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AI was great until it was not.A cautionary tale.
Nia Robles, a theoretical physics PhD student at Harvard, describes how ChatGPT first helped her learn during a master's at Oxford by turning dense notes into concrete examples, and how its spread through academia has since left her more isolated, with mentors and peers answering questions with 'just ask ChatGPT' instead of debate, collaboration and teaching.
15 min · 3,471 words
Consistency is not a localized property
A short N The Loop essay using Kafka's years-long exactly-once effort, which still needed redesign eight years later, to argue that consistency is an end-to-end property no single component can guarantee, so someone must understand and own the whole system rather than trusting machines to hold it.
1 min · 305 words
The Alchemical Transformations of the Mutus Liber (1677)
Mathilde Montpetit on the Mutus Liber, a nearly wordless 1677 alchemical book whose fifteen plates illustrate the humid way to the Philosopher's Stone, tracing how readers from Eugène Canseliet onward have interpreted its imagery and how its reissues transformed the work.
4 min · 967 words
The Slow Formation of Durable SoftwareHow a group of historians took years to imagine Zotero, the research application that would eventually be used by millions
Today, software can be created more or less instantly with AI, for a large user base or for yourself, for any purpose or for no serious purpose at all. As Robin Sloan enticingly puts it, just “ask for what you want.” The genesis of Zotero, the “free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research,” used by over 20 million people in dozens of languages and countless disciplines, is the opposite of this instant gratification. It took five…
15 min · 3,481 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
Software developers are not okay
Baldur Bjarnason looks at the wave of software developers posting about burnout, layoffs, the 2026 job market and AI taking the fun out of programming, and argues the comment sections reveal an industry in real distress. His essay explains why so many are not doing well and suggests people in software consider a possible future outside the tech industry proper.
10 min · 2,208 words
Do you actually like hard problems?
Sunil Pai argues that engineers who say they love hard problems mostly love puzzle solving and pattern matching, which AI now does with near-infinite breadth. The genuinely hard problems left mix engineering with product, society, culture and politics, and he reflects on missing being the go-to engineer for the grind even as people still seek his higher-level judgment.
1 min · 312 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
Open Source as We Know It Is Dead
James Ross looks back on 15 years in open source and argues that AI is killing it as he has known it: AI-generated pull requests made contributing cheap but maintaining far more expensive, so the projects he loves are closing their doors to outside contributors, and he admits he has no neat fix.
9 min · 1,974 words
OpenSSH Ships on Every Mac, Linux Server and Windows PC. Its Creator Trusts No One.
A long-form profile of Theo de Raadt, from his exit from NetBSD and lost DARPA grant to founding OpenBSD and OpenSSH, framed by the 2024 xz backdoor, and how his famously paranoid, combative approach to security came to protect remote access on most of the world's servers.
29 min · 6,772 words
6 questions for believers in AI consciousness!
Philosopher Rebecca Lowe offers a choose-your-own-adventure set of six questions for people who believe AI is conscious, arguing that basic philosophical distinctions about what consciousness means and what kind of thing could have an internal world would clear up much of the current confusion and anger in the debate.
16 min · 3,755 words
Colin Armstrong explains how building heade.rs, a domain lookup tool, with Claude Code in about an hour changed his sense of what is worth building: when a tool no longer has to pay for itself, small personal software that fixes an everyday annoyance becomes worthwhile even if it never grows into a product.
3 min · 580 words
In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, Jeremy Avigad argues that AI is changing what it means to do mathematics, a shift with historical precedent, and reflects on what it means for how mathematicians work, what the community should value, and the norms it now needs to rebuild.
9 min · 2,068 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
Against the Personal Agents Theory of Everything
In a guest essay for The Leverage, Nathan Baschez argues that personal agents are not the end game: the next paradigm is AI factories, shared, specific, and scrutinized systems that teams build together, which he says are economically inevitable because they enable specialization and gains from trade. He also offers a pattern language for building one.
10 min · 2,223 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
An essay comparing commodity and engineering plastics to literary character types—why “polymer” is often marketing spin, and how chemistry shapes toughness, clarity, heat tolerance, and reputation.
7 min · 1,565 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