Earlier this week, Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license. In doing so, he may have killed "copyleft." Version 7.0 employs an MIT license in place of the previous GNU Lesser General…

The first time I sat down and used Claude Code's Opus 4.5 to build software, I couldn't believe how good it was. My next thought was: this is going to change the dynamics inside software teams. The standoff between roles Marc Andreessen recently described the moment as a “Mexican standoff:” Every…

John Maynard Keynes thought we would have 15-hour workweeks by now. Today’s Mailbag post is off schedule because we at Slow Boring wanted to get some proper Iran coverage up yesterday. That also means I skipped over a bunch of the Iran questions that readers asked. Every Sunday we invite paid…

For the longest time, I’ve procrastinated on finding a good backup and storage solution for my Fujifilm RAW files. My solution up until recently involved manually copying my photos across two external SSD drives. This was quite a hassle and I hadn’t yet figured out a good off-site backup strategy.…

There has been a lot of discussion online lately about vibe coding and and how Large Language Models (LLMs) will revolutionize the field of software development. Every new model will launch us into realms of pure productivity, shipping software at the speed of thought and removing all the friction…

The Chardet Controversy: AI-Generated Code, Licensing Wars, and the Ghost of Google v. OracleA heated dispute has erupted within the Python community involving Mark Pilgrim, the original creator of the chardet library, and the project’s current maintainers. The conflict centers on the release of…

Present day. Present time. Jason Hutchens 7 min read·3 days ago -- In 2001 Paul Ford travelled from New York to Tel Aviv to work with me at a secretive AI startup. We were building a baby computer that could learn to use language from first principles, by making predictions about which word should…

HomeEssaysCollectionsExploreSourcesShopSupport PDRAboutBlog Search The Public Domain Review Support PDR EssaysCollectionsExploreSourcesShopAboutBlog This unique self-portrait, also known as "view from the left eye", is the creation of Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, noted for his…

The conflict between AT&T and BSD in the 1980s and early 1990s is a pivotal moment in the history of operating systems. This period shaped the development of open-source software and the legal frameworks around intellectual property in software. Here’s an extensive account of the situation. 1. The…

Each day when you wake up, you come back to yourself. You see the room around you, feel your body brush against your clothes and think about your plans, worries and hopes for the day. This daily internal experience is miraculous and mysterious, and the subject of Michael Pollan’s new book, A World…

‘They like to smoke,” says the publicist ahead of my interview with Paolo Sorrentino and Toni Servillo. That’s why the table and chairs have been hastily dragged outside. That’s why today’s audience will be conducted alfresco. We’re on the cramped sixth-floor balcony of a Venice hotel, overlooking…

I am occasionally asked by colleges to give a version of a talk on how I became a writer. The easy thing to do is to give a sort of guided tour through the woods of literary self-formation: a string of anecdotes designed to elicit a few chuckles, a moment or two of reflection about the inevitable…

A new camera system is making it possible for humans to see colors in the way animals do, opening up a vivid new perspective on the natural world. Led by researcher Vera Vasas, who has spent years studying animal vision, this innovative project is changing how we understand what animals actually…

It’s difficult these days to make a nature documentary that isn’t like all the others. Spectacular landscapes, crisp closeup photography, tales of predation and survival, birth and death: whether you go for Pixar cuteness, crimson claws or environmental crisis, it’s been done 100 times before.…

Whatever you think about the charitable gifts of MacKenzie Scott, no one would describe them as small. The novelist and philanthropist gave away $7 billion in 2025. That’s more than her ex-husband Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has given away in his entire lifetime. But when Scott penned her end-of-year…

Room with a View, 2026, shot on iPhone 16. Photograph: Adela Ramirez Room with a View, 2026, shot on iPhone 16. Photograph: Adela Ramirez Smart shotPhotography Seeing people walking their pets in a snowstorm melted the heart of this New York-based photographer Sat 7 Mar 2026 06.00 EST Share Prefer…

