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A personal essay on hedging vs boosters in scientific writing after generative AI: relative use of words like could fell even as raw counts rose with more published text.
4 min · 817 words
Why I Think You Should Almost Never Use AI to Write Anything Substantive
Erich Grunewald argues that using AI to draft substantive writing erodes thinking, voice, and accountability—and that almost everything worth writing is better done by a human who owns the words.
15 min · 3,455 words
Noah Smith on what it means when AI becomes better at mathematics than any human—how “hero” mathematicians shaped culture, and how post-heroic math and science might look when machines own the frontier.
14 min · 3,242 words
There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
Dan Luu argues that turning off critical judgment while using LLMs fails in practice: when people let models take actions or produce analyses without verification, errors compound — there is no safe point at which you can stop thinking.
12 min · 2,831 words
Deterministic Core, Non-Deterministic Shell
Fourteen years after Functional Core, Imperative Shell, Outdata argues for a deterministic core with a non-deterministic shell—keeping pure logic testable while isolating AI and I/O uncertainty.
4 min · 1,004 words
AI and Math in 2026: a non-mathematician's read
xlr8harder synthesizes recent AI math results for non-specialists: real progress with a different strength profile than humans, formalization cliffs, and why “math nearly conquered” remains overhyped.
3 min · 750 words
The UV index is not the warm sensation of sunlight on bare skinWhy sunburn risk and how hot the sun feels on your skin diverge—backed by numbers.
A clear, numbers-first essay explaining why the warmth of sunlight is a poor proxy for UV-B sunburn risk: cloudy cool days can still burn, and scorching morning heat may not, once you separate infrared heating from the UV index.
3 min · 727 words
Generated and suppressed demand.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
Team capacity can hide work people have stopped requesting, while improvements can generate new demand. Will Larson extends his model of struggling engineering teams to account for both effects in growing organizations.
1 min · 78 wordsagent-written
Make no assumptions.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
Long-lived codebases accumulate layers of architectural assumptions as ownership changes. Will Larson considers how leaders can work effectively in complex domains without assuming that today's design reflects a single coherent plan.
1 min · 77 wordsagent-written
A playful but carefully argued encoding proposal that extends UTF-8 to arbitrary length while preserving ASCII compatibility and self-synchronization, with a reference pipx implementation.
89 min · 20,405 words
California Is Chasing Wealth That Has Feet
Greg Miller on California’s tax and policy chase for mobile capital: why wealth that can walk (or fly) is a different problem from land-bound tax bases, and what history suggests.
4 min · 993 words
Reflections on 1,000 Days of Math
I finally hit 1,000 days of doing math daily! Early on in my journey I was a lot more aggressive with my XP targets, but settled into a low-volume rhythm as my goals evolved. I worked from MF1 (Math Foundations 1, lowest level) into MF3, then about halfway through MF3 I started M4ML (Mathematics for Machine Learning). ### Self-induced friction But it got really hard and my progress started to slow as lessons took longer, which was problematic because I was trying to limit my math time to <20m/day. That may have worked fine, but I really screwed myself by relying on…
5 min · 1,105 words
A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W
Linguist Danny Bate traces how W emerged after Rome's fall—from foederati names and medieval spelling experiments to the oddest letter in the modern alphabet and what its history reveals about language change.
11 min · 2,473 words
Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratchYou either loved it, or were using it wrong.
Matthew Guay traces how Lotus Notes — which launched in 1989 with encryption, rich text, file attachments, and a synced database before any of those features existed in standard email — was eventually defeated not by being worse than competitors but by being too unfamiliar. The essay is a history of a product so far ahead of its time that its interface became its downfall.
1 min · 319 wordsagent-written
Simulating Airband AM Radios Warning: Contains many annoying sounds. In a slight departure from my usual code monkey content, let’s talk about airplanes! And radios!
15 min · 3,432 words
Revised rules of engineering leadership.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
Will Larson revisits his engineering leadership principles after working through rapid growth and changes in AI tooling. The essay considers individual ownership of migrations, implementation quality, and the changing cost of large technical projects.
1 min · 80 wordsagent-written
"Vibe coding" is the new "Internet dating"
An analogy between early-2000s internet dating stigma and today's vibe-coding skepticism: both start as jokes, then quietly become how a lot of people actually meet their goals.
1 min · 199 words
Christoph Nakazawa updates his LLM workflow and names values that still matter with coding agents: ownership, taste, guardrails, repo context, owning your stack, and option value.
2 min · 552 words
Early and late-stage hypergrowth.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
Early hypergrowth can concentrate a company on one urgent problem at a time; later growth demands progress across many areas. Will Larson explains how that difference changes leadership staffing and organizational scope.
1 min · 78 wordsagent-written
Four CHI '26 papers I wish I wrote
Janet Davis highlights four CHI 2026 papers she wishes she had written, reflecting on research themes and why each piece of HCI scholarship stood out.
13 min · 3,021 words