Something funny happens when you bring up the name Harold Bloom in an academic setting. I’ve seen it happen many times: the rolled or averted eyes, maybe even a little scoff, a look that says Jesus, him again? “Write about his ideas,” a professor once told me, “and no one will take your work…

At Discord, we want the experience of chatting with your friends, reacting to a message, or posting artisanal farm-to-channel memes to feel instantaneous. We’ve managed to achieve this at scale by leveraging Elixir’s powerful concurrency mechanisms to run each Discord server (which we call a “guild”…

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: A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship by Louis P. Masur Oxford University Press, 169 pp., $24.99 As though…

Hold your horses, though. I'm not unveiling a new S3-native database. This paper is from 2008. Many of its protocols feel clunky today. Yet it nails the core idea that defines modern cloud-native databases: separate storage from compute. The authors propose a shared-disk design over Amazon S3, with…

Much has been said about AI decimating the job market for developers. In an industry changing this quickly, we certainly can’t blame people—especially junior and aspiring engineers—for worrying that the AI automation wave might sweep their jobs out from under them. More existentially, some are…

The Magic Mountain (public library) by Thomas Mann The thundering success of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain … required the intervention of the rector to keep us from spending the whole night awake, waiting for Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat to kiss. Or the rare tension of all of us sitting up…

I enjoy writing code. Let me get that out of the way first. The problem solving, the architecture decisions, the feeling when something clicks into place. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is everything around it. Lately I’ve been spending most of my time writing agents and tools. Building…

This is the fourth installment in my series on delimiters in languages. I recommend reading the first article to understand the implication of categorizing XML tags as delimiters in this context. (March 2, 2026: Updated the considerations around the training vs. model inference framework). The tour…

Coordinating concurrent tasks around shared state is one of the most common problems in Python's asyncio. The standard library gives you asyncio.Event and asyncio.Condition, but each has a gap that only shows up under real concurrency pressure. We hit this while building Inngest's Python SDK, where…

I read a lot on the web. I almost never look at websites, though. I consume almost everything through an RSS reader. As AI reshapes the way online information is organised and consumed, it increasingly feels like I'm behind the scenes, watching the performance from the wings rather than seeing it…

Should humans stay out of the software development process and vibe code, or do we need developers in the loop inspecting every line of code? I believe the answer is to focus on the goal of turning ideas into outcomes. The right place for us humans is to build and manage the working loop rather than…

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,…