Year: 2019 There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist. A good example is the obsession with…

Our AI Codecon conference kicked off today with Coding with AI: The End of Software Development as We Know It. Here are my opening remarks introducing the series’ themes. You can reserve your seat for upcoming AI Codecon events here. Thanks so much for joining us today. We have over 20,000 people…

“Who Broke the Internet?” is a new podcast from CBC Understood that I host and co-wrote — it’s a four-part series that explains how the enshitternet came about, and, more importantly, what we can do about it. Episode one is out this week:…

At the bottom of the abyss between us is the hard fact that to be a person, a particular person, is so profoundly different from what any other person can suppose. This is why one of the hardest learnings in life is that you cannot love — or scold, or coax, or palter — anyone out of their personal…

One of the strangest features of American work culture is the constant pressure to treat one’s job as something more than a job: a calling, a means of expressing oneself, a vehicle for personal growth. This pressure comes from bosses, of course, who would rather foster intrinsic motivation than pay…

Year: 2019 There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist. A good example is the obsession with…

When I first heard the phrase vibe coding, I rolled my eyes a little. It sounded like another fleeting buzzword, one of those things that shows up in a thread, gets memed into the ground, and disappears before it ever really lands. As someone who respects the craft of building software, the idea of…

Typical attire of a GPU utilization maximizer. Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs, are the hottest mathematical co-processor since the FM synthesis chips that shaped the sounds of the late 1900s. Like all co-processors, they are chosen when the performance of more flexible commodity hardware, like…

Canon has long been known for pushing the boundaries of lens design, but their latest patent is extreme, even by their standards. A new patent filing hints at an ambitious leap in lens design: a 24mm lens with an f/0.7 aperture. This combination of ultra-wide and ultra-fast is rare, typically…

As we published last month, the long-rumored Canon RF 200-500mm f/4L IS USM appears to have been shelved. In its place, sources tell us, Canon is working on a new super-telephoto: the RF 300-600mm f/5.6L IS USM — a professional-grade zoom designed for wildlife and sports photographers who want the…

Despite not being officially announced by Sandisk, the WD Black SN8100 is available for pre-order at Amazon (Germany), at the equivalent of $225 for the 1TB variant, via momomo_us . With listed reads of 14.9 GB/s, this should be the fastest consumer PCIe 5.0 SSD, at least if we're talking about…

There is plenty of commentary online about how AI will replace coding as we know it in the future. There’s huge amounts of prediction about what the future holds.1 But I haven’t come across many case studies of rolling out the tools that exist today. So here’s some observations. For context: SaaS…

Memory safety is a cornerstone of Zig’s design philosophy. While maintaining the performance benefits of manual memory management, Zig incorporates sophisticated safety mechanisms to prevent common memory-related errors. This article provides an in-depth exploration of Zig’s memory safety features…

Credit: Sveta/Adobe Stock Chicago Booth Review Podcast Why Is Some News More Newsworthy? April 30, 2025 CBR Podcast What makes news stories newsworthy? Can you measure newsworthiness? Are people right in thinking that the media tend to focus on bad news? Chicago Booth’s Emir Kamenica argues that…

Are customers on the European side of the pond considering a move from US hyperscalers in the wake of recent events? Some of the region's vendors are reporting an uptick in inquiries as organizations mull their options. After a year of navel-gazing over AI, the topic dominating conversations at…

tl;dr - At a certain scale, all applications need a task queue - think Celery for Python, BullMQ for Node.js, and Sidekiq for Rails. Hatchet is an open-source, managed task queue focused on scale, reliability, and improved developer experience. https://youtu.be/3myPYVyaqwM The problem Building a…

Let it Be(OS) The BeOS file system, an OS geek retrospective From the archives: In the '90s, OS geeks adored BFS's ahead-of-its-time feature set. Andrew Hudson – Jul 5, 2018 11:22 am | 150 HD, so like... a high-definition floppy? HD, so like... a high-definition floppy? Story text Size Width * Links…

What if I told you there was a public SaaS company growing at >60% per year, more than twice the growth rate of its peers, that spends more on product development than sales & marketing? This same company has more than 7x’d its enterprise value since IPO. Lined up against the other best SaaS…

