Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Alfie John recalls growing up before the mainstream internet, trading pirated games on floppies, discovering BBSes and the demoscene's cracktros, and finding Denthor of ASPHYXIA's VGA demo trainer tutorials in Turbo Pascal, which made him decide he wanted to make demos and become a programmer.
4 min · 1,017 words
We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970
Thanks for that, Jim compares today's rush to hand military and political decisions to error-prone AI models with the plot of the 1970 film Colossus: The Forbin Project, in which a US president cedes national defence to an AI that seizes control.
3 min · 577 words
James Yu catalogs literary awards granted to works where AI was used or suspected in the writing process, from Japan's Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi prizes that allowed AI from the start to contests where AI use surfaced later.
8 min · 1,782 words
An essay on mathematicians' emotional reactions to AI-generated proofs, from Terence Tao's call for etiquette and Hugo Duminil-Copin's account of panic to spiritual angst and humility, set against the 1976 four color theorem and other industrializing disciplines, arguing the romantic era of mathematics is ending.
8 min · 1,738 words
The Land Within Us: How People Shape the Earth—and Are Shaped in Return
Gayil Nalls, founder of the World Sensorium / Conservancy, draws on the Amazon documentary Yanuni and new Nature research on the forest of knowledge to argue that biological and cultural diversity sustain each other, and that regenerating land also means regenerating Indigenous knowledge, attention and responsibility.
10 min · 2,196 words
The unknown painter behind Manhattan’s Gilded Age interiors
Jane Coombs profiles James Wall Finn, the largely forgotten muralist whose ceilings adorn the New York Public Library's Rose Main Reading Room and other Gilded Age Manhattan rooms, and pieces together how he won elite commissions.
6 min · 1,287 words
Clockwork Mechanics, Maintenance, and Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages
Karl Peeter Valk argues on the JHI Blog that the mechanical clock became a potent metaphor in the late Middle Ages not because of its perfection but because of its imperfections, tracing the image through Nicole Oresme, courtly culture, and Henry Suso's Horologium Sapientiae.
11 min · 2,527 words
cakehonolulu digs into why older Samsung TVs can't mute their built-in speakers while using Q-Symphony with a Q990D soundbar, walks through the configuration issues and the TV's service menu, and finds a workaround by setting the service menu's Max Volume to 0, which mutes the TV speakers while Q-Symphony keeps working.
9 min · 2,037 words
William Gibson and the trademarking of Cyberspace™
A short essay on William Gibson’s coining of “cyberspace,” how the word entered culture, and the odd history of attempts to trademark it.
2 min · 526 words
Writing is no longer proof of work
Sean Goedecke argues tech companies rely on writing as evidence of compliance, effort, and expertise, much like Bitcoin relies on proof-of-work, and that LLMs are eroding that signal, leaving engineers to save real effort for writing meant as communication.
6 min · 1,283 words
The History of Development of Norton Commander
Dr Nikolai Bezroukov's Softpanorama chapter recounts how John Socha's Norton Commander defined the Orthodox File Manager paradigm—from VDOS and NC 1.0 in 1986 through the cult of NC 3.0 to NC 5.5—and why the dual-pane OFM design still shapes file managers decades later.
81 min · 18,563 words
Dark Enlightenment: The Authoritarian Trajectory Being Taken by Tech Giants
Sydney Criminal Lawyers argues that Silicon Valley elites are normalizing Dark Enlightenment ideas—technocratic rule, privately run city-states, and hostility to democracy—with little pushback from authorities.
5 min · 1,160 words
Making an 88x31 book-button using ImageMagick
Konstanty Sośnierz shows how to turn an entire book, Moby Dick, into an animated 88x31 web button with ImageMagick on a POSIX system: working within the tiny size, picking fonts, fetching and formatting the text, generating the GIF frames, and a Python helper for centred lines. The full result is a 4.2 MB GIF over 19 hours long.
4 min · 919 words
Daniel Temkin's Folders is an esolang where programs are encoded purely as nested directory structures—no file contents required—updated for 2026 among his Forty-Four Esolangs.
4 min · 820 words
I'm Not Going to Have Blood on My HandsWhy Nicole Noren, a decorated ESPN producer, quit in protest
Columbia Journalism Review interviews former ESPN producer Nicole Noren on quitting over sports-betting partnerships, and what it means when newsrooms normalize gambling promotion.
6 min · 1,441 words
I designed a nose guard for my dog and gave it away. Now 500 dogs wear one
Omri Hillel recounts designing a nose guard for his pitbull Billie after a sunburn scare, open-sourcing the pattern, and watching SnoutCover grow to about 500 dogs in a year—with lessons on giving product away and iterating with owners.
11 min · 2,493 words
Go Piss, Girl: The plight of the public potty
Kate Wagner reviews Bryant Simon's For Customers Only, a history of American public bathrooms, arguing that the scarcity of public toilets is a long-running policy failure tied to inequality, privacy, race, gender and the limits of architecture.
13 min · 2,995 words
Henrik Karlsson reflects on why music moves us so deeply, from a Sámi joik heard on the car radio to how a soundtrack can turn a horror scene funny, and what that says about meaning, emotion and the narrow range of commercial music.
14 min · 3,117 words
Apocalypse Now and ThenArtificial intelligence is capitalism’s final destination
Arundhati Roy’s Equator essay argues that AI is not a neutral tool but capitalism’s accelerating endgame—and calls for political resistance rather than resigned inevitability.
22 min · 4,980 words
Phil Eaton explains why The Consensus added an 'AI tells' detector to its curated technical-writing feed, so it can keep freely promoting thoughtfully human-written articles while letting readers filter likely AI-written ones.
2 min · 526 words