Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
AI and the revenge of the non-techies
Maroun Baydoun on how AI is disrupting software engineers' long privileged run—envy, disruption, and a revolution that somehow ends with a pricing page.
9 min · 2,046 words
Casey Newton’s hands-on take on OpenAI’s Dots agents at DevDay: capable coworking inside ChatGPT, paid-only positioning versus Meta Muse, and the trust/safety tradeoffs of always-on agents.
9 min · 2,024 words
Natasha Murashev argues that adding AI to a product should not mean a chat box: agent workflows, on-device prediction, and TTS can stay invisible while the existing UI simply works better for non-AI-native users.
3 min · 650 words
A satirical product essay for “Windows 11½”: a tongue-in-cheek redesign pitch that skewers modern desktop bloat while laying out a coherent, opinionated vision for a lighter PC OS.
7 min · 1,677 words
It’s Time to Investigate the AI Labs
Cal Newport argues frontier AI labs have grown brazen in public messaging about agent harms and extinction risk, and that Congress should investigate rather than let private companies set the narrative.
2 min · 564 words
Kev Quirk finally leaves Firefox after Mozilla’s AI push, tries Vivaldi, and lands on Brave—covering extensions, sync, and why privacy-default browsing finally stuck.
2 min · 528 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
The Problem is not the AI Code, but Nobody Knows Anything Anymore
Simon Späti argues the real risk of AI-written codebases is not mediocre generated code, but teams that lose architecture knowledge and intent because everyone just asks the model.
4 min · 836 words
GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks
A software vendor reports a malware-laced GitHub imitation of Easy Data Transform that sat for weeks after reports—until the post hit Hacker News and the page disappeared within minutes.
1 min · 306 words
DraftKings Is Using AI to Supercharge the Harms of Online Behavioral Advertising
EFF argues DraftKings' use of betting data and ML to re-engage losing gamblers shows why all online behavioral advertising—not just third-party data sharing—should be banned.
3 min · 609 words
Tom Batey of WebDepend argues that AI can run checks but cannot judge whether software satisfies expectations—so businesses still need human testers who own responsibility when AI writes and verifies code.
6 min · 1,412 words
PlayTaurus argues guitarists should buy hardware for what it is and run community firmware on it—ESP32-class chips are cheap enough, NAM models are open, and closed pedal firmware is the last proprietary lock.
2 min · 477 words
Frontier Labs Are Selling Garbage to Fools in Washington
Selling snake oil to the United States Congress is an ancient American craft, and the frontier artificial intelligence industry is currently attempting the most audacious hustle in modern corporate history.
7 min · 1,701 words
Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to.
Thirty years of voluntary funding schemes haven't paid open source maintainers because asking doesn't scale. The real money already flows — to JFrog, Docker, Sonatype — at the registry layer. The fix: registries charge companies for supply (they already do), then route a slice automatically to the maintainers who make that supply worth having.
23 min · 5,396 words
Eric Bailey argues CSS-Tricks should become a co-op so the web keeps an independent, practitioner-owned home for frontend knowledge—after the site’s repeated near-deaths under corporate ownership.
3 min · 595 words
How to Solve AI in Publishing with Three Easy(ish) Steps
Richard Pulfer proposes practical steps for the publishing industry to handle AI scandals and authorship concerns—focusing on disclosure, process, and standards rather than panic alone.
6 min · 1,475 words
How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs
Are you steering towards AI burnout? Afraid of loosing your job to someone with little programming skills, no aspirations to quality, and a huge Claude account? Disappointed about the code quality in your projects, or worse in “your” own code? This is for you. There are significant and legitimate ethical concerns about frontier LLMs run by big tech companies, these have been discussed at length, I’m aware and agree, this post is not about them. Please don’t mistake me for a pro-LLM techbro. Also: Since people have mistaken my texts for LLM-generated before, I’ll tell you…
13 min · 3,046 words
The Bottleneck Moved From Writing Code to Proving It
AI made writing code cheap; the scarce work is now proving it. A practitioner essay on verification as the new bottleneck for agent systems and engineering teams.
4 min · 926 words
Ethan Hawksley argues passkeys excel against phishing and breaches but are a poor fit for personal accounts: lockout risk, hardware-key limits, Big Tech sync bans, and fragmented third-party UX still outweigh the day-to-day threat of AiTM proxies for most individuals.
3 min · 786 words
Don't Make Job Referrals Public
A job-market observation: public referral programs blur incentives and dilute what a referral is supposed to mean when recruiters and candidates treat them as open calls.
3 min · 576 words