The rise of AI assistants in coding has sparked a paradox: we may be increasing productivity, but at risk of losing our edge to skill atrophy if we’re not careful. Skill atrophy refers to the decline or loss of skills over time due to lack of use or practice. Would you be completely stuck if AI…

Ten years is a long time. When we started First Round in 2005 with the idea to fill the gap between individual angel investing and Series A investing, many on Sand Hill Road dismissed our model as a “cute” novelty. Boy how times have changed. What began as a crazy, contrarian idea has now led to a…

Join Free The Hustle Loading Oh no! We couldn't find anything like that. Try another search, and we'll give it our best shot. Home Originals The suburban office park that launched Silicon Valley Published: April 25, 2025 Stanford built one of the first office parks in the country. Tech pioneers…

Andrew Liszewski is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2011, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid. CalDigit is well-known for its Thunderbolt docks that don’t skimp on ports. After debuting a compact but well-equipped Thunderbolt 5…

As Thunderbolt 5 devices become more widely available, the CalDigit Element 5 Hub offers a compact, no-frills expansion option with only the essential ports. Thunderbolt 5 was finalized in 2024, but it wasn't until January's CES 2025 show that we started to see devices get announced. CalDigit, known…

DJI, the king of drones and stabilization, is expected to launch its first mirrorless camera - the DJI Mirrorless Camera - by the end of 2025. Rumors point to a full-frame sensor, built-in stabilization and a modern design - all spiced up with the genetic code of the prestigious Hasselblad. If the…

The web will be far worse off if Google is forced to sell Chrome, even if it's to atone for legitimate ad-market monopoly abuses. Which mean we'll all be worse off as the web would lose ground to actual monopoly platforms, like the iOS App Store and Google's own Play Store. First, Chrome won the…

Last year, we expanded NotebookLM to more than 200 countries and now we’re making Audio Overviews available in more than 50 languages. Audio Overviews, which turn your sources into engaging, podcast-like conversations, were immediately popular when they launched late last year. Now, thanks to…

I spent a lot of my early years as a blogger arguing against libertarianism. Here are some example posts that I reposted on Substack: (Here are a few more on my old blog, in case you’re interested.) My basic criticisms of libertarianism were: Libertarians’ ideological opposition to public goods…

April 29, 2025 Product Sycophancy in GPT-4o: what happened and what we’re doing about it Loading… We have rolled back last week’s GPT‑4o update in ChatGPT so people are now using an earlier version with more balanced behavior. The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable—often described…

2025-04-29 Underjord is a tiny, wholesome team doing Elixir consulting and contract work. If you like the writing you should really try the code. See our services for more information. We all have varying degrees of exposure to Big Tech. Some of it seems fine, stable and can be relied on. Some of it…

Previous: Science in the Age of AI What the Most Essential Terms in AI Really Mean Next: Science in the Age of AI How Can AI ID a Cat? An Illustrated Guide. SERIES natural language processing When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History April 30, 2025 Researchers in “natural language…

Adam Curtis’s Theory of Everything Adam Curtis’s Theory of Everything Adam Curtis’s latest film paints a picture of the world that is so complex, so dense, and so theoretical that the prospect of real change appears nearly impossible. ▪ Summer 2021 Civil rights activist and Black Power leader…

For almost all her life, Heather Graham says, she was a “people pleaser”. It was encouraged in childhood, she says, this obligation to put others’ needs above her own, and it endured even after the 1997 film Boogie Nights had made her a star and she had severed all contact with her “judgmental,…

May 2, 2025 Product A deeper dive on our findings, what went wrong, and future changes we’re making. Loading… On April 25th, we rolled out an update to GPT‑4o in ChatGPT that made the model noticeably more sycophantic. It aimed to please the user, not just as flattery, but also as validating doubts,…

Yes, I'm fully aware those are two separate things, but hear me out here for a moment. Back in 2018 I was hearing a lot of stuff from all angles and all sorts of friends and influences about Kubernetes, and from what I heard it seemed like a pretty promising piece of kit to use. At the time, I…