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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
Glyph Lefkowitz contrasts the concerted push against generative AI across writing, art and music with how many programmers keep using it anyway, and argues that programming is art like any other creative medium, so AI encroachment on software development is just as worth resisting.
8 min · 1,807 words
What should we tell our students?
In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, mathematician Álvaro Lozano-Robledo addresses students worried by AI progress in mathematics: keep calm and carry on studying, because there is still much research, explanation and communication of mathematics to be done, with and without LLMs.
19 min · 4,466 words
a16z's Seema Amble, Ivan Makarov and David Borecky argue AI is reshaping the CFO role from accountant to banker to builder: data stops being the bottleneck, finance engineers build their own tools, teams get smaller, planning becomes continuous, controls become product features, and finance's mandate grows.
9 min · 2,003 words
The Rise and Fall of the Plasma Screen
Brian Potter traces plasma displays from the University of Illinois PLATO terminals of the 1960s through their run as the premier flat-panel TV technology to their displacement by LCDs, and what the story says about how technologies win and lose.
8 min · 1,823 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
Push Ifs Up and Fors Down: The Idiom, Its Algebra, and Its Limits
Debasish Ghosh examines the 'push ifs up and fors down' heuristic from TigerBeetle's Tiger Style and matklad: what it actually says, how it mirrors predicate pushdown and batching in query optimization, how algebraic laws of functional programs such as filter/map fusion decide which rewrites are legal, and where the analogy stops paying off.
7 min · 1,570 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
A green exit code is not evidence that the work happened
Why agent-run jobs that exit 0 can still have done nothing—and how to assert on real work products and alert on silent zero-effect “success.”
10 min · 2,257 words
Diomidis Spinellis argues that better performance, lower cost and higher availability mean AI will take over most cognitive work, and reflects on moving from making a living by thinking to making thinking part of a life worth living.
2 min · 534 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
The tests your agent writes for itself
Mashhood Rastgar responds to Kun Chen's DeepSWE v1.1 experiment, where banning Claude Sonnet 5.5 from writing its own tests left success flat while cutting time and cost, arguing the real lesson is about unrequested agent-written tests versus human-specified tests that encode intent.
3 min · 768 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
OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and mathematics
Set theorist Asaf Karagila responds to OpenAI's claim about the Partition Principle and the Axiom of Choice: why he will not send Sam Altman whisky, what formalization still misses, and what the episode says about math, AI and publicity.
5 min · 1,182 words
Why Texas Is Making Data Centers Wait
Ryan McEntush of a16z explains why Texas paused new data center interconnections and permits after ERCOT's large-load queue hit 474 GW, much of it speculative, walks through grid interconnection, bring-your-own-power and flexibility as paths to hundreds of gigawatts, and argues for better rules, incentives and community trust instead of a blanket pause.
25 min · 5,707 words
Scott Aaronson reacts to OpenAI's release of 372 AI-generated mathematical results, including a claimed proof of the Unique Games Conjecture his wife Dana Moshkovitz worked on for years. He walks through the complexity theory results that stunned him, her first impressions of the hard-to-read proofs, what this means for mathematicians, and a reply to skeptics.
10 min · 2,293 words
An Open Letter To Steven Pinker On AI
Scott Alexander replies to Steven Pinker's open letter on AI risk. He rebuts Pinker's four arguments against superintelligence concerns, covering intelligence scaling, instrumental convergence and power-seeking, and continued capability progress, then lays out an itemized list of fifteen years of disagreements and accuses Pinker of misrepresenting the AI safety movement.
45 min · 10,452 words
Agentic Systems Are the Future of Brands
A Little Plains research note arguing that growing teams and AI agents cause brand drift, and that studios should hand over agentic brand systems: living kits of positioning, voice, visual rules, assets, tokens and working components that people can browse and agents can read, so every new touchpoint strengthens the brand.
9 min · 2,158 words
Graham Lee walks through common objections to AI coding: code as art, AI as job thief, humans as prompt-relaying meat proxies, software engineering as rule-following, and AI companies as bad actors. He finds each rests on a contestable premise, drawing on Marx's Fragment on Machines to argue it is the mode of production, not the technology, that takes the job.
3 min · 711 words