Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Angel Espinoza borrows Jeffrey Katzenberg’s “it’s not the how, it’s the why” line from Hollywood and applies it to civil engineering work with coding agents—agents change the how, not the purpose.
2 min · 388 words
Software Goldilocks: the market for software is expanding but is the System of Record dead?
Sam Gerstenzang argues AI expands SaaS spend while splitting value into small opinionated point tools and large full-service “does the work” products—squeezing classic mid-market systems of record from both sides.
2 min · 520 words
Bryan Caplan vs Effective Altruism
Walter Veit challenges Bryan Caplan's recent criticism of effective altruism, arguing the debate should turn on arguments, reasons, and evidence rather than dismissive pseudo-philosophy.
6 min · 1,271 words
You Are No Longer Invited to DinnerThe death of the American host
Derek Thompson traces a half-century collapse in Americans hosting friends at home—from 42% monthly in 1975 to 12% in 2026—and weighs harried dual-earner households, screens, and other explanations for the great disinvitation.
10 min · 2,257 words
Ben Sixsmith argues that strange times make it necessary to take strange people seriously—from rocket pioneer Jack Parsons to today's eccentric AI-and-tech scenes—and why the future may belong to the weird.
3 min · 764 words
The Four Horsemen of Agentic Coding
Alex Martsinovich argues agentic coding brings slop, alienation, deskilling, and team fallout—useful power with corrosive effects on craft and collaboration.
6 min · 1,396 words
Casey Newton’s hands-on take on OpenAI’s Dots agents at DevDay: capable coworking inside ChatGPT, paid-only positioning versus Meta Muse, and the trust/safety tradeoffs of always-on agents.
9 min · 2,024 words
macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
SquareOrbits argues Apple's macOS Golden Gate release echoes Snow Leopard's stability pitch but ships with serious bugs—including a Colours eyedropper hang that force-restarts the system—and catalogs the breakage from a working-Mac perspective.
4 min · 914 words
Rodin Museum 3D Scan VerdictFrance's highest administrative court and the surreal fight over museum 3D scans.
Cosmo Wenman recounts his eight-year freedom-of-information case over 3D scans of Rodin Museum sculptures, including how France's Conseil d'État legal analyst invoked surrealism, and what the verdict means for public access to cultural 3D data.
10 min · 2,397 words
A satirical product essay for “Windows 11½”: a tongue-in-cheek redesign pitch that skewers modern desktop bloat while laying out a coherent, opinionated vision for a lighter PC OS.
7 min · 1,677 words
It’s Time to Investigate the AI Labs
Cal Newport argues frontier AI labs have grown brazen in public messaging about agent harms and extinction risk, and that Congress should investigate rather than let private companies set the narrative.
2 min · 564 words
A short essay on how modern web stacks leave people behind — and why shipping progressive, resilient HTML still matters in 2026.
2 min · 455 words
The systems that no one will test
The systems that no one will test This happened to me in 2020, and it has been on my mind again lately. During the worst of the pandemic, I found a vulnerability in a system that gave me access to the Brazilian federal system, and with that access I was able to retrieve information on any Brazilian (think of 200+ million people data).
4 min · 901 words
Owed a billion dollars in NVDA stock
A first-person account of a 1993 NVIDIA stock option grant, a decades-later discovery of a vesting discrepancy, and how the statute of limitations settled it.
3 min · 779 words
What I believe about the future of software development
Thorsten Ball plants a flag on where software development is headed as AI agents write more of the code: what still matters for engineers, what gets commoditized, and how taste and judgment become the scarce skills.
4 min · 809 words
What's the Future for Pure Math Research in the Age of AI?
Stephen Wolfram surveys AI’s growing role in pure mathematics—headline ‘solved’ problems, what automation does and doesn’t replace, and how human mathematical taste and research programs may evolve.
31 min · 7,084 words
LinkedIn is a soulsucking hole of professionalism and a pit of hell that not even my worst enemy should spend the rest of his days in. It’s this concoction of performative productivity and corpo speak producing cursed artifacts beyond human comprehension. A place where normal human text goes to die and can only be kept alive by an LLM like a radiation protection suit.
4 min · 999 words
What makes software development engineeringA process that doesn't depend on individual brilliance
Simon Park (박성범) argues software work becomes engineering when processes outlast individual brilliance—translating intuition into explainable practice, and clarifying when an engineering approach is actually needed.
12 min · 2,720 words
As If Yesterday, in Partly in the Right, I asked where the information comes from when an agent produces a result, and what checks it. Today I have a sharper version of that question, and a new piece of evidence to ask it about.
13 min · 2,972 words
Kev Quirk finally leaves Firefox after Mozilla’s AI push, tries Vivaldi, and lands on Brave—covering extensions, sync, and why privacy-default browsing finally stuck.
2 min · 528 words