Josh Wulf and I talked loop engineering for four episodes. The models stopped being the constraint a long time ago; what's left is vision, verification and agency. Delete your skill packs, put the…

Intended audience: non-technical citizens of the web

A response to Rich Hickey's "'AI' is Not a Tool": automation and tool use can coexist, and wielding an LLM well requires skill, feedback, and judgment.

A fabulously gay blind Romance author.

It might be us. Even when there are photos, videos or tape recordings, people find that they can’t agree on what happened. Our vivid recollections can be vivid, but they might not be accurate…

No war required

My theory of life

Insights You Can See. Gapingvoid works with leaders to design culture intentionally.

Three of China’s pioneers raise huge rounds ahead of much-anticipated IPOs

Search everything on your Mac by meaning. Give your agents the best context in one search instead of a disk-wide grep. See who owns what, and find knowledge gaps. Free and local.

On a good day, my bongo score looks like this: Compared to all the people who have played this morning, it’s right at the top. That could be great… Except I’m not being compared t…

Play the original Total Annihilation demo in your browser with Nanolathe, an open-source 2.5D RTS engine. Install the native beta, play online with friends, explore the code and build on it.

Forty years of computing was designed around humans as the reader, writer and operator. On AI21's YAAP podcast I argued that's no longer a design goal, and what that means for programming languages.

One of the original promises of a personal computer was that the computer would be personal. It's kind of strange to think that, now in 2026, it has taken circa 40 years for this to actually become…

In other posts, I’ve written about the distinction between “the work” and “the workplace.” I want to dig a little more into what makes workplaces unique.

When Ralph was published last year, I sat on it. People who have been reading this blog for a while know this. I first came across the idea of loop engineering in early January last year, sat on it…

Justin Cormack, who worked on MirageOS back in the day, called me at the pub to talk about why unikernels are coming back. The friction that made them hard is gone, the operating system is design…

Rivian has a new ad, starring Bill Murray. It’s not a great ad (more on that below) but the remarkable thing is that it features the quirky, beloved and scarce Bill Murray. Between the movie …

Insights You Can See. Gapingvoid works with leaders to design culture intentionally.

Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?

How frontier labs, neolabs, and investors can all win

In 1980s Southern England, intricate crop circles are appearing overnight, and people are desperate for an explanation. Could humans really create something so complex without anyone spotting them?…

When focused on the things we can change, dissatisfaction is a powerful tool. Accepting everything else–the parts we can’t or won’t change–reserves our energy for the places…

Our new decision-scoring model delivers top performance in latency and quality on structured decision tasks to outperform both LLMs and other decision models.

The Firebase iOS SDK crashed after a backend change, crashing all apps which used Firebase analytics for 2-6 hours. Google didn’t update the status page, but did offer a postmortem 4 days later.

Last week’s column, with the aid of a pink romantasy bookshop, discussed the way a healthy economy offers “disciplined pluralism”. Discipline means that sooner or later, uneconomic ideas fail. Plur…

You're a teacher by simply doing what you're doing.

When you sign up for my newsletter, you'll get a free sci-fi short story: Starfarer, monthly updates on space science and sci-fi, and updates on my writing projects!

Civilized culture is based on a thin sort of friction. You don’t yell at the library, act boorish at a restaurant or hassle a minor celebrity at the supermarket. It’s just not done. The…

An open speech recognition model that runs on the same CPU engine as Needle. It transcribes seven languages, reaches the first token in 11 ms, and loads beside Needle so one binary turns a clip…

How a group of historians took years to imagine Zotero, the research application that would eventually be used by millions

The long read: On 14 January this year, army and navy squads faced an unprecedented challenge: one bomb on a Plymouth building site, another floating on a dredger in Exmouth. That afternoon, the…

The horns sound out in the theater. Resonant in a space that predates amplifiers. The drum strikes deeply. I enter the stage in the mist of the smoke machine and green light. I can't see the audience…

Why phoenix_test makes Phoenix feature tests read better and fail more usefully.

The djinn go back millennia, powerful and elusive creatures of the supernatural. They show up across time and culture. Three hundred years ago, Charles Perrault retold a short story about a headstr…

Read and write your data at any point in time, past, present or future, with a single option.

I’d put in my hours. 482 weeks. 3,379 days. That’s how long I’d been studying the Stoics when I sat down to write the Daily Stoic. I was 29 years old and I knew enough to write a couple-hundred-page…

Insights You Can See. Gapingvoid works with leaders to design culture intentionally.

In October, the apples in New England are some of the best in the world. Alas, the apples in this bowl are nine months old and from 3000 miles away. I found them sitting in a forlorn corner of a ho…

If you just need bash, why do you need codemode?

A very long rant, riffing on the opportunity for bootstrapped startups who seek to create value using AI. I wrote it a while ago, thought it was too long, but in arguing with an AI today (everyone …

A look at how Four Seasons founder Isadore Sharp learnt to handle recessions in one of the most cyclical industries known to man.

Insights You Can See. Gapingvoid works with leaders to design culture intentionally.

Are the devastating wildfires of this summer the result of the shifting climate? Of human greed and stupidity? Or simply of a decline in extensive husbandry and pastoralism?

Not long after 8.30 a.m. on 26 August, a mass of rock and ice, more than six hundred metres wide, broke off the face of...

Who is the AI villain we should be angry at?

Someone who has seen a lot of movies but has never made one has a certain kind of knowledge. The same is true for clients, patients and students. They haven’t solved a problem, healed a patie…

Women don't avoid sovereign hobbies by accident; they get pulled back before they ever reach the water

What changes when a tool doesn't have to pay for itself. Years ago, if an app annoyed me, I shrugged and dealt with it.

I was happy for years in Apple’s walled garden; with AI, however, their protections feel like limitations.