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
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
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
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 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
How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet
Amanda Shendruk investigates how Amazon’s marketplace and advertising tools push prices up across the web — not just on Amazon — via seller fees, Buy Box dynamics, and price-matching ripples.
5 min · 1,065 words
Bark: The Toll-Free BBS for 90s Teens
Topics: Retrocomputing The other day I was thinking about the first communities I found online and, perhaps tangentially, to what degree they influenced the amount of therapy I now require to function normally as an adult. Our family's second computer came from Sam's Club. It was a 386DX with Windows 3.0 but my inner nerd would have nothing to do with cheerful bit-mapped color schemes, preferring instead to exit to MS-DOS and do all necessary computing and gaming from a command prompt and text-based GUIs. Hardware-wise, it looked and felt cheap. The machine was less reliable than the…
19 min · 4,358 words
Ryan Bigg reflects on applying to hundreds of tech roles after years in the industry, the mismatch between experience and current hiring, and deciding to look beyond tech for what’s next.
1 min · 270 words
The 1st Time Machines Mogged Mathematicians
Pessimists Archive's Louis Anslow revisits the 1976 computer-assisted proof of the Four Color Theorem by Appel and Haken, the skepticism and outright rejection it drew from mathematicians, how acceptance slowly came, and the parallels with today's debate over AI-generated mathematics.
4 min · 979 words
The Toftwood Male Voice Choir: A Mystery Pressed in Vinyl
Amateur radio operator EI3LH turns an impulse-buy vinyl LP by the Toftwood Male Voice Choir into a detective story: tracing the obscure Christian choral record, its pressing, and the people behind a mystery crate-dig find.
9 min · 2,136 words
I admire John Gruber. I think he’s a great writer. I think he’s smart as hell. He’s annoyingly funny, too. I am impressed and inspired by his success with both Daring Fireball and The Talk Show. I get excited when John links to one of my apps or articles. When he linked to my story about relaunch...
4 min · 1,005 words
Do dentists actually know what they’re doing?
In vignettes from age 17 to 33, Parker Tatum recounts jaw pain, night guards, cavities and gum recession, and the conflicting diagnoses of a succession of dentists, orthodontists, periodontists and surgeons who each dismiss the previous one's work, raising the question of whether any of them know what they're doing.
16 min · 3,778 words