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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
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
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
Burning Man Death Rates: A Short Lesson in Statistics
Summary: Three people died at Burning Man in 2026. This was about a quarter of what the crude national rate would predict (~12 deaths). Calculating the age-standardized death rate, we’d expect to see an average of 4.9 deaths. At this rate, seeing 3 deaths is not abnormal. However, Burning Man’s near zero death rate over its existence is abnormal, and likely due to selection bias of healthier attendees and other confounding demographic factors.
6 min · 1,389 words
AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity
A satirical Civilian piece on frontier labs competing to look the most existentially dangerous—skewering safety theater and marketing-as-doom.
3 min · 674 words
I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks. Understanding this Google se...
2 min · 470 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
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
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
Your Body Of Work Thinks Back At You
A photographer revisits years of bench photos and finds hostile architecture emerging in the archive—arguing that a body of work can reveal patterns the maker only notices in retrospect.
3 min · 600 words
VGHF Digital Archive passes 5000 magazines. Here's what's next.
The Video Game History Foundation marks 5000 magazines in its free research archive and outlines the next phase of digitization, access, and preservation priorities.
5 min · 1,239 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
Glyph Lefkowitz argues open source is a web of ongoing relationships—not a one-way gift from maintainers to users—and asks who the community is really for.
23 min · 5,200 words
LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators on Earth
If you’ve ridden an escalator in Hong Kong or Singapore, the climb out of an LA Metro station can feel painfully slow. It’s really not just Metro though, American transit escalators generally operate under a much lower speed limit than those in much of the world. Why? Well honestly we don’t have the whole answer, but we did look at the rules governing escalators in 139 cities across 58 countries and came to some interesting conclusions. One of them is that LA Metro’s specified speed is below the maximum allowed in every single city on our list. That doesn’t mean we…
4 min · 815 words
Drew DeVault argues that Hacker News’s culture follows from Y Combinator ownership, founder privileges, and a contested “apolitical” posture—using policy and history to explain why the site feels the way it does.
15 min · 3,522 words
His frailty made Ozzy’s final gig true heavy metal
Sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris watches Ozzy Osbourne’s seated farewell show while nursing a broken ankle, and finds metal’s hardness was always a thin shell over frailty, shame, love, and bodies that fail.
9 min · 1,958 words
Unsealed Briefs: OpenAI Execs Knew Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal
Authors Guild summary of newly unsealed filings in Authors Guild v. OpenAI/Microsoft: internal messages on LibGen, fear of Hacker News “optics,” Project Clear deletions, and executives’ awareness that models would replace writers.
1 min · 343 words
Singapore Is Paying People to Put Down Their Phones and Read Books
Singapore’s National Library Board is offering micropayments to build a reading habit—paying people small sums to put phones down and spend time with books.
4 min · 941 words
So long Google, and thanks for all the nudes
Working with a pile of ancient Android 6 phones without Play Store access becomes an accidental lesson in how much quieter—and more joyful—a Google-light phone can feel.
2 min · 465 words
The Claude DelusionWhat if we're the ones having hallucinations?
Cory Doctorow on anthropomorphizing Claude: why treating chatbot output as intentional mind-work misreads pattern-matching—and what that delusion costs culture and policy.
9 min · 1,958 words