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…

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…

Ilya & I discuss SSI’s strategy, the problems with pre-training, how to improve the generalization of AI models, and how to ensure AGI goes well. Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sponsors Gemini 3 is the first model I’ve used that can find connections I haven’t anticipated. I…

Photo: Koch Films Is it true that you were thinking of quitting acting before you got the call from director Joachim Trier? Yes, literally the day after I made my decision! It was so strange. I had a big lying in bed moment followed by the release of “OK, I’m done. I’m not going to do this anymore”.…

Even before Covid hit, Nicolette Ross, now 40, was contemplating a move. She was part of a community of artists and entrepreneurs in Chicago—she managed a printmaking studio and freelanced as a printmaker and custom binder—for a decade. But in 2020, because of Covid social isolation, Ross and her…

REVIEW ESSAY Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang W.W. Norton, 2025, 304 pages What forces created such an awe-inspiring material civilization? What administrative and intellectual systems created the conditions for this development? Is such an [end-state] the result of…

Photo by Richard Jaimes on Unsplash Attraction is mostly physical. We’re told by scientific studies, and an impressive amount of research, that body shapes signalling fertility, symmetrical faces, and clear skin are all signs of human attractiveness. We tell women to wear red lipstick. We tell men…

Published: November 24, 2025 This is Part 3 of Modern JavaScript for Django Developers. Welcome to Part 3! In case you missed it—in Part 1 we covered how to organize a JavaScript codebase inside a Django project, and in Part 2 we provided a crash course in JavaScript tooling. And now we finally…

Over the past year, I’ve had many disquieting realizations — that the American voter is more forgiving of insurrections than inflation, that being 37 means having one bad knee (and another not particularly good one), and that the New York Mets made a pact with Satan in the fall of 1986, for which…

I’m excited to publish this post co-authored with Timothy Lee, one of my favorite writers on technology and artificial intelligence. His Substack Understanding AI is a fantastic guide to how AI works as a technology and a business. Photo by Gertrūda Valasevičiūtė on Unsplash In the last few weeks,…

Our newest model, Claude Opus 4.5, is available today. It’s intelligent, efficient, and the best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use. It’s also meaningfully better at everyday tasks like deep research and working with slides and spreadsheets. Opus 4.5 is a step forward in what AI…

Before a car crash in 2008 left her paralysed from the neck down, Nancy Smith enjoyed playing the piano. Years later, Smith started making music again, thanks to an implant that recorded and analysed her brain activity. When she imagined playing an on-screen keyboard, her brain–computer interface…

The Android operating system is incredibly versatile. Beyond smartphones, it officially powers tablets, watches, TVs, cars, and XR headsets. However, it has virtually no presence on traditional PCs, where Google instead relies on ChromeOS. Despite Google’s efforts to challenge the dominance of…

I’ve been testing Google’s new Gemini 3 model. It is very good. But rather than give you benchmark numbers, I’m going to show you how far AI has come in three years by asking the AI to demonstrate it. It has been slightly less than three years since the release of ChatGPT. A few days before that…

Issues involving the care of vulnerable people are some of the few issues that still resonate across the political spectrum. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned to victory on universal child care, among other affordability concerns. On the campaign trail in 2024, President Donald Trump’s…

Anthropic released its most capable artificial intelligence model yet on Monday, slashing prices by roughly two-thirds while claiming state-of-the-art performance on software engineering tasks — a strategic move that intensifies the AI startup's competition with deep-pocketed rivals OpenAI and…

We’re going to largely skip markets again, because the sweater is rapidly unraveling in other areas as I pull on threads. Suffice it to say that the market is LARGELY unfolding as I had expected — credit stress is rising, particularly in the tech sector. Many are now pointing to the rising CDS for…

Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult 24th November 2025 Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 this morning, which they call “best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use”. This is their attempt to retake the crown for best coding model after significant…

Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets is often cited, perhaps apocryphally, as having said that there are four types of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina. Japan, an island lacking natural resources and defeated in war, had every reason to be underdeveloped. Argentina,…

The future of AI agents is one where models work seamlessly across hundreds or thousands of tools. An IDE assistant that integrates git operations, file manipulation, package managers, testing frameworks, and deployment pipelines. An operations coordinator that connects Slack, GitHub, Google Drive,…

The PivotNine Blog 19 September 2025 Justin Warren Blog NPM FOSS npm open source parasocial xz It is a remarkable triumph of free and open source software (FOSS) that it is so useful and so reliable that it has become ubiquitous. So reliable, in fact, that organisations of all shapes and sizes have…

Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people’s beds. A little…

There have been a few discussions about what Flathub should do to push developers to maintain their apps on the latest versions of the published runtimes. But most of those lack important details around how this would actually happen. I will not discuss in this post the technical means that are…