Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Language Models for Text Classification: From Bag-of-Words to JevA visual guide to bag-of-words, RNNs, CNNs, transformers, Jev-like APIs, and calibration
Sebastian Raschka walks from classic bag-of-words classifiers through RNNs, CNNs, and transformers to TypeSafe AI's Jev—explaining APIs, IMDb benchmarks, calibration, and why decision models matter for agent harnesses.
5 min · 1,076 words
Software Goldilocks: the market for software is expanding but is the System of Record dead?
Sam Gerstenzang argues AI expands SaaS spend while splitting value into small opinionated point tools and large full-service “does the work” products—squeezing classic mid-market systems of record from both sides.
2 min · 520 words
Bryan Caplan vs Effective Altruism
Walter Veit challenges Bryan Caplan's recent criticism of effective altruism, arguing the debate should turn on arguments, reasons, and evidence rather than dismissive pseudo-philosophy.
6 min · 1,271 words
You Are No Longer Invited to DinnerThe death of the American host
Derek Thompson traces a half-century collapse in Americans hosting friends at home—from 42% monthly in 1975 to 12% in 2026—and weighs harried dual-earner households, screens, and other explanations for the great disinvitation.
10 min · 2,257 words
Generation Got Cheaper Again. Verification Didn't.
O'Side Systems on the growing gap between cheap AI code generation and slow human verification: cost per accepted change, review queues, and where engineering leaders should invest next.
5 min · 1,218 words
Ben Sixsmith argues that strange times make it necessary to take strange people seriously—from rocket pioneer Jack Parsons to today's eccentric AI-and-tech scenes—and why the future may belong to the weird.
3 min · 764 words
Historians often blame drought, famine, and invaders for the Late Bronze Age collapse—but that can’t explain why the empires never came back. Patrick Fitzsimmons argues for a deeper structural story.
14 min · 3,253 words
On the Value of Doing a PhD in the Age of AI
MIT's Phillip Isola offers ten reminders for anxious AI PhD students: public research still has leverage, human expertise remains safety infrastructure, and the PhD's job is to chase a moving frontier for the love of the game.
3 min · 781 words
Pirating the PiratesNotes from the underground of film preservation.
Devan Scott on how fan restorers, remuxers, and boutique labels like Arrow and Kino fight studio revisionism—reconstructing historically accurate cuts of films such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when official releases fail.
3 min · 760 words
A short essay on how modern web stacks leave people behind — and why shipping progressive, resilient HTML still matters in 2026.
2 min · 455 words
The systems that no one will test
The systems that no one will test This happened to me in 2020, and it has been on my mind again lately. During the worst of the pandemic, I found a vulnerability in a system that gave me access to the Brazilian federal system, and with that access I was able to retrieve information on any Brazilian (think of 200+ million people data).
4 min · 901 words
Owed a billion dollars in NVDA stock
A first-person account of a 1993 NVIDIA stock option grant, a decades-later discovery of a vesting discrepancy, and how the statute of limitations settled it.
3 min · 779 words
When I was a freshman at RISD, there was a club fair, and I was drawn to the RISD STEAM table, where I met Carly Ayres and Sayer Pease. They welcomed me with open arms, and I started to learn about things like 3D printers and Arduino. I first learned Processing from Clement Valla, paper electronics from Jie Qi, and then Arduino from Paul Badger. I fell in love, and the fate was more or less sealed when I made my first music synthesizer. Creating a tool that output things I never thought of while making it lit up my heart, and is still why I do the things I do today.…
5 min · 1,063 words
What I believe about the future of software development
Thorsten Ball plants a flag on where software development is headed as AI agents write more of the code: what still matters for engineers, what gets commoditized, and how taste and judgment become the scarce skills.
4 min · 809 words
Russell Sechzer on what's missing in agentic commerce: incomplete financial instructions, who authorizes agents, who pays for work that never becomes a purchase, and the invisible costs behind Muse, Instinct, Stripe, Visa, and AP2.
8 min · 1,882 words
LinkedIn is a soulsucking hole of professionalism and a pit of hell that not even my worst enemy should spend the rest of his days in. It’s this concoction of performative productivity and corpo speak producing cursed artifacts beyond human comprehension. A place where normal human text goes to die and can only be kept alive by an LLM like a radiation protection suit.
4 min · 999 words
What makes software development engineeringA process that doesn't depend on individual brilliance
Simon Park (박성범) argues software work becomes engineering when processes outlast individual brilliance—translating intuition into explainable practice, and clarifying when an engineering approach is actually needed.
12 min · 2,720 words
As If Yesterday, in Partly in the Right, I asked where the information comes from when an agent produces a result, and what checks it. Today I have a sharper version of that question, and a new piece of evidence to ask it about.
13 min · 2,972 words
Robert W argues LLM confidence scores are vibe-words, not calibrated probabilities—and outlines RLCD-style approaches that treat hallucination as a solvable measurement and training problem.
7 min · 1,560 words
What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators
Ben Overmyer compares Western heraldry and Japanese mon as generative systems—and what those rule-bound visual languages teach about building software that invents coherent coats of arms and marks.
13 min · 3,070 words