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A short essay on how modern web stacks leave people behind — and why shipping progressive, resilient HTML still matters in 2026.
2 min · 455 words
The systems that no one will test
The systems that no one will test This happened to me in 2020, and it has been on my mind again lately. During the worst of the pandemic, I found a vulnerability in a system that gave me access to the Brazilian federal system, and with that access I was able to retrieve information on any Brazilian (think of 200+ million people data).
4 min · 901 words
Owed a billion dollars in NVDA stock
A first-person account of a 1993 NVIDIA stock option grant, a decades-later discovery of a vesting discrepancy, and how the statute of limitations settled it.
3 min · 779 words
What I believe about the future of software development
Thorsten Ball plants a flag on where software development is headed as AI agents write more of the code: what still matters for engineers, what gets commoditized, and how taste and judgment become the scarce skills.
4 min · 809 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
What makes software development engineeringA process that doesn't depend on individual brilliance
Simon Park (박성범) argues software work becomes engineering when processes outlast individual brilliance—translating intuition into explainable practice, and clarifying when an engineering approach is actually needed.
12 min · 2,720 words
As If Yesterday, in Partly in the Right, I asked where the information comes from when an agent produces a result, and what checks it. Today I have a sharper version of that question, and a new piece of evidence to ask it about.
13 min · 2,972 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
“They had no concept of a duty of care to their users.”
Marcin Wichary reflects on software craft and quality through the lens of duty of care to users—drawing on design and tooling history to ask what it means when products treat people as afterthoughts.
3 min · 664 words
Pranav Desai catalogs ten visual and copy tells of AI-generated “slop UI”—from rainbow gradients and pulsing badges to glassmorphism and generic hype—and why vibe-coded interfaces often look cheap without a design vision.
4 min · 908 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
What's wrong with Open Source AI?
Alexine Le Port on the shrinking gap between open-weight and frontier models—and why open-source AI culture is still mostly vibing instead of shipping durable public infrastructure.
3 min · 651 words
What Would A Serious AI Product Look Like?
One of the issues that I have with the current generation of “AI” products is that they do not appear to take their own premises seriously. I look at a plethora of obsequious chatbots claiming to be serious tools for problem solving, and I think, this is not what a problem-solving tool would look like. Even before we get to the tremendous ethical problems with the frontier labs, it is this impression of their composition *as a product* that makes me feel, constantly, whenever I am interacting…
22 min · 5,119 words
I listened to the recent Ezra Klein interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which seems to be something of a Rorschach test for AI doomerism: if you are inclined to see doom, Jensen sounds dismissive, but if you (like me) do not fear for the future of humanity at the (metaphorical!) hands of a computer program, Jensen’s responses seem very reasonable. (With some exception: does this guy really not
3 min · 748 words
Watching discussions happening online, I see a frequent unfortunate tic I’ll call the Expert Asterisk. A beginner is asking for help, and experts are answering. Then in the spirit of completeness, an expert throws in a fact or detail far from the learner’s abilities or needs.
3 min · 580 words
Crowding out and AI debt issuance
Analysts and economist are, broadly speaking, offering up four reasons for the continued rise in developed market, and in particular, US bond yields. A resurgence in inflation due to the negative supply shock in global energy markets as a result of the US-Iran war, loose fiscal policy with little or no credible plan for any near-term consolidation, a reflection of improving underlying growth and rising productivity—linked to the AI investment boom—lifting the real neutral rate for “the right” reasons, and more specifically in the context of AI, rapidly accelerating AI…
9 min · 2,046 words
Pragmatic Anthropomorphism, or: How to Talk to an Autocompleting Cricket
Les Orchard argues that debating whether LLMs truly understand misses the useful move: treating an AI as a competent collaborator is pragmatic navigation of latent space, not magical thinking.
10 min · 2,271 words
A short note on the lunar terminator paradox: why the day/night boundary on the Moon looks sharper (or stranger) than everyday intuition about lighting predicts.
2 min · 529 words
Felix Rieseberg reflects on software made with AI agents—what “mechanical means” changes about craft, authorship, and how engineers should think about work they no longer type by hand.
12 min · 2,730 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