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Everything filed under Opinion, newest first.
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Alice and Bill own identical UK iPhones, but only Alice still has Apple Advanced Data Protection. MacAnorak explains how Apple's UK ADP withdrawal created a two-tier encryption outcome for otherwise identical devices.
13 min · 2,953 words
PgDog’s Lev Kokotov on why engineers fix open problems they care about, why ownership beats closed-source support tickets, and how free-as-in-freedom Postgres sharding funds itself with enterprise SLAs.
2 min · 387 words
Spymarks, not WatermarksWatermarks that spy on users are no mere watermarks
Brandon Thomas coins “spymark” for hidden tracking signals in media—like SynthID payloads that can encode user IDs—arguing privacy-hostile watermarks need a clearer name and stronger pushback.
5 min · 1,042 words
Alice GG on the Tetris effect for modern feeds: how attention gets hijacked, why it is the scarce resource, and what reclaiming it means for builders and users.
3 min · 620 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
Dan McKinley argues that obsessing over prompt text misses the point: build interlocking evaluation and optimization pipelines, and treat LLMs as non-conscious systems whose 'meaning' is mostly our projection.
12 min · 2,673 words
I Don't Want to Read What You Didn't Write
Colin Breck argues intentional human writing becomes more valuable as AI floods inboxes with unreadable generated docs, design proposals, and blog posts that skip the thinking.
13 min · 3,000 words
Two Years of Building with AI: An Honest Developer Review
An honest two-year look at AI-assisted development—from ChatGPT to Claude Code—what works, why every change still gets reviewed, and the de-skilling risk.
7 min · 1,632 words
Baldur Bjarnason argues chat-based LLMs work like a psychic’s cold reading: vague prompts, confirmation bias, and the user’s own meaning-making create the illusion of understanding.
22 min · 5,118 words
Good people refuse to do bad things
Antonin Carette responds to lab-researcher resignations: why personal refusal matters when frontier AI labs race toward self-improving systems despite known risks.
4 min · 940 words
Daniel Lawrence Lu visits San Francisco’s Muni Heritage Weekend—historic streetcars, museum cars, and notes on transit nostalgia and the city’s working rail heritage.
1 min · 329 words
Done, Keys, and a Second Check
An operating-model essay arguing enterprises need ownership of done, keys, escalate/monitor rights, and a second check—not just consumer-style AI agents that complete tasks.
5 min · 1,180 words
CleanShot’s bulldozed settings
Marcin Wichary documents how CleanShot’s settings UI was “bulldozed”: dense preferences flattened into a shallower, less legible layout, and what that says about modern app design trade-offs.
5 min · 1,074 words
This is a modern motherfucking website.
Robin Reel's tongue-in-cheek manifesto for building fast, readable, accessible sites without framework bloat—modern CSS and HTML done plainly.
7 min · 1,533 words
Why Does AI Code Confidence Increase When Your Risk Should Too?
William Moore on the confidence trap in AI coding tools: fluency peaks on high-stakes auth/payments/migrations because they are common in training data—treat certainty as an inverse risk signal and force failure-mode reasoning.
2 min · 390 words
Bryan Cantrill reflects on Sun Microsystems’ culture and mistakes—what Oxide’s homage tees revive, and which lessons still matter for hardware-software companies.
3 min · 718 words
Arya Mazumdar on the existential panic among mathematicians after AI claimed a Millennium Prize problem, and why the field’s identity is more than automated proofs.
3 min · 684 words
XNS argues wallets should only verify, authorize, sign, and broadcast—leaving construction and UX to apps—so independent reverse-checks catch compromised transaction builders.
7 min · 1,697 words
The people who know the most often sound the least certain
Vrash argues AI needs better storytellers, not researchers trained to sound like politicians—using a Dwarkesh conversation with John Schulman, Beren Millidge, and Charlie O'Neill to show how experts hedge while communicators overclaim.
7 min · 1,667 words
Fiscal dominance is here, or is it?
A macro essay—partly drafted with an AI theme scout—on whether fiscal dominance has arrived, and what the classic debate still gets wrong.
9 min · 1,979 words