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Rolling the ladder up behind us
Who will take over for us if we don't train the next generation to replace us? A critique of craft, AI, and the legacy of human expertise.
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AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
AI is impressive because we’ve failed at semantic web and personal computing | exotext
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Is it possible to allow sideloading and keep users safe?
In which I attempt to be pragmatic. Are you allowed to run whatever computer program you want on the hardware you own? This is a question where freedom, practicality, and reality all collide into a mess. Google has recently announced that Android users will only be able to install apps which have been digitally signed…
364
Tomorrow's emoji today: Unicode 17.0
Trombone emoji skanking it's way into our hearts …
365
I announced my divorce on Instagram and then AI impersonated me
After maintaining a total stance of public silence for months, I recently publicly announced my unexpected divorce on Instagram. I shared a picture of the divorce cake that my friends got for me, and shared a brief essay I had drafted the day before about the news. I had to edit it down slightly from my original draft…
366
People are just as bad as my LLMs
Last year I created a fun little experiment where I asked a bunch of LLMs to rank 97 hackernews users using their comment history based on whether they would be good candidates for the role of “software engineer at google”. (yes yes, seems silly I know, you can read part 1 and part 2 but […]
367
The hype is the product
Large publicly traded tech companies seem to no longer consider their customers – that is, people and organizations who actually buy their products or pay for access to their services – their core foc
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Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr
P2P and federated protocols converge toward becoming Nostr, but with extra steps
369
63 Chinese Cuisines: The Complete Guide (2024)
Not one cuisine, not eight, but many more. Our best shot at a comprehensive-ish guide.
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Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)
I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver of my thoughts made it into the article, but the question from Nellie Bowles was very stimulating so I wanted to share more of my thoughts.
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Is Ketamine Neurotoxic?
It is clear that ketamine at a sufficient dose & frequency can and does kill neurons through NMDA-driven excitotoxicity. However, what does a sufficient dose & frequency mean? There is a common myth that ketamine is “neurogenetic”. This is mostly false. While it does increase neurogenesis in the only two places in the…
372
Silence Is a Commons by Ivan Illich (1983)
Ivan Illich is doing to computers what he did to education (De-Schooling Society, 1971), to energy (Energy and Equity, 1974), to medicine (Medical Nemesis, 1975), and to sex roles (Vernacular Gender, 1983). Each time it has been radical analysis that changes our perception of what is really going on. Each time, and…
373
Midcentury North American Restaurant Placemats
Like so many past ephemera finds I’ve shared here, I bought these midcentury North American restaurant placemats at Brimfield Flea this July from a vendor who had around 500 in a big plastic tub. I bought 25 for $75 (a steal!) but I did have to talk myself out of asking how much it would be for the whole box. Most of…
374
Why are there no good dinosaur films?
running on jurassic park's fumes for over 30 years
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A look at the creative process behind Bluey and Cocomelon (2024)
These are the two most-streamed children's shows. Joe Brumm's personal touch for Bluey trumps Cocomelon's engagement-hacking approach.
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AI should only run as fast as we can catch up
Last month, I met with Eric, a fearless PM at a medium size startup who recently got into vibe coding with Gemini.
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Half of America's Voting Machines Are Now Owned by a MAGA Oligarch
They told us elections were rigged. Then they cloned stolen voting software. Then they bought the voting machines.
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Skynet won and destroyed humanity
For a very long time, it appeared obvious to outside observers of the time flow that Skynet would never win the war, and never annihilate humanity.
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Firefox OS's story from a Mozilla insider not working on the project (2024)
I clearly remember, but can't date it. I was working for Mozilla messaging at the time ( momo ), being the QA lead for Thunderbird. It was at the end of one of the Mozilla All-hands, maybe in 2011 or 2012. At one of the ending keynotes, we were introduced to Boot 2 Gecko. A hack that would let US - Mozilla own the…
381
The value of institutional memory
In 1978, a dredging gang working for British Waterways was struggling with a problem. They were trying to clear obstacles on the Chesterfield Canal so they could stabilise a concrete wall — not an …
382
Can “second life” EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage?
Colin Campbell explains how Redwood drains every drop of capacity from used batteries before they are recycled.
383
A year of vibes
A personal recap of 2025 and a year of a new style of engineering.
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Attention is a luxury good
Luxury goods are special: they are scarce and expensive, and they earn us status with some folks because it shows that we paid more than we needed to. Luxury isn’t about quality, suitability …
385
Slow social media
How can we design better platforms?
386
A Post Mortem on the Gino Case
Zoe Ziani, a psychology researcher who had the misfortune several years ago as a Ph.D. student be tasked with following up on some unrelicable published psychology research, tells the story of how her department pulled the chair out from under her:
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AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery
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LLM Inflation
One of the signal achievements of computing is data compression 1 : we take in data, make it smaller while retaining all information (“lossless” compression), transmit it, and then decompress it back to the original at the other end.
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AI Slop vs. OSS Security
griff Table of Contents Author's Note What Exactly is the Problem? Human Capital is Limited Burnout Burnout Burnout What AI Slop Looks Like The CV...