Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
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
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
Rejection Sensitivity in Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Children
Maya Sissoko explains rejection sensitivity in gifted and 2e kids—what it is and isn’t, how it shows up at home and school, and practical ways caregivers can respond without pathologizing intensity.
11 min · 2,436 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
The Missing Model: How AI Agents Behave Over Months
Muhammad Hanzla argues labs lack a study design for how AI agents behave across months of real work, and outlines why that longitudinal model should be built before longer autonomy.
15 min · 3,495 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
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
Docker has always used microVMs
Dave Scott revisits Docker’s history and argues containers on Linux have long leaned on microVM-style isolation ideas—context for today’s secure sandbox and unikernel discussions.
2 min · 373 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
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
Async Rust: Where does the scheduler live?
Mond opens with an async Rust complaints bingo card and reading list, then argues that the real discomfort is that async Rust needs a runtime, while concurrency always requires a scheduler somewhere, and weighs Zig's approach of passing the I/O implementation as a parameter as a direction worth trying.
17 min · 3,872 words
Aleph Alpha Kolibri: How the Sovereign German LLM Works
Tejas Kumar explains Aleph Alpha's Kolibri, an open-weight German and English mixture-of-experts LLM with 78B parameters and about 3.5B active per token: how it works, how it was trained in Germany and Finland, where it is strong or weak, and when to use it.
13 min · 3,074 words
Quo Vadis, Mathematics?Is Mathematics Over, or Just Graduating?
xAI co-founder Christian Szegedy asks whether mathematics is ending or graduating as AI automates theorem proving—drawing on Hungarian competition culture to argue AI will scale applied math as infrastructure while “high math” concentrates on deepest questions.
8 min · 1,877 words
Haunted by the ghosts of materialism
lcamtuf explores free will vs scientific materialism, brains-in-vats, Boltzmann brains, and the simulation hypothesis — arguing techie utilitarianism misses what philosophy is good for.
2 min · 498 words
Why don't more developers "use the platform"?
Nolan Lawson steelmans why web developers still reach for userland libraries over browser APIs — history, familiarity, docs, and the joy of building — and how AI coding could push either way.
3 min · 790 words
City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2
A follow-up essay on why many city-building games feel hollow: missing social texture, opaque systems, and design choices that strip “soul” from simulated places—and what deeper urban sims might still chase.
3 min · 682 words
Agents Don't Need Memory. They Need Documentation.
Kevin Liao argues agent systems fail less from missing long-term memory than from missing written project docs—README, architecture, and runbooks that agents can read and update like humans.
4 min · 1,011 words
“Just Ask Claude” Is A Rare And Valuable Skill
Justis Mills on why, when someone asks you for help and you simply ask an AI, they usually couldn't have done it themselves: they avoid AI, don't pay for premium models, are behind the times, lack the latent knowledge you bring to the prompt, or simply want to connect with you.
2 min · 563 words
Of Mottes, Baileys, and Stochastic Parrots
Manoel Ribeiro argues the "stochastic parrots" metaphor often motte-and-baileys: it dismisses LLM capabilities, then retreats to the trivial claim that models predict the next token.
6 min · 1,470 words