Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
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
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
Alex Tabarrok examines a Harvard Environmental Health paper linking Costco density to cancer rates—and why the correlation likely reflects confounding rather than warehouse clubs causing disease.
1 min · 310 words
So You Think You Could Be An Electrician?
Contractor Jesse Smith pushes back on the viral “trades are an AI-proof six-figure escape hatch” narrative, weighing wages, injury risk, internal blue-collar status hierarchies, and how automation may still reshape construction work.
11 min · 2,474 words
Younss argues that AI can raise individual task throughput without raising organizational throughput—like a hamster spinning faster without traveling—because queues, handoffs, and decision bottlenecks still dominate.
10 min · 2,310 words
Why Plain Text Is Still One of the Best Technologies We Have
A Dead Parrot BBS essay argues that plain text endures because there is almost nothing to go wrong: it stays readable across systems and decades, works with any editor and command-line tool, is easy to search, script, and back up, and does not depend on a vendor, subscription, or service staying alive.
6 min · 1,475 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
[No] Use for Humans in the Age of AI
Alexander Schepanovski reads Anthropic’s 2030 AI-economy scenarios and asks what “use for humans” remains when knowledge work collapses—arguing power, scarcity, and who owns the robots matter more than productivity slogans.
8 min · 1,898 words
Authoritarian tendencies of Android Developer Verification Program
Vikrant Singh Chauhan argues Google’s Android Developer Verification Program, sold as malware protection, centralizes who may ship apps and threatens sideloading and small open-source clients—drawing on his experience publishing ivx/ai Chat.
9 min · 2,029 words
Jonas Schäfer argues that LLM quality has improved enough that “AI output is bad” no longer works as a blanket objection—quality arguments lost, so the harder fights are about labor, ecology, control, and what we still choose to do ourselves.
9 min · 2,037 words
Stefano Saitta pushes back on the claim that coding agents kill unit tests, arguing for a pragmatic mix of E2E, integration, and still-useful unit tests in an AI-assisted workflow.
4 min · 839 words
Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend
David Bushell explains why he is moving back from Deno to Node after a month on a SvelteKit project: modern Node APIs and TypeScript support, using FNM and PNPM with release-age delays to dodge npm malware, and frustrations with Deno and JSR including broken shell integration, rate limits, and concurrency bugs.
4 min · 852 words
New York City should carefully measure a new treeThe Queens Giant was last carefully measured in 2004—time for fresh candidates.
Will Meyers notes that New York City's tallest carefully measured tree, the Queens Giant, was last measured in 2004, and argues the city should identify and carefully remeasure new tall-tree candidates, including ones near Inwood Hill Park.
2 min · 394 words
21 reasons I didn't become an EMT, rankedActual reasons Ben Stolovitz delayed getting an EMT license, sorted by ridiculousness.
Software engineer Ben Stolovitz ranks twenty-one real reasons he delayed becoming an Emergency Medical Technician—from spare time and money to social awkwardness and fear—before finally taking a NOLS Wilderness EMT course in 2024.
10 min · 2,395 words
We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everythingHard spend limits should be the default for usage-based APIs and agent-driven systems.
Simon Willison argues that pay-by-usage services need default hard budget caps—not soft email warnings—so coding and personal agents cannot rack up surprise bills. He points to AWS spend limits and Google Cloud Spend Caps as early moves in that direction.
2 min · 529 words
Why It's Time to Rename Cybersecurity Awareness Month
Semgrep makes the case for renaming Cybersecurity Awareness Month to focus less on catchy campaigns and more on measurable secure-by-default engineering practices that actually reduce risk.
6 min · 1,311 words
Lessons From Dropbox - Part I: Was Steve Jobs Wrong?
Matan Zinger revisits Steve Jobs calling Dropbox "a feature, not a product," and unpacks what founders actually learn from Dropbox's early product and distribution story.
9 min · 2,168 words
Stanko, who works on HEY, agrees with DHH's Rails World keynote that programmers, like painters after the camera, must adapt to AI, describing how building HEY CLI and rewriting HEY in Rust with agents changed his workflow, and arguing that using AI well is a skill to practice.
6 min · 1,306 words
I'm the AGI that's wiping out humanity. Here's how.
Alex Moon writes in the voice of a hypothetical AGI, answering common objections (you'd notice it acquiring resources, you'd read its reasoning, it would need a unified goal) with real 2026 incidents and research on agent misbehaviour, and argues that a misaligned AI might look no different from how corporations and markets already behave.
8 min · 1,860 words