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…

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The first edition of this series on Neoliberalism and Its Enemies looked at how the Hewlett Foundation has characterized the neoliberal era in its grant-making. I got some pushback from people who accused me of using a straw man rather than any of the more sophisticated definitions one can find in…

The term “neoliberalism” has been kicked around academic circles for a couple of generations now, meaning different things at different times. More recently, though, it became a term used in mainstream political discourse. The events of the last few years — including Bernie Sanders’ self-described…

A note: the following essay is not mine. It was written by Mark Pesce in 1997 and published here. I’m reposting it on default.blog to share it with a new audience and to keep it accessible. All credit to Pesce, a name I keep encountering in my travels through cyberspace. In 1997, before social…

21 Feb, 2026 Code is on the right monitor, and Slack is on the left. A YouTube playlist flows through my noise-canceling earphones. My fingers hit Alt+Tab before I even make a conscious decision, moving back and forth between the browser and the terminal. We call this multitasking. we mistake it for…

Claude CodeAIStumbling into AIdbt How do you use your LLM coding agent? Mine is usually Claude the proofreader, Claude the bash monkey, Claude the webdev. All these things are about tasks completed. Read this, write that code, fix that web page. This week I gave Claude a new job. I had an existing…

The software industry doesn't agree on much. Tabs versus spaces, monoliths versus microservices, whether stand-ups are useful or performance art—pick a topic and you'll find engineers ready to die on both hills. But for about forty years, we had one consensus: lines of code is a terrible metric.…

Tests Are The New Moat Open source projects grow over time. They are a product of incremental development. A project starts lean, gains adoption, pivots to accommodate that adoption, and maintains backwards compatibility throughout this process. These lean projects become large ships. Historically,…

Before the lights dimmed for the film, “The Lady from Shanghai” at Vidiots, Aidan Gannon and Jason Fine were busy perusing the aisles of endless DVDs. For these young cinephiles, the Eagle Rock hub isn’t just a theater — it’s a gateway to film history. In a matter of minutes, the 24-year-olds found…

25th February 2026 I gave a talk this weekend at Social Science FOO Camp in Mountain View. The event was a classic unconference format where anyone could present a talk without needing to propose it in advance. I grabbed a slot for a talk I titled “The State of LLMs, February 2026 edition”, subtitle…

“Sandhogs,” they called the laborers who built the tunnels leading into New York’s Penn Station at the beginning of the last century. Work distorted their humanity, sometimes literally. Resurfacing at the end of each day from their burrows beneath the Hudson and East Rivers, caked in the mud of…

We designed FDM-1, a foundation model for computer use. FDM-1 is trained on videos from a portion of our 11-million-hour screen recording dataset, which we labeled using an inverse dynamics model that we trained. Our video encoder can compress almost 2 hours of 30 FPS video in only 1M tokens. FDM-1…

For nineteen years, until his retirement in 1885, Herman Melville would awake, slick back his dark hair and unsnarl the snags from his beard, don a uniform of dark navy pilot cloth and affix to his chest the brass badge of a U.S. Customs Inspector. Operating at the Lower Manhattan docks, Melville’s…

(Credits: Far Out / A24) Tom Taylor@tomtaylorfo Thu 24 April 2025 9:43, UK Follow us on Google Discover The year is 1975, and David Byrne is holed up in art school on Rhode Island feverishly cogitating how to shrink his own head. He would soon crack the case, figuring out that the “easiest way to do…

AI demand is surging across consumers, developers, and businesses. Meeting that demand and providing everyone access to our products requires three things: compute, distribution, and capital. Today we’re announcing $110B in new investment at a $730B pre-money valuation. This includes $30B from…

There is a popular belief that Hemingway averaged 10 words per sentence. Studies don’t confirm it – the estimate is closer to 15. He was surely a master of short sentences, but that was a deliberate style. The shortening of speech we see today is not. Researcher Arjun Panickssery tracked how the…

Imagine visiting your repository in the morning and feeling calm because you see: Issues triaged and labelled CI failures investigated with proposed fixes Documentation has been updated to reflect recent code changes. Two new pull requests that improve testing await your review. All of it visible,…

On day one, to even begin programming anything, programmers must understand how to write text files, and use an interpreter, or compiler, or assembler, to turn them into executing programs. Soon after, they must roughly understand what memory is, and how to use addresses and pointers (even if…

Part I: Why auctions work When selling a unique asset, auctions usually work. Your equity is a unique asset, and when you raise money, you are selling a big chunk of it. There’s no “right” price for your equity and there aren’t that many interested buyers. An auction allows you to figure out who is…

The breathing light – officially “Sleep Indicator Light” – debuted in the iconic iBook G3 in 1999. It was originally placed in the hinge, but soon was moved to the other side for laptops, and eventually put in desktop computers too: Power Mac, the Cube, and the iMac. The green LED was replaced by a…

/ February 25, 2026 The German auteur’s recent book presents a strange, idiosyncratic vision of the concept of “truth,” one that defines how he sees the world and his art. Copy Link Facebook X (Twitter) Bluesky Pocket Email Werner Herzog, 1984. (Frederic Garcia / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images) In…

“Find your purpose.” It has become such common advice that few question it. But rather than inspirational, it can feel like a burden. How do I go about finding this and what if I never do? This is “purpose anxiety” — the gnawing sense that one’s life should have an overarching purpose, but it’s…

A lot of my readers call me a cynic when I say things like “you should do things that make your manager happy” or “big tech companies get to decide what projects you work on”. Alex Wennerberg put the “Sean Goedecke is a cynic” case well in his post Software Engineers Are Not Politicians. Here are…

Before Cormac McCarthy became Cormac McCarthy, the man and the novelist, he was Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr., or Charlie McCarthy for short. He was the third child of six and the oldest son born to an Irish Catholic family in Rhode Island that moved to Tennessee during the Great Depression. To his…