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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
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
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
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
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
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
I'm tired of the AI tone. Not AI writing itself. AI is incredibly useful. I've probably used ChatGPT more this week than I'd like to admit. I'm talking about the weird, increasingly recognizable way everything on the internet now sounds like it was written by the same extremely articulate 27-year-old who has never had a bad day. You know the tone. Everything is a wedge. Every idea is not just X, but Y.
4 min · 839 words
My Weird New Hobby: Wandering Around Tokyo on Google Maps
A playful Street View essay: following a 350Z across years of Tokyo captures, noticing wires, houses, and how a city changes (and doesn’t) when you wander it on Maps.
3 min · 668 words