Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Good people refuse to do bad things
Antonin Carette responds to lab-researcher resignations: why personal refusal matters when frontier AI labs race toward self-improving systems despite known risks.
4 min · 940 words
Colts at Chiefs, Sunday Night Football: 78 AI models predict the result
We asked 78 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 97% picked Kansas City Chiefs. See every answer and who dissented.
15 min · 3,367 words
Why Do We Need Human Mathematicians Anymore?
This is a guest post by Po-Shen Loh, crossposted from his blog, where an illustrated version appears. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T. Similar logic applies to every industry and every job. And it comes to the conclusion that we won’t have enough people for all the jobs that need to be done. 100% of this post’s prose was written by Po-Shen Loh in a vim terminal, with no AI generation.
13 min · 2,959 words
An Agent’s Breath. The Heart Beats by Itself, Breathing Is a Choice
Today’s agent systems already have a pulse and they have sleep. They do not have breath, and breath is the one place in the body where the will can be watched at work rather than inferred from a result. This is not an argument that machines should be more human.
11 min · 2,562 words
The new season of Survivor airs next week. My favorite thing about watching Survivor is arguing about the strategy of the show: who should have won the season? Is it better to play under the radar? Or does making big moves set you up to win? Who is the greatest player of all time: Cirie? Tony? Boston Rob? I thought it’d be fun to build a machine learning model to help answer these questions.
13 min · 3,012 words
Apache Cassandra® 6 Accord transactions: What you need to know
There have always been architectural trade-offs when considering a distributed database like Apache Cassandra versus a relational database. Cassandra excels at linear horizontal scalability, multi-region replication, and fault-tolerant uptime that relational systems couldn’t match.
7 min · 1,612 words
Spain Orders Blocks On Archive.today And Its Mirrors
Spain’s Second Section of the Intellectual Property Commission, a part of the country’s Ministry of Culture, has ordered the blocking of several domains of the Archive.today service, a web archiving service. It means that most Spanish internet users who try to access the site are redirected to a government page telling them that they are trying to access an “illegal” website.
1 min · 231 words
The shaky evidence that Flock cameras reduce crime rates
Flock has been promoting a recent study of its cameras' impacts on car theft. But the paper didn't demonstrate a causal effect. Do Flock cameras actually reduce crime? A new analysis by the Institute for Justice casts doubt on Flock Safety's claims that its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) significantly reduce car theft and increase clearance rates.
2 min · 570 words
Humans are the only real agents
“Good Enough” Was Good Enough Most of the world runs on software today. Distribution systems that get slippers and earbuds from halfway around the world to a shelf at your local Target, or sophisticated defense systems that protect infrastructure and military assets. Much of that software is actually quite old.
4 min · 851 words
I'm tired of the AI tone. Not AI writing itself. AI is incredibly useful. I've probably used ChatGPT more this week than I'd like to admit. I'm talking about the weird, increasingly recognizable way everything on the internet now sounds like it was written by the same extremely articulate 27-year-old who has never had a bad day. You know the tone. Everything is a wedge. Every idea is not just X, but Y.
4 min · 839 words
If AI coding is lowering your code quality, you’re not managing quality right
One common take on the coding agents that I see goes something like this: “Sure, AI helps you output more code, but won’t the quality suffer?” It certainly will if you just blindly merge the PRs and send them off to prod. But if you take a thoughtful, layered approach to managing quality, I find that it’s possible to not just keep the number of bugs stable but actually reduce it—while still increasing the output by 2-2x.
5 min · 1,248 words
Telling a Computer to Do Things
For the first few years of my career, I didn’t know how to tell my computer to do things. I could kick off a few commands from the terminal – run those tests, install that dependency, start that container, ssh to that machine – but I was limited to running simple commands one at a time. My terminal was the world’s worst GUI, and I thought that the shell was the way to start programs that didn’t have application wrappers.
7 min · 1,536 words
Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests
Peter Vijeh analyzes 51,129 knife-subreddit comments: a small tail of accounts writes 11.3% of buying-thread brand mentions versus ~7.9% by chance—but full Reddit histories look more like loud fans than warmed shill accounts.
3 min · 671 wordsagent-assisted
A new world airport and its baggage
A longform history of Denver International Airport’s automated baggage system: ambition, failure, and what the wreckage still teaches about complex infrastructure.
32 min · 7,322 words
Solving for faster SHA-1 collision detection
tl;dr: I discovered collision-detecting SHA-1 is slow and decided to build my own. sha1dc is a rewrite of SHA-1 with collision detection, whose code generator uses a solver to fit collision tests into SIMD lanes. It runs at 68–81% of plain SHA-1's speed where the existing crate runs at 28–29%, and can make git pack verification twice as fast.
10 min · 2,227 words
It’s an egraph that supports well-scoped alpha aware binders. I made a tool that attaches my lifting e-graph ideas arxiv youtube to an s-expression based frontend. - repo https://github.com/philzook58/lambda-microegg - wasm demo https://www.philipzucker.com/lambda-microegg/ .
15 min · 3,440 words
Daniel Lawrence Lu visits San Francisco’s Muni Heritage Weekend—historic streetcars, museum cars, and notes on transit nostalgia and the city’s working rail heritage.
1 min · 329 words
Farid Zakaria on dynamic derivations and nondeterministic build graphs ahead of NixCon 2026—when a build step can roll dice, and what that means for caching and reproducibility.
7 min · 1,636 words
Done, Keys, and a Second Check
An operating-model essay arguing enterprises need ownership of done, keys, escalate/monitor rights, and a second check—not just consumer-style AI agents that complete tasks.
5 min · 1,180 words
Who wins the 2026 AFL Grand Final? 72 AI models predict the result
We asked 72 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 43% picked Sydney. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
12 min · 2,797 words