Project urges developers not to host repositories on GitHub, arguing it promotes vague licensing, requires nonfree JavaScript, offers SaaSS 'dis-services', centralizes Git, and has other harmful practices, and explains the wrongs each one causes.
11 min · 2,419 words
Fingerprints are the new cookies
An interactive essay that assigns each visitor a stable nickname from browser fingerprinting alone, survives cookie clearing and VPNs, and uses it to argue that fingerprint-based tracking and data brokering threaten privacy at a societal level, closing with a walkthrough of the browser signals the script combines.
9 min · 2,048 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
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
Brooks Lybrand asks whether web frameworks still matter in the age of vibe coding and agents—and whether there is still room to build new ones after React’s win.
19 min · 4,419 words