Threads Bluesky Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna Harper, 274 pp., $32.00 The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood by James Boyle MIT Press, 326 pp.,…

2025-07-16 • 4119 words • 45 minutes • #go • #dark-arts • #protobuf Parsing Protobuf Like Never Before Historically I have worked on many projects related to high-performance Protobuf, be that on the C++ runtime, on the Rust runtime, or on integrating UPB, the fastest Protobuf runtime, written by my…

OpenAI is going all-in on the most-hyped trend in AI right now: AI agents, or tools that go a step beyond chatbots to complete complex, multi-step tasks on a user’s behalf. The company on Thursday debuted ChatGPT Agent, which it bills as a tool that can complete work on your behalf using its own…

Project CETI is a large-scale effort to decode whale speech. If AI models do learn a universal language, we might be able to use it to talk to whales. Growing up, I sometimes played a game with my friends called “Mussolini or Bread.” It’s a guessing game, kind of like Twenty Questions. The funny…

During college, my class was instructed to study Schopenhauer in political philosophy. Complete bummer, pessimist, the guy just makes you want to kill yourself. There was one quote about him though that really opened my eyes. Schopenhauer's philosophy is the mirror of his own nature... What he saw…

(Title written with apologies to Sandi Metz.) One of the biggest fallacies in coding is that dependencies have zero downsides. It's treated as free functionality you don't have to write yourself. Wow, what a deal! But dependencies absolutely have a cost. They may require a significant time…

The title of this blog post is not something you hear people say often, if ever. What you do hear people say is “concurrency is not parallelism”, but that’s not as useful, in my opinion. Let’s see how Wikipedia defines those terms: Concurrency refers to the ability of a system to execute multiple…

As ever, here is what's ahead: Updates on prior piecesMy most recent Rough Notes essayA few things worth reading Updates & Erasures: I previously wrote about the perils of building renovation as a Fed chair, especially given an administration bent on finding a reason to fire you "for cause." As…

man vs. machine Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship "Humanity has prevailed (for now!)," writes winner after 10-hour coding marathon against OpenAI. Benj Edwards – Jul 18, 2025 3:34 pm | 4 Przemysław Dębiak (right) receives an award for winning the 2025 AtCoder World Finals…

Tomáš Baránek 12 min read·3 hours ago -- Photo by Nahrizul Kadri on Unsplash Disclaimer: I am a book publisher & I love technology. It can empower people. I have been using LLM chatbots since they became widely available. I regularly test machine translation at our publishing house in collaboration…

Backup: Beyond the Simple Copy For as long as I can remember, backup is something that has been underestimated by far too many people. Between flawed techniques, "Schrödinger's backups" (i.e., never tested, thus both valid and invalid at the same time), and conceptual errors about what they are and…

By Caitlin Welsh July 15, 2025 — 3.30pm , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. In the very first scene of Girls, 24-year-old aspiring writer Hannah (series creator Lena Dunham) has just been…

It's 1998, the middle of the dot-com boom. Portals are advertising on TV, web developers are fighting browser companies, Microsoft and Amazon are gaining power, and Netscape is going open source. By | July 15, 2025 | Tags: Dot-com, Yearly Reviews, 1998 Do you Yahoo!?; a 1998 TV advert. For web…

For most of the 2010s, I was a religious user of Yelp, an app for finding and reviewing restaurants and other local businesses. The red-and-white interface became a trusted source of recommendations when at home in New York or abroad. In Berlin, Kyoto and Reykjavík, I searched for coffee shops, and…

Last week I released Protocollie. Built in 4 days with languages I don’t know, without even directly touching the code. People keep asking “how?” but I’m not entirely sure it’ll work the same way twice. We’re all making this up as we go. The Great Experiment Nobody's Running the Same Way There's…

Tl;dr: After five years of using Matrix.org/Element as my primary communication platform, and rooting for it, and promoting it, and enduring its many quirks, I’ve decided to move on (or rather back). Despite promising ideals and growing institutional adoption, the network remains slow, unreliable,…

I started to code more in Python around 6 months ago. Why? Because of AI, obviously. It’s clear (to me) that big money opportunities are all over AI these days. And guess what’s the de facto programming language for AI? Yep, that sneaky one. I had used Python before, but only for small scripts. For…

