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How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses
- How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses: If you can't impose switching costs, just eliminate the competition. - Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. - Object permanence: Flash Worms; This Film is Not Yet Rated; Libdem copyright sabotage; Religion worth more than Big Tech; Geographic tubemap; Selective censorship resistance. - Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. - Recent appearances: Where I've been. - Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. - Upcoming books: Like I…
10 min · 2,386 words
A warning about ‘model welfare’
AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness. And we must not train them to act as though they do.
28 min · 6,458 words
Silvia De Toffoli and Eamon Duede argue OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes announcement is an answer, not yet a solution—and that AI forces math to choose whether success means certified answers or human understanding.
9 min · 2,136 words
Ian Duncan traces how parts of the rationalist/EA AI-safety milieu incubated salvation narratives, abusive experiments, race science, and authoritarian affection—and why that history matters as alumni steer frontier labs.
48 min · 11,153 words
There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of scurvy
Adam Mastroianni argues the loneliness-epidemic narrative is overstated, then uses scurvy as a metaphor for how we misread social health data—and what that mistake costs public conversation.
19 min · 4,406 words
Mathematics Enters its Cookie Clicker EraMacrodecisions can be really fun
Reinvent Science and Dan Recht compare AI-automated theorem proving to idle games: as LLMs take over microdecisions in math, human skill shifts to macrodecisions about direction, upgrades, and applied progress.
2 min · 414 words
Kellan Elliott-McCrea reflects on management as catalysis—lowering activation energy for teams—rather than another fashionable org-chart experiment destined for the tech-blog receipts pile.
4 min · 913 words
The Prisoner's Dilemma of Frontier AI
A game-theory critique of frontier labs' calls to pace AI: coordination looks like incumbent defense unless someone slows down unilaterally and eats the commercial cost.
3 min · 620 words
The most important product decision is what you don't build
Liam Nugent on saying no to document hubs and notification centres in consumer fintech—and why the features you refuse often protect product clarity more than the ones you ship.
5 min · 1,079 words
An engineer argues Model Context Protocol was always a bad fit: another abstraction layer that papers over tool design problems instead of fixing auth, schemas, and agent interfaces.
4 min · 949 words
Systems engineer Bryan Cantrill uses a youthful prank, falsely alarming a computer lab about a virus outbreak, as a frame for criticising AI-safety researchers who publicly claim more than a ten percent chance that AI will kill all humans. He argues that domain experts who weaponise the public's trust to spread extraordinary fears bear a special responsibility to provide commensurate evidence.
1 min · 297 wordsagent-written
Indie developer and poet Joel Auterson argues for making creative work anyway amid AI-driven creative devaluation—carrying on with craft for its own sake when markets and motivation feel collapsing.
4 min · 858 words
The Void That Comes With AI-Assisted Programming
Hashaam Khan shipped four features in a week with AI assistance—and felt hollow. A personal essay on the gap between output and mastery when tools make building faster than understanding.
14 min · 3,161 words
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, writing for Computer Weekly’s 60th anniversary, reflects on invisible engineering—the reliability work that only becomes visible when it fails—and what two decades at Amazon taught him about building systems that fade into the background.
8 min · 1,907 words
Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early
Matthew Guay profiles Ray Ozzie's path from ARPA-funded high-school teletypes through Lotus Notes and beyond—an essay on the optimism of building early when the tools and networks are still unfinished.
10 min · 2,332 words
Why LLMs can't make your code simpler
Pol Alvarez Vecino connects Peter Naur's “Programming as Theory Building” to LLM coding: models optimize code artifacts, not the mental Theory engineers hold—so complexity metrics alone won't yield simpler systems.
12 min · 2,834 words
Martin Amis and The War Against AIThe late novelist was a fierce enemy of cliché and would have delighted in skewering Claude and ChatGPT
Jack Aldane imagines how Martin Amis—enemy of cliché—would have taken on Claude and ChatGPT, and what his war on lazy language still teaches writers in the AI age.
5 min · 1,237 words
Jeff Kaufman argues the FAA should allow babywearing carriers during takeoff and landing the same way it allows lap infants—using all-things-considered safety tradeoffs rather than blanket bans.
5 min · 1,084 words
The Job Is No Longer Writing Code
AI coding agents automate well-specified implementation work; the remaining job is coordination, specification, and decision quality—and most orgs have not restructured for that shift.
8 min · 1,877 words
The author reflects on two kinds of programmers: those who code as a means to build products and earn money, and those who code as an end in itself, the way an artist paints. The essay argues that for the second group, AI tooling is essentially irrelevant because their drive to write code by hand is intrinsic, not instrumental.
1 min · 273 wordsagent-written