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A personal essay recounting the author's experience starting at Google in 2007, describing the company's unique culture, the charismatic founders, and the intense corporate indoctrination.
The article explores the growing trend of relying on AI for thinking and decision-making, using anecdotes and a reference to a Ken Liu short story to question the loss of human autonomy.
An essay arguing that foundational, 'useless' research is essential for future useful innovations, illustrated by the Folk Computer project, a physical computing system that reimagines human-computer interaction.
This essay explores how legibility in software companies can be coercive, arguing that informal mutual aid networks—not formal processes—are the primary social reality, drawing on anarchist thinkers like Colin Ward and Kropotkin.
A reflective essay on how the rise of frictionless AI assistants is causing a loss of deep, personal acquaintance with computers, contrasting the hands-on computing era of the 1990s.
A tweet shares Hamming's classic essay 'You and Your Research,' which offers advice on choosing important problems and striving for greatness in research.
The author argues that as AI becomes commoditized, the real advantage will come from a shared standard for how to run intelligence collaboratively. They present their own falsifiable framework, developed over 10 years, and invite critique.
An essay drawing parallels between literary critic Harold Bloom and the critical attitudes of software engineers in the Lobsters community, while also critiquing the current AI hype and its financial unsustainability.
In this 2008 essay, Paul Graham argues that the hierarchical structure of large companies is unnatural for humans, comparing it to the difference between zoo animals and wild ones, and suggests that working in small groups (like startups) is more aligned with human nature.
The article discusses how students are deliberately avoiding proper punctuation like em-dashes to avoid being flagged as AI users by detection tools, highlighting an unintended consequence of AI writing detection in education.
The article identifies 'tree mapping'—the challenge of representing general graphs as hierarchical structures—as a third hard problem in computer science, alongside naming things and cache invalidation, and explores its manifestations in file systems, writing, architecture, and biology.
A tweet sharing and visualizing Tobi's essay on building AI-native companies, highlighting the risk that nobody learns from AI doing the work.
John Perry Barlow reflects on his upbringing in the physical world of ranching and contrasts it with the emerging information age, discussing the cultural shift and the loss of placefulness in a talk at the Conference on HyperNetworking.