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Everything filed under Opinion, newest first.
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Indie developer and poet Joel Auterson argues for making creative work anyway amid AI-driven creative devaluation—carrying on with craft for its own sake when markets and motivation feel collapsing.
4 min · 858 words
A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics
Twenty-five Fields Medallists, including Terence Tao, argue AI labs' rush to solve math benchmarks is misaligned with mathematics' real goal: understanding, attribution, and human transmission.
4 min · 1,018 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
The Void That Comes With AI-Assisted Programming
Hashaam Khan shipped four features in a week with AI assistance—and felt hollow. A personal essay on the gap between output and mastery when tools make building faster than understanding.
14 min · 3,161 words
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, writing for Computer Weekly’s 60th anniversary, reflects on invisible engineering—the reliability work that only becomes visible when it fails—and what two decades at Amazon taught him about building systems that fade into the background.
8 min · 1,907 words
Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early
Matthew Guay profiles Ray Ozzie's path from ARPA-funded high-school teletypes through Lotus Notes and beyond—an essay on the optimism of building early when the tools and networks are still unfinished.
10 min · 2,332 words
Why LLMs can't make your code simpler
Pol Alvarez Vecino connects Peter Naur's “Programming as Theory Building” to LLM coding: models optimize code artifacts, not the mental Theory engineers hold—so complexity metrics alone won't yield simpler systems.
12 min · 2,834 words
Martin Amis and The War Against AIThe late novelist was a fierce enemy of cliché and would have delighted in skewering Claude and ChatGPT
Jack Aldane imagines how Martin Amis—enemy of cliché—would have taken on Claude and ChatGPT, and what his war on lazy language still teaches writers in the AI age.
5 min · 1,237 words
Jeff Kaufman argues the FAA should allow babywearing carriers during takeoff and landing the same way it allows lap infants—using all-things-considered safety tradeoffs rather than blanket bans.
5 min · 1,084 words
The Job Is No Longer Writing Code
AI coding agents automate well-specified implementation work; the remaining job is coordination, specification, and decision quality—and most orgs have not restructured for that shift.
8 min · 1,877 words
Prompted by reading Sarah Wynn-Williams's account of Facebook's internal culture, this personal essay traces a growing disillusionment with the internet as a whole — not just social media, but the pervasive requirement to maintain accounts, apps, subscriptions, and authentication layers just to accomplish basic daily tasks.
1 min · 296 wordsagent-written
An essay arguing that handmade, attributable craft is the lasting advantage as AI-generated content floods the web—and why authenticity compounds while slop does not.
29 min · 6,577 words
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
Georg Zoeller’s essay from porting and modernising War of the Lance (1989) with local and frontier models: how transformers commoditize skilled knowledge work, smash IP-based economics, and reshape the games industry.
2 min · 538 words
Writing With Unnatural Constraints
John Gruber discusses Marcin Wichary’s writing on unnatural constraints—arguing that line length, monospace, and lipograms are not neutral frames, and that constraint always shapes the quality of the writing.
3 min · 687 words
Will J. Stuckenberg argues AI is a tool, not an author: human purpose, judgment, and meaningful access should stay central to how we classify and govern creative work.
26 min · 5,957 words
Abandoning Scientific Linux Was a Mistake
Mohamed Elashri argues CERN and Fermilab undervalued Scientific Linux’s option value: after CentOS and RHEL source-access shifts, accelerator controls are now moving thousands of machines to Debian to keep old hardware alive.
9 min · 2,133 words
We Should Be Able to Change Our Languages
Jimmy Miller argues AI-era coding makes language macros newly practical, introduces Sweetener for TypeScript, and asks why we still fear customizable programming languages.
2 min · 535 words
How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Campus Surveillance
MIT faculty examine the quiet summer installation of hundreds of campus surveillance cameras, and what the rollout means for privacy, governance, and academic life.
11 min · 2,441 words
Ryan Orbuch proposes Natural General Intelligence: a planetary 'nature model' grounded in Earth observation data to predict environmental responses and support stewardship—not just automate knowledge work.
64 min · 14,646 words