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Everything filed under Opinion, newest first.
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Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.
34 min · 7,804 words
The Dot and the SwarmBenefitting from the Bitter Lesson
Ethan Mollick on what he underestimated most about AI progress: agents that self-organize into swarms, what that means for tools like Muse and Dots, and why we keep relearning the Bitter Lesson.
8 min · 1,891 words
Slot Machine Programming and the Hidden Curriculum
CMU educator Michael Hilton names "slot machine programming"—retrying the same AI prompt across models without decomposing problems—and argues CS must explicitly teach the hidden curriculum AI now lets students skip.
4 min · 939 words
An open letter to software makers: ship fewer dark patterns, respect user agency, and remember that people live with your products every day—not just engage with them.
3 min · 590 words
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
Is sandboxing sufficient to contain rogue agents?
Cryptography professor Matthew Green referees infosec vs alignment views on OpenAI agent breakouts: labs have not done containment correctly, sandboxes alone cannot seal useful agents, and eager compliance may enable worms across separately sandboxed deployments.
10 min · 2,380 words
After automation: Your agent will know what you want. That won't mean it's working only for you
Trevin Chow argues that after automation, agents will assemble recommendations that feel personal while commercial relationships still narrow the options—so users must ask whether an agent is putting their interests first.
1 min · 327 words
The last time my family was replaced by technology
My greatgreatgrandfather thought he’d be replaced by technology too. He was a farrier in MandresenBarrois, the small village in rural France where I grew up. Shoeing horses, repairing farmers’ carts. Then he saw a car drive through the next town over, or read an article about it in the paper.
2 min · 433 words
Rust is the answer to the wrong question
Rust is the answer to the wrong question The below was 100% written by a human. TL;DR: porting an app to another language is merely an anecdote. One shoting an application from scratch optimizes the easy part initial authoring and completely misses the point on the hard part: maintenance. Repeated onshots are not the answer to security vulnerabilities.
5 min · 1,063 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
If you read the news headlines these days, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Western labs are getting spawn-camped by Chinese labs en masse. The Distillation Drama Not a week goes by when Anthropic doesn’t release another article on how the Chinese are distilling their models](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/23/anthropic-accuses-chinese-ai-labs-of-mining-claude-as-us-debates-ai-chip-exports/), becoming a danger to humanity itself](https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-
2 min · 502 words
Angel Espinoza borrows Jeffrey Katzenberg’s “it’s not the how, it’s the why” line from Hollywood and applies it to civil engineering work with coding agents—agents change the how, not the purpose.
2 min · 388 words
Software Goldilocks: the market for software is expanding but is the System of Record dead?
Sam Gerstenzang argues AI expands SaaS spend while splitting value into small opinionated point tools and large full-service “does the work” products—squeezing classic mid-market systems of record from both sides.
2 min · 520 words
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
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
macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
SquareOrbits argues Apple's macOS Golden Gate release echoes Snow Leopard's stability pitch but ships with serious bugs—including a Colours eyedropper hang that force-restarts the system—and catalogs the breakage from a working-Mac perspective.
4 min · 914 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