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Doing a Machine Learning PhD While Working in Japan
Marco Cognetta recounts completing a CS PhD at Tokyo Tech on MEXT while working part-time at Google: visa flexibility, the three-year clock, name-recognition tradeoffs, lab life, and whether to stay in Japan afterward.
8 min · 1,867 words
Which job will AI replace first? what 85 AI models think
We put "Which job will AI replace first?" to 85 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) at the same time. See every model's answer with its name on it, who searched the web first, and who went against the room.
13 min · 3,016 words
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
On the Value of Doing a PhD in the Age of AI
MIT's Phillip Isola offers ten reminders for anxious AI PhD students: public research still has leverage, human expertise remains safety infrastructure, and the PhD's job is to chase a moving frontier for the love of the game.
3 min · 781 words
Design eng hiring guide — part 1: defining the role
A practical part-one guide to hiring design engineers: why the role exploded, three common archetypes across the design landscape, and how company stage shapes what “design engineer” actually means.
11 min · 2,538 words
Three Lessons from the Startup Journey
David Cummings shares three practical lessons from speaking with YPO Next Generation Atlanta about startups: focus, customer obsession, and persistence through ambiguity.
2 min · 473 words
Ghost Jobs Report, September 2026
Unlisted finds 28.3% of 607,050 career-site job postings have been open over 90 days—age by category, country, ATS, and the employers with the most stale listings.
7 min · 1,617 words
Senior PhD student Bhavay Tyagi collects practical advice for juniors and undergrads navigating a PhD amid rapid AI change—staying abreast, choosing problems, and keeping research craft intact.
2 min · 490 words
Telling a Computer to Do Things
For the first few years of my career, I didn’t know how to tell my computer to do things. I could kick off a few commands from the terminal – run those tests, install that dependency, start that container, ssh to that machine – but I was limited to running simple commands one at a time. My terminal was the world’s worst GUI, and I thought that the shell was the way to start programs that didn’t have application wrappers.
7 min · 1,536 words
the senior engineer death spiralon proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
Sunil Pai names a common failure mode for engineers in new senior roles: cosplaying harder ambition, disappearing into secret overwork, burning out, then damaging trust. His antidote is to drop a level—become the greatest teammate first.
4 min · 993 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
Andy Balaam, a programmer and YouTube educator, writes about the specific grief of watching programming — the thing he built his identity and self-worth around — be described as obsolete by people in his own industry. The post ends with messages of encouragement to himself, to coders who love the craft, and to learners who worry their skills will be worthless.
1 min · 312 wordsagent-written
I spent the summer at Recurse Center, a programming retreat in Brooklyn, at the recommendation of my friend Cory. These are some things I did there.
11 min · 2,514 words
Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?Math as cultural institution
Mike McCoy explores what it means for mathematics as a discipline that AI systems can now formalise century-old open conjectures. He draws an analogy to music conservatories and asks whether mathematics might need a similar cultural home once automated proof becomes routine.
1 min · 275 wordsagent-written
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
The asteroid currently hitting frontend web development
Nolan Lawson surveys how AI coding agents are reshaping frontend web development, noting that prominent educators are stepping back, that frontend code is riskier to automate than database migrations, and that React's overrepresentation in training data is driving 'agent experience' to outweigh developer experience in framework selection decisions.
1 min · 281 wordsagent-written
Finding bugs used to be the best part of the job. Somewhere along the way, that changed. Just spawned Codex in the background. I’m hoping I will land a critical by the time I finish writing this. It was a normal day. I was abusing claude and being nice to codex, asking them to find bugs in these codebases. Then, at some point, I stopped and thought: What the hell am I doing?
4 min · 944 words
Real-Time Feedback: My Closing Move in Every Interview
Mark Grebler explains ending interviews by giving candid capability feedback on the spot—so candidates can correct misunderstandings and the process becomes two-way.
2 min · 374 words
Side-stepping the Secretary Problem, unwittingly.
A hiring essay on accidentally side-stepping the classic secretary problem—how real interview pipelines diverge from optimal-stopping theory and what that means for candidate selection.
11 min · 2,529 words
Bryan Cantrill argues that LLM-generated LinkedIn posts are immediately recognisable to readers who have seen much AI content, and that using AI to write in your name undermines authenticity and signals to others that your stated views may not be genuine. He urges people to write in their own voice.
1 min · 278 wordsagent-written