In each of her previous novels and story collections, the Irish author Mary Costello has revealed the inner vastness hidden within even the quietest lives. Her latest book, A Beautiful Loan, goes further, with a faithful, poetic exploration of the multitudes we contain and what it means to be human.…

William Butler Yeats in 1911. He went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.Photo Illustration by Megan Le; photograph by George Charles Beresford, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons I forwarded an email to my friend Sam with the note, “Want to go to this?” “This” was something called an…

Renate Reinsve as Nora Borg in Sentimental Value. Neon Stellan Skarsgård plays a filmmaker attempting to reconnect with his estranged daughters in the latest from director Joachim Trier. "The conflict between working as an artist and combining that with a personal life is difficult … that goes for…

Something funny happens when you bring up the name Harold Bloom in an academic setting. I’ve seen it happen many times: the rolled or averted eyes, maybe even a little scoff, a look that says Jesus, him again? “Write about his ideas,” a professor once told me, “and no one will take your work…

At Discord, we want the experience of chatting with your friends, reacting to a message, or posting artisanal farm-to-channel memes to feel instantaneous. We’ve managed to achieve this at scale by leveraging Elixir’s powerful concurrency mechanisms to run each Discord server (which we call a “guild”…

Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship by Louis P. Masur Oxford University Press, 169 pp., $24.99 As though…

Hold your horses, though. I'm not unveiling a new S3-native database. This paper is from 2008. Many of its protocols feel clunky today. Yet it nails the core idea that defines modern cloud-native databases: separate storage from compute. The authors propose a shared-disk design over Amazon S3, with…

Much has been said about AI decimating the job market for developers. In an industry changing this quickly, we certainly can’t blame people—especially junior and aspiring engineers—for worrying that the AI automation wave might sweep their jobs out from under them. More existentially, some are…

The Magic Mountain (public library) by Thomas Mann The thundering success of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain … required the intervention of the rector to keep us from spending the whole night awake, waiting for Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat to kiss. Or the rare tension of all of us sitting up…

I enjoy writing code. Let me get that out of the way first. The problem solving, the architecture decisions, the feeling when something clicks into place. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is everything around it. Lately I’ve been spending most of my time writing agents and tools. Building…

This is the fourth installment in my series on delimiters in languages. I recommend reading the first article to understand the implication of categorizing XML tags as delimiters in this context. (March 2, 2026: Updated the considerations around the training vs. model inference framework). The tour…

Coordinating concurrent tasks around shared state is one of the most common problems in Python's asyncio. The standard library gives you asyncio.Event and asyncio.Condition, but each has a gap that only shows up under real concurrency pressure. We hit this while building Inngest's Python SDK, where…

I read a lot on the web. I almost never look at websites, though. I consume almost everything through an RSS reader. As AI reshapes the way online information is organised and consumed, it increasingly feels like I'm behind the scenes, watching the performance from the wings rather than seeing it…

Should humans stay out of the software development process and vibe code, or do we need developers in the loop inspecting every line of code? I believe the answer is to focus on the goal of turning ideas into outcomes. The right place for us humans is to build and manage the working loop rather than…

Everything I believed about software has changed rapidly over the past few years. AI tools like Codex, Cursor, and Claude Code are making development vastly faster and more accessible. The value of traditional software businesses is cratering,1 and the far-and-away most important software assets are…

Almost exactly two hundred years ago, a twenty-year-old Englishman posed himself a pointed question: “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this…

If you have fond memories of clicking away on the BlackBerry, the Palm Treo, the T-Mobile Sidekick or similar handhelds from back in the day, I have good news for you: Phones with keyboards are making a comeback. Sort of. There's a growing number of companies looking to bring back clicky, tactile…

Time marches on, but literary discourse is eternal. The last week has seen a revival of the “should aspiring fiction writers actually read books?” debate. I won’t bother bothering you with the origins or the arguments. Obviously, good artists study their mediums. They also tend to enjoy the art…