It’s as if the smell of burnt plastic from a dollar store has permeated the world. Things are worse: chipboard furniture, T-shirts unrecognizable after a second wash, packaged foods with more preservatives than ingredients. Airplane seats turned into backrests. Automatic restroom lights that turn…

Jul 20, 2025 2 min read Write for InfoQ Feed your curiosity. Help 550k+ global senior developers each month stay ahead. Get in touch Listen to this article - 0:00 Audio ready to play 0:00 0:00 Reading list A recent study challenges the widespread belief that AI tools accelerate software development.…

I feel like the ground is shifting beneath my feet. Several times in the last few weeks I’ve seen people I respect talk about how they use a generative AI assistant when coding, or criticize those that are critical of generative AI. People who were, themselves, critical of generative AI in recent…

NEW YORK (AP) — The lights are on at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau across the street from the White House, and employees still get paid. But, in practice, the bureau has been mostly inoperable for nearly six months. CFPB employees say they essentially spend the workday sitting on their…

I left OpenAI three weeks ago. I had joined the company back in May 2024. I wanted to share my reflections because there's a lot of smoke and noise around what OpenAI is doing, but not a lot of first-hand accounts of what the culture of working there actually feels like. Nabeel Quereshi has an…

13th July 2025 Today is the 20th anniversary of the first commit to the public Django repository! Ten years ago we threw a multi-day 10th birthday party for Django back in its birthtown of Lawrence, Kansas. As a personal celebration of the 20th, I’m revisiting the talk I gave at that event and…

DuckDB is portable, easy to use, and ducking fast! We at MotherDuck put our money where our beaks are and embarked on a journey to build a new type of serverless data warehouse based on DuckDB. This means extending DuckDB beyond its design as an embedded, local, single-player analytics database, and…

Medium’s recap, financial turnaround, and difficult path back to health. Tony Stubblebine 18 min read·4 hours ago -- I’m gonna write the wonky post of Medium’s turnaround. I’m not sure if a company is allowed to be this blunt about how bad things were. But it’s very much of the Medium ethos that if…

Few places are as comfortable with architectural variety as New York, a city that has always reinvented itself, but never thrown away its past. As a result, it boasts one of the liveliest mixes of structures in the world, many of which are marquee examples of their eras. Here are 15 of the Big…

“This is such a race for being the science powerhouse that you never fully recover,” says Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences. “You might accelerate back up to 60, but you can’t make up for those years when you were at a standstill while the competition was racing ahead.”…

Table of Contents Table of Contents Why Warren Buffett Says Jack Bogle Probably Did More for American Investors Than Anyone Else By Daniel Liberto Daniel Liberto is a journalist with over 10 years of experience working with publications such as the Financial Times, The Independent, and Investors…

Speaking to AI podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Anthropic’s Sholto Douglas said he predicted there would be a “drop in white-collar workers” over the next two to five years, even if current AI progress stalls. “There is this whole spectrum of crazy futures. But the one that I feel we’re almost guaranteed…

Hypercard Hype 30-plus years of HyperCard, the missing link to the Web From the archives: Before the World Wide Web did anything, HyperCard did everything. Matthew Lasar – May 25, 2019 9:56 am | 230 The Computer Lab's Beyond Cyberpunk Hypercard stack Credit: Beyond Cyberpunk! The Computer Lab's…

Every week a new thread emerges on Reddit asking about the difference between MCP and API. I've tried summarizing everything that's been said about MCP vs API in a single post (and a single table). AspectTraditional APIs (REST/GraphQL)Model Context Protocol (MCP)What it isInterface styles (REST,…

Bernie Sanders says it over and over again: 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. But Matt Darling, formerly of the Niskanen Center, swears it’s not true, and Dylan Matthews of Vox calls it a damned lie. Even Matt Yglesias is apparently on the case, but I’m blocked from seeing his posts. Who’s…

6th June 2025 I presented an invited keynote at the AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco this week. This is my third time speaking at the event—here are my talks from October 2023 and June 2024. My topic this time was “The last six months in LLMs”—originally planned as the last year, but so…

Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa, in the 1890s Let’s start with one of those insights that are as obvious as they are easy to forget: if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field. If you want to learn writing, read great writers, etc. But this is not…