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Everything filed under Writing, newest first.
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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
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
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
When I was a freshman at RISD, there was a club fair, and I was drawn to the RISD STEAM table, where I met Carly Ayres and Sayer Pease. They welcomed me with open arms, and I started to learn about things like 3D printers and Arduino. I first learned Processing from Clement Valla, paper electronics from Jie Qi, and then Arduino from Paul Badger. I fell in love, and the fate was more or less sealed when I made my first music synthesizer. Creating a tool that output things I never thought of while making it lit up my heart, and is still why I do the things I do today.…
5 min · 1,063 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
September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
Tom Wojcik ties the Hormuz closure, energy and food prices, bond-market repricing, NATO uncertainty, climate stress, AI-era job ladders, and Poland’s demographics into one essay on buffers swapped for dependencies.
29 min · 6,592 words
Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story
In 2011, Apple released the Cards app. The app — which required iOS 5 — let you design custom letterpress cards, with your messages and photos printed upon them — which Apple would ship to your recipient on your behalf. I recently learned the origin story of Cards, and that it was specifically a Steve Jobs product. It also wasn’t smooth sailing. But first, some backstory, and inserting myself into the narrative, because it’s my site and I can do what I want here.
6 min · 1,445 words
Ten Lines Of Code That Changed My World
Roel Nieskens picks ten short snippets—from BASIC hello-world loops to JavaScript wat Batman and typography hacks—that shaped how he thinks about programming, fronts-ends, and fonts.
3 min · 689 words
Marcos Magueta borrows a Roman naming practice to argue for clearer software names—how ancient cognomina habits map onto naming libraries, products, and the stories we tell about code.
5 min · 1,232 words
If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?
If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become? Yesterday, I received this email as a response to [You Can't Vibe Code Love](https://blog.codinghorror.com/you cant vibe code love/). It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well.
3 min · 679 words
I’ve been thinking about where I stand in respect to the current state of the industry.
5 min · 1,068 words
Ed Zitron's AI prediction track record
Dan Luu audits Ed Zitron’s AI commentary against outcomes: which predictions held, which missed, and how to read media AI takes more carefully.
46 min · 10,673 words
His frailty made Ozzy’s final gig true heavy metal
Sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris watches Ozzy Osbourne’s seated farewell show while nursing a broken ankle, and finds metal’s hardness was always a thin shell over frailty, shame, love, and bodies that fail.
9 min · 1,958 words
AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You
Alexandru Nedelcu argues that outsourcing coding, review, and reading to AI risks losing the hard-won wisdom that only comes from doing the work—and why “I haven’t written code since 2025” is a warning, not a flex.
4 min · 913 words
Unsealed Briefs: OpenAI Execs Knew Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal
Authors Guild summary of newly unsealed filings in Authors Guild v. OpenAI/Microsoft: internal messages on LibGen, fear of Hacker News “optics,” Project Clear deletions, and executives’ awareness that models would replace writers.
1 min · 343 words
Patrik Inzinger on AI-polished internal writing: a robot emoji says an agent typed the post, not whether a person owned the ideas—and why that can make a small team less legible.
3 min · 758 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
I'm tired of the AI tone. Not AI writing itself. AI is incredibly useful. I've probably used ChatGPT more this week than I'd like to admit. I'm talking about the weird, increasingly recognizable way everything on the internet now sounds like it was written by the same extremely articulate 27-year-old who has never had a bad day. You know the tone. Everything is a wedge. Every idea is not just X, but Y.
4 min · 839 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
LWN covers Typst’s rapid progress as a modern typesetting system — package ecosystem, compiler work, and why more people are trying it as an alternative to LaTeX workflows.
10 min · 2,217 words