Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story
In 2011, Apple released the Cards app. The app — which required iOS 5 — let you design custom letterpress cards, with your messages and photos printed upon them — which Apple would ship to your recipient on your behalf. I recently learned the origin story of Cards, and that it was specifically a Steve Jobs product. It also wasn’t smooth sailing. But first, some backstory, and inserting myself into the narrative, because it’s my site and I can do what I want here.
6 min · 1,445 words
Getting out of the way: my robotics crash course
Software engineer Rob Bercik documents a crash course with a desktop robot arm: why LLM-era builders should get out of the way, what broke first, and what physical loops taught him.
8 min · 1,842 words
Ten Lines Of Code That Changed My World
Roel Nieskens picks ten short snippets—from BASIC hello-world loops to JavaScript wat Batman and typography hacks—that shaped how he thinks about programming, fronts-ends, and fonts.
3 min · 689 words
C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
Gustavo Pezzi defends C’s platform-sized integers: how 12–60-bit machines shaped int, why minimum ranges beat fixed widths, and what Lua’s portable C still teaches.
2 min · 486 words
Marcos Magueta borrows a Roman naming practice to argue for clearer software names—how ancient cognomina habits map onto naming libraries, products, and the stories we tell about code.
5 min · 1,232 words
If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?
If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become? Yesterday, I received this email as a response to [You Can't Vibe Code Love](https://blog.codinghorror.com/you cant vibe code love/). It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well.
3 min · 679 words
Several months ago, I decided that AI contributions were no longer welcome in a FOSS project I am building and maintaining - LibreWeddingPlanner. It’s not that it got a lot of contributions with AI — actually all contributions I’ve had are translations and feature requests — but I wanted to avoid future drama and have a position against AI. However, although I was not using AI for my FOSS contributions, I kept using it at work. In my workplace, as well as in many of my developer friends’,…
10 min · 2,190 words
He who does not code, neither shall he eat
You have never heard of me, and depending on who you are, god do I hope you will forget my name as soon as you finish reading this. Quite frankly, I am unimportant. I am not a maintainer of any major Open Source project. My largest Open Source contributions have been completely replaced by better code, and were not meaningful enough to make me qualified to speak on this issue.
10 min · 2,193 words
Arm & SoftBank: Part 1 — Masa comes calling, bearing gifts
Today, something a little different: a joint post in the form of a conversation between Jon Metzler and Babbage.
11 min · 2,555 words
Crazy as it sounds to say this, since it’s all anybody’s been able to talk about for over a year, but the impact of AI on computing hasn’t yet sunk in.
6 min · 1,349 words
Why All Philosophers Ought To Be Radical Naturalists
My last blog posts calling for a scientific turn in philosophy and the abandonment of aprioristic philosophy largely resulted in three responses.
7 min · 1,549 words
I Look, if you are still stuck on “AI cannot really think, it’s just a stochastic parrot”, please snap out of it and lock in, or you’ll keep repeating that line until you find yourself sitting in the corner chair, watching as ChatGPT™ has sex with your wife.
8 min · 1,856 words
LLM Policies: Progress At All Costs
Diego Escalante argues that GNOME and KDE LLM-policy debates are really about whether open-source communities will accept “progress at all costs,” and what values get traded away when AI tooling is waved through.
4 min · 1,003 words
On Ezra Klein’s Podcast With Jensen Huang
Zvi Mowshowitz annotates Ezra Klein’s interview with Jensen Huang: Huang downplays existential risk as “just software,” yet endorses safety standards that would shut down OpenAI and 10x safety spending.
33 min · 7,619 words
I’m Tired of Being on the Network
Mat Duggan on smartphone fatigue: how always-on networks reshaped attention, relationships, and work, and why stepping back from the phone has become a practical form of self-preservation.
11 min · 2,442 words
CS 240 Spring 2026 AI Retrospective
Purdue CS 240 instructor Jeffrey Turkstra reflects on Spring 2026 AI-assisted cheating cases: what went wrong in enforcement, what students actually did, and how academic integrity policy should change.
17 min · 3,997 words
Burke Holland argues chat isn’t always the right interface for AI-assisted development, and walks through canvases as a more tangible UI for building with GitHub Copilot.
5 min · 1,250 words
A founder who built a desktop coding app around AI planning explains why plan mode collapsed as models got better at figuring out what to do while they work—and what replaces it.
9 min · 2,033 words
How to win a beer with high-dimensional statistics
Jamie Simon explains a viral high-dimensional statistics paper with a bar-bet framing: why naive intuition about data geometry fails, and how the right summary wins the round.
4 min · 827 words
Kate Broughton connects OpenAI’s misalignment disclosures to how we form children and machines—what constitutions, staged evaluation, and “following” might mean for raising capable systems.
10 min · 2,240 words