Subscriber-only Newsletter David French Sept. 18, 2025 By Opinion Columnist It’s hard to grasp the magnitude of the emerging threat to free speech in the United States. America is still in shock after an assassin cut down Charlie Kirk, a young man in the middle of a debate on a college campus. I can…

The original 128K Mac from 1984 came with a single Motorola 68000 processor running at 8 MHz that could only run one app at a time. Yet today’s Macs come with multiple CPU cores that can comfortably run several substantial apps simultaneously, while running a Time Machine backup and other tasks in…

There are two basic ways that computers can perform their tasks faster: the processors inside them can run faster by increasing their clock frequency, and there can be more processors working in parallel with one another. One of the main limitations on the frequency of processors is that faster…

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: Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World by Peter Godfrey-Smith Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 322 pp.,…

We’ve received a bunch of communications about the upcoming Canon EOS R7 Mark II, most of which we can’t vet for accuracy. When you can’t vet things, you have to wonder if things are made-up or simply wish lists. I’ll say up front that Canon’s APS-C camera lineup doesn’t really interest me, but I do…

A student struggling with reading, as too many American 12th graders are today. (Photo by FatCamera) One of the major themes of my writing is that mass media is driven by negativity bias, which is driven by audience behavior, and this is slowly driving us all crazy. So I genuinely hate to be the…

Python’s asyncio.gather function is great for I/O bound parallel processing. There’s a simple utility function I like to use that I call gather_in_batches: The way you use it is Generate a list of tasksGather your results Here’s some simple sample code to demonstrate: objects could be all sorts of…

When you’re surfing and get caught in the whitewater after a big wave, the feeling can be terrifying – you’re “caught on the inside.” I love this phrase because it conveys a feeling all humans have felt some version of: when things get a little intense, your body is burning oxygen, and you lose…

It's funny how quickly humans adjust to new technology. Only a few months ago Claude Code and other agents felt like magic, now it increasingly feels like browsing the internet in the late 90s on a dialup modem. Firstly, Anthropic has been suffering from pretty terrible reliability problems . And…

Founders with great businesses are often frustrated that they can’t raise money. Here’s why. I’ve been having coffee with lots of frustrated founders (my students and others) bemoaning most VCs won’t even meet with them unless they have AI in their fundraising pitch. And the AI startups they see are…

One of the biggest mistakes is shielding people from the pain they need to learn. Firing People I first became a manager when I was 26. I first had to fire someone when I was 26. I spent the whole week anxious. The night before I couldn’t sleep. On the day of the firing I was all nerves. On the way…

College films are a special breed of storytelling; they capture the rollercoaster of emotions that your late teens and early 20s bring. Whether that's the awkward firsts, the wild nights, the dreams that feel just within reach, or the crushing moments of reality check, these films are moving and…

Dayvi Schuster 8 min read Tuesday, September 23, 2025 A deep dive into the practical advantages of Zig over Rust for building command-line interfaces. Introduction So when it comes to memory management there are two terms you really need to know, the stack and the heap. The stack is a region of…

Since 2013, we’ve been metaphorically peering over the shoulders of programmers to create our annual interactive rankings of the most popular programming languages. But fundamental shifts in how people are coding may not just make it harder to measure popularity, but could even make the concept…

See the article in its original context from December 24, 2000, Section 11, Page 3Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. IN an area on the North Shore of Long Island where expensive owner-occupied single-family houses are the…

In 1975, a young engineer named Eric Favre took a trip to Rome that would change the history of coffee. Favre had recently started working at Nestlé’s headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland, and one of his first projects was to develop a machine that would combine the convenience of domestic coffee with…

Last week, I had coffee with someone who works at a big consulting firm. She spent twenty minutes explaining her role to me. Not because it was complex, but because she was trying to convince herself it existed. "I facilitate stakeholder alignment across cross-functional workstreams," she said. Then…

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: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson Avid Reader, 288 pp., $30.00 Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown by…

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: Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor by Emily Callaci Seal, 264 pp., $30.00 Many of us spend an enormous amount…

Subscribe to receive notifications of new posts: 2025-09-25 If you are building an application, you rely on email to communicate with your users. You validate their signup, notify them about events, and send them invoices through email. The service continues to find new purpose with agentic…

The coffee tastes like someone brewed a shovel of dirt. The bunkhouse stinks of exertion and your boots are still wet from yesterday’s toil. You and your partner sit under a lantern tending to the saw. Six feet of steel with huge teeth and tiny rakers that act like little spoons when they’re deep in…

Everyone knows what AWS S3 is, but few comprehend the massive scale it operates at, nor what it took to get there. In essence - it’s a scalable multi-tenant storage service with APIs to store and retrieve objects, offering extremely high availability1 and durability2 at a relatively low cost3. Scale…

International Review of Financial Analysis Volume 36, December 2014, Pages 1-19 Author links open overlay panel https://doi.org/10.1016/j.irfa.2014.07.015Get rights and content Under a Creative Commons license Open access Abstract This paper presents the first empirical evidence in the history of…

05 Jul, 2025 I read to forget. Even when studying or working on papers for a PhD, I approach texts with the same mindset: I'm not a storage device that needs to save all bits of information. I am more of a system of Bayesian beliefs, constantly evolving and updating in small, incremental steps. I…

08 Feb, 2025 I stumbled on the video Prize lecture: Ben Bernanke, economic sciences prize 2022 and was confused about what Mr. Bernanke says about lending markets. First, in minute two of the video, he talks about the simple economics of lending. There is imperfect and asymmetric information. That…

Image Credits:Andriy Onufriyenko / Getty Images Venture CodeRabbit raises $60M, valuing the 2-year-old AI code review startup at $550M Marina Temkin 12:00 PM PDT · September 16, 2025 Harjot Gill was running FluxNinja, an observability startup he co-founded several years after selling his first…

← Back to Stategraph TL;DR why-stategraph.tldr $ cat why-stategraph.tldr • Terraform state shows distributed coordination issues but uses file primitives. • File blob (100% read/lock) vs. change cone (~3%). • Stategraph → graph state, ACID transactions, subgraph isolation. The Terraform ecosystem…

One of the standout features of tools like Docker and Kubernetes is the ability to quickly exec into a production shell. With environment variables configured, working directory set, and everything ready to go, you’re primed for action. But not every project uses Docker in production, which makes…

Every month or so, a new blog article declaring the near demise of CSV in favor of some "obviously superior" format (parquet, newline-delimited JSON, MessagePack records etc.) find its ways to the reader's eyes. Sadly those articles often offer a very narrow and biased comparison and often fail to…

In perpetuity All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity Finding working copies of the last few titles was an "especially cursed" journey. Kyle Orland – Sep 8, 2025 12:24 pm | 47 The iPod might not be the ideal device for playing Sonic the Hedgehog, but you can do it!…

Illustration by Melinda Beck Annenberg professor Emily Falk’s new book probes the human brain’s value system. For Emily Falk, who studies how we make choices, choosing to take a job at Penn was easy. For one thing, it meant coming home. Falk grew up in the Delaware Valley, got interested in…