For much of the world, technology has become so intertwined with our day-to-day lives that it influences everything. Our relationships, the care we seek, how we work, what we do to protect ourselves, even the things we choose to learn and when. It would be understandable to read this as a dystopian…

“Developing superintelligence is now in sight,” says Mark Zuckerberg, heralding the “creation and discovery of new things that aren’t imaginable today.” Powerful AI “may come as soon as 2026 [and will be] smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields,” says Dario Amodei, offering the…

“Don’t make stuff because you want to make money — it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous — because you will never feel famous enough,” John Green advised aspiring writers. “If you worship money and things … then you will never have enough. Never…

Ever present in my mind is The List: the countries I still haven’t gone to that I most want to visit. Ethiopia is on The List. So is Indonesia. And South Korea. And Madagascar. And Taiwan. Early on, my wife and I pledged to visit two new countries every year, and we mostly pulled it off. Then came…

The beautiful, brushed dial is catching the light perfectly, creating a subtle sunburst effect as a simple spar sweeps round to 12. Not 12 o'clock, but a 12 set at 1 o'clock. A crucial 12, though, because it marks the time to change. It signals the zenith of a screaming crescendo that began mere…

The editors at The Baffler want me to talk about my job. They want me to humiliate myself in the pages of this magazine. Very well: I am a podcaster. What is a podcaster? It’s someone who makes money from talking, often by means of selling dick pills. I don’t do that part, but I still obscure what I…

In 1905, a designer named Eleisha Pechey created a playful serif font called Windsor for the British type foundry Stephenson Blake. Exactly 70 years later, legendary type designer Ed Benguiat, who has created or redesigned logotypes for The New York Times, Coca-Cola and Ford, would run into Woody…

I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five…

Intro Let’s explore and deobfuscate the input stack on Linux. Our aim is to understand its components and what each does. Input handling can be divided into two parts, separated by a common layer: Kernel-level handling: It deals with what happens in the kernel and how events are exposed to…

Stoatphoto, Shutterstock The purpose or meaning of holiday traditions, rotely handed down from a distant past, can often be elusive. Halloween for example: We need the help of historians, to say nothing of psychologists, to understand the things we do on that day. But the same would not seem to be…

Sometimes you need to set environment variables with secrets, API keys or tokens, but they can be susceptible to exfiltration by malware, as seen during the recent Shai-Hulud attack. For publishing to PyPI, it’s strongly recommended to use Trusted Publishing rather than managing long-lived tokens on…

If you use AI coding agents, you face the same challenge: how do you give them enough context to understand your architecture, conventions, and workflows without repeating yourself? The problem compounds as your codebase grows. Complex module relationships, domain-specific patterns, and team…

Every once in a while, the curtain of the ordinary parts and we touch the miraculous — the sense that there is another world not beyond this one but within it, a mirror-world any glimpse of which returns our own more luminous and full of wonder. This can never be willed, but one can be willing for…

It might surprise you to hear that one of this year’s awards season contenders is a Norwegian film. But it’s not the first time. In 2022, Joachim Trier’s sly, POV-shifting relationship drama The Worst Person in the World snuck into the Academy Awards with nods for Best International Film and Best…

Since Google introduced Pixel VIPs in June, the widget has become the primary way I message and call people. I use it multiple times throughout the day and it’s close to entering my first homescreen. 9to5Google has a rebooted newsletter that highlights the biggest Google stories with added…

In a photo industry of ever-increasing prices, it’s refreshing to see optics that supply exceptional value for the dollar. The new Canon RF 45mm f/1.2 STM made the entire industry double-take upon seeing an f/1.2 optic for only $479. Surely, there must be a catch, so I took the handy little 45mm to…

There was a time when culture gestured outward toward shared experience, toward the new, toward some horizon of possibility. Now, it stares inward, fragmented, homogenized, and devoid of collective significance. The internet, once mythologized as the great democratizer of creativity, has instead…

THE NOTIONAL VALUE TRAP Foreword Just as growth in the “real” economy of material products and services has been decelerating towards contraction, so aggregates of financial wealth have carried on increasing relentlessly. Since the widening disequilibrium between the monetary and the material must…

I don’t remember when I first started noticing that people I knew out in the world had lost their sense of erotic privacy, but I do remember the day it struck me as a phenomenon that had escaped my timeline and entered my real, fleshy life. It was last year, when I was having a conversation with a…

We're excited to announce a major architectural improvement to Atuin Desktop: a completely redesigned runbook execution engine. This is a huge change, the first big step toward making runbooks a core automation primitive. If you’ve ever hit flaky context, disappearing state, or inconsistent…

If you’ve ever tried to dive into JSON Schema, you’ve probably encountered a wall of terminology that makes your head spin: schemas, metaschemas, dialects, vocabularies, keywords, anchors, dynamic references. It feels like the community invented new words for things that already had perfectly good…

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. I grew up in Pasadena, California, attending school with the sons and daughters of fathers (yup, in those days it was only dads) who worked at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.…

“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter. In his splendid short poem about the secret of happiness, Kurt Vonnegut exposed the taproot of our modern suffering as the gnawing sense that what we have is not enough,…

I haven’t published since April because I’ve been afraid. I also avoided social media, news aggregators, and discussion forums for months. I’m done letting fear stop me. What was I afraid of? In this post I detail every single thing I’ve avoided admitting on this blog. Knowledge Gap Confessions…

‘I like this, it’s good,” Ethan Hawke tells Richard Linklater, midway through a lively digression that has already hopped from politics to the Beatles to the late films of John Huston. “What’s good?” asks Linklater. “All of this,” says Hawke, by which he means the London hotel suite with its coffee…

As AI agents become more capable, developers are increasingly asking them to take on complex tasks requiring work that spans hours, or even days. However, getting agents to make consistent progress across multiple context windows remains an open problem. The core challenge of long-running agents is…

When we shared this year’s Octoverse data with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, his first reaction was genuine surprise. While TypeScript overtook Python to become the most used language on GitHub as of August 2025 (marking the biggest language shift in more than a decade), Python still grew…

Scientists have identified five major “epochs” of human brain development in one of the most comprehensive studies to date of how neural wiring changes from infancy to old age. The study, based on the brain scans of nearly 4,000 people aged under one to 90, mapped neural connections and how they…

“Why worry about something that isn’t going to happen?” KGB Chairman Charkov’s question to inorganic chemist Valery Legasov in HBO’s “Chernobyl” miniseries makes a good epitaph for the hundreds of software development, modernization, and operational failures I have covered for IEEE Spectrum since my…

Friday, September 12, 2025 1:43PM ET by Gabe Rivera (@gaberivera) Permalink Please clap for Techmeme Techmeme turns 20 freaking years old today. This is our self-congratulatory post marking the occasion. Please share, retweet, and offer your sincerest congratulations. And thanks to so many of you…

Massively Against AI What Does That Even Mean? Armin Ronacher recently asked over on Mastodon: Is this platform still massively against AI or has it moved more towards acceptance? I started to answer on there, but figured I might as well post on my blog, since I have thoughts... It seems like, for…

uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade Programming 23 October 2025 | Reading time: 6 minutes It’s 2025. Does installing Python, managing virtual environments, and synchronizing dependencies between your colleagues really have to be so difficult? Well… no! A brilliant new…

The word alone is enough to make some people break out in a cold sweat, and it’s hard to blame them. These fuzzy, diminutive creatures, complete with a stare some have described as demonic, became truly inescapable over this past summer. Everywhere I turned, from the airport to the mall to the…