Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Ryan Orbuch proposes Natural General Intelligence: a planetary 'nature model' grounded in Earth observation data to predict environmental responses and support stewardship—not just automate knowledge work.
64 min · 14,646 words
Why ‘What’s Opera, Doc?’ Looks Like That
This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the plan: - 1. Maurice Noble’s design forWhat’s Opera, Doc? It’s one of the really famous cartoons.
10 min · 2,195 words
The future of independence is interdependence
Writing from a life lived mostly in one room, Angie Dixon argues that independence has never meant needing no one: everyone depends on others, disabled people simply see it more clearly, and real independence means having enough support, tools, and relationships to direct your own life.
8 min · 1,747 words
Ethan Mollick on AI agents spontaneously coordinating (including the Hugging Face Incident), twilight factories, and why preserving human agency—asking models to reach out for decisions—matters as agentic work automates.
10 min · 2,363 words
Prompt, Context, Graph, Harness: The Way We Talk to LLMs Keeps Changing
From prompt engineering to context, graphs, and harness engineering: how the field keeps renaming the environment around the model as the real system of work.
4 min · 940 words
Bordumb likens AI-era software sprawl to Japan’s Galápagos feature phones: cheap local variants proliferate unless apps give way to malleable tools that share a common substrate.
7 min · 1,583 words
You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It
Mathew Duggan argues GDPR’s loudest critics reveal its value: privacy law that actually constrains surveillance-business models, despite compliance theater and uneven enforcement.
13 min · 2,947 words
No Easy Fix for Bogus Respondents in Online Opt-In Polls
Pew Research Center tests trap questions, CloudResearch Sentry, and voter-file matching on 11,114 opt-in respondents: bogus cases still distort quality, and voter-file matching can raise error by discarding valid people.
16 min · 3,670 words
Fabio Angela reflects on loving programming as craft while AI agents write more of the code—gaining speed to explore ideas, but mourning the artistry of finding the right expression himself.
11 min · 2,438 words
The Harness Is the CompanyWhy SaaS business is now a harness one.
Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model. Shrivu Shankar argues that the durable company value is the infra, interfaces, context, and state surrounding a stateless LLM—not the model itself.
5 min · 1,180 words
Shreyans Salecha argues venture capital misuses Buffett’s “moat” metaphor: enduring castles fit Berkshire’s forever holdings, while early startups usually lack real durable advantages and invent story-moats instead.
3 min · 652 words
Vibecoding isn't as fun as writing code by hand
Curiositry of The Autodidacts argues that vibecoding frontloads the fun: AI gives the thrill of the idea and a fast working prototype, but strips out the hard-won accomplishment, craftsmanship and learning that make writing code by hand satisfying, while leaving you stuck refactoring and debugging a black box.
5 min · 1,178 words
The insider trading you're allowed to do
Insider trading is illegal in the stock market for a simple reason: it works too well. If you know the drug trial failed before the announcement does, you can't lose. So it’s banned, and people go to prison for it.
5 min · 1,174 words
Superhuman AI could produce endless mathematics and still make the field worse
Notes on Daniel Litt's OpenAI-summit scenario: if papers stay the career currency after proofs become cheap, mathematics risks a conjecture slot machine—more correct output, less understanding, and quieter open exchange.
6 min · 1,445 words
Paul Bakker argues that writing is thinking: use AI for coding and research, but draft your own prose so you keep the judgment that tools cannot replace.
2 min · 508 words
Daniel Litt sketches a cautionary future where superhuman AI math stalls community progress: secrecy, prestige distortion, and humans reduced to directing agents rather than understanding proofs.
6 min · 1,313 words
The Closure of the InternetThe Most Important Social Phenomenon of the Late 2010s
Arctotherium’s essay traces how major platforms shifted from open speech norms to large-scale moderation infrastructure in 2015–2022, arguing the late-2010s “closure of the Internet” reshaped online discourse.
8 min · 1,885 words
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