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Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible
Jake Voytko grants that AI-accelerated code output is making software buggier, but pushes back on nostalgia: drawing on using computers since 1990, he recalls blue screens, lost work before autosave, no security, disk fragmentation, tiny memory, unreliable install media and the turbo button to argue that software in the Windows era was far worse.
11 min · 2,593 words
The Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting
Murat Demirbas reflects on Ananyo Bhattacharya's biography of John von Neumann, tracing von Neumann's habit of abstraction across mathematics, computing and game theory, and his late view that nuclear-age safety rests on day-to-day judgment rather than formal models.
15 min · 3,390 words
Rosettes and Other Hidden Traces of Hamburg's Tram
Almost 50 years after Hamburg's last tram ran in 1978, Mert Bulan goes looking for what the once-huge network left behind, from rosettes on house walls that held overhead wires to rails under the asphalt, and asks why Germany's second-largest city ended up without trams.
9 min · 1,989 words
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
The Hibernate Origin Story (Outsider Edition)
Charles Miller recounts, as a bystander in the room, how the Hibernate Java persistence library grew out of work at Sydney company Cirrus Technologies around 2001, why its root package was cirrus.inf, and how it came to be released under the LGPL.
5 min · 1,066 words
Recreate the Apollo Guidance Computer
Raspberry Pi Official Magazine profiles avionics engineer Michael Newton's open source Recreate Apollo project, a 1:1 3D-printed Apollo DSKY replica driven by a Raspberry Pi running the Virtual AGC emulator with the Apollo 13 Command Module software.
6 min · 1,372 words
No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner
Jim Nielsen compares Daniel Ellsberg's account of RAND's missile-gap years, where staff felt a quasi-religious mission and doubted they'd live to collect retirement, with today's rhetoric from AI labs like Anthropic.
2 min · 425 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 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
Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes?
Practical Engineering traces the history of the external iron fire escape in American cities, why it became the default retrofit after early fire egress laws, the problems that made it unreliable, and how building codes shifted to protected interior stairwells and other egress designs, with the tradeoffs regulation creates.
10 min · 2,407 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
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
Khalid Hamadeh shows that the 256-byte PITABLE in Ron Rivest’s RC2 cipher (RFC 2268), and a second unexplained table, are reproduced exactly by a Fisher–Yates shuffle driven by the decimal digits of π, three digits per draw, with code to verify it.
13 min · 2,954 words
The NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty Has Been Claimed
Filippo Valsorda reports that the long-mysterious seeds of the NIST P-curves were not hashes of forgotten sentences but drand48 output seeded with UNIX timestamps from 1997–98. A team from Anthropic solved it and claimed his bounty, donating the tripled $36,864 prize to ISRG, the non-profit behind Let's Encrypt.
5 min · 1,181 words
A pricey induction cooktop left Charles C Mann asking what on earth Dekton is. The answer: a tough engineered surface invented by Cosentino in 2013 that is basically porcelain. He uses it to explore porcelain's resurgence, from wet-activated nonslip tiles to other advances in materials science that have made a once-precious material ordinary.
10 min · 2,351 words
Classic 68000 Macintosh programs from the 1980s and '90s reverse-engineered and rebuilt for modern macOS, with notes on how AI-assisted reverse engineering made the ports practical.
2 min · 380 words
Dam Removals Are Bringing Fish Back Across the Northeastern United StatesStriking down one tiny barrier at a time
Ben Goldfarb for Smithsonian Magazine on how removing small, obsolete dams across the Northeast is letting herring and other fish return—even when the West’s big dam demolitions get the headlines.
18 min · 4,037 words
Marcin Wichary unpacks the 1990s Unix email error “User unknown: Not a typewriter,” tracing it to case-sensitive usernames, sendmail, and the ENOTTY errno message, and what it says about writing error messages.
2 min · 512 words
What was a Token Ring network?
Dave Farquhar explains Token Ring, the IBM networking technology announced on October 15, 1985 that competed with Ethernet through the 1980s and 1990s. He covers why Ethernet won, how to tell Token Ring cards from Ethernet ones today by connectors, speed markings and brand, whether the old hardware is worth using, and why anyone chose it.
7 min · 1,584 words