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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
Here Be Monsters: What Do You Still Need to Know When Agents Do the Work?
Starting from a CI failure caused by Codex cramming whole React components onto single lines, Adrian Quiroga argues that as AI agents write code faster than anyone can read it, engineers still need three things: solid fundamentals, breadth across the stack, and the willingness to dive in for just-in-time depth when something breaks.
13 min · 2,875 words
The real AGI-pill is specialized robots
Giacomo Randazzo argues that the excitement over general-purpose robots misses half the picture: AI agents will make specialized industrial machines cheap to design and general-purpose robots will make them cheap to build, so tasks move from general robots to specialized machines once frequent enough, leading to a Cambrian explosion of specialized machines.
18 min · 4,083 words
Why is it so expensive to send an email?
Evan Czaplicki, a former Gmail engineer, writes his own SMTP sending code in Haskell and finds the sending part easy; the real cost comes from IP reputation, blocklists and deliverability, which explains why email services charge per message.
6 min · 1,419 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
Recycling ANSI art: Tracing the origins of Fire Escape's logon screens
Josh Renaud traces where the ANSI logon screens on Fire Escape's St. Louis BBS came from, matching them to earlier 'public domain' art by Violet Stymacks and other late-1980s artists, and looks at how the BBS scene thought about ripping, remixing and permission.
15 min · 3,417 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
Venkatesh Rao, reading Joyce Appleby's history of capitalism, argues that today's AI panic mirrors early mercantilist zero-sum thinking: fears of surplus intelligence and useless minds resemble old fears about trade and idle labor, while a 'cognitive capitalist' view sees intelligence creating new demand and new freedom for minds.
15 min · 3,546 words
An essay from The Pilgrim Age on misplaced trust: eight eMudhra certificate authority keys that turned out to be trivially weak and passed audits anyway, the bystander effect and the retold Kitty Genovese story, and what it means when AI agents, not people, start doing the checking.
10 min · 2,266 words
We should be more ambitious with the software we build
Dan Luu argues that AI coding tools let skilled engineers attempt far more ambitious software, using Michael Malis's pgrust (a Postgres rewrite with JIT-style optimizations whose testing has surfaced real Postgres bugs) as the running example, and explains why programming expertise still matters for judging model output.
27 min · 6,109 words
Matt Webb explains why he shut down the web servers he had self-hosted for 27 years, archiving old sites and moving his blog to GitHub Pages, because a wave of new vulnerabilities (PHP, HTTPS certificates, Linux root exploits) has tipped the calculus against securing his own internet-facing boxes, with musings on AI agents in a future of pervasive exploits.
5 min · 1,226 words
Alex Gusev, CTO of Uploadcare, reflects on turning 40 and realizing that AI coding agents have removed the engineering challenges that drove a lifetime of side projects and startups, and on what it means to look for a new kind of challenge in a second professional life.
3 min · 804 words
Be Aware of What's in Your Logs
Prompted by a bug report that came with a log full of things the developer never wanted to see, fireborn explains how log files can contain screen text, messages, account identifiers, file paths and more, and urges users to check what they share and developers to provide clear warnings, safe defaults and privacy-respecting ways to report problems.
14 min · 3,114 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
Software is slow because of bad design, not slow languages
Sean Goedecke argues that rewriting programs in C or Rust (with or without AI) rarely makes them much faster: most software is I/O-bound, slow languages already delegate hot paths to fast libraries, and real speedups come from redesign.
5 min · 1,229 words
Friday essay: AI is devastating higher education, but the system was already broken
Jeff Sparrow argues that generative AI is ravaging universities, from AI-written essays to scraped scholarship, but that marketised, efficiency-driven higher education was already broken, and calls for a struggle over what knowledge and the university are for.
28 min · 6,529 words
Chemists, Chemical Engineers, and Plant Managers
Drawing on more than a decade at ThredUp, Ryan Moser proposes three work archetypes — chemists who discover, chemical engineers who build systems, and plant managers who run reliable operations — and explains how knowing yours guides a career, why talented people struggle in the wrong conditions, and how leaders can tell whether people outgrew the company or it outgrew them.
8 min · 1,900 words
Local Democracy’s Business Model is Broken
Jeff Fong argues that US local governments, which control zoning, permitting, and building codes, are funded in ways that reward restricting growth, and that land value return would realign their incentives toward abundance.
14 min · 3,316 words
In his Oxford Etymologist column, Anatoly Liberman looks back at the English Spelling Society's century-long push for reform and argues that the movement needs popular culture, media and influencers, not just scholars, if it is ever to make English spelling more humane.
6 min · 1,379 words