Numb in Central Asia, prologue: Turks in space
In the nexus of the entire world
Ten shelves · 50 essays
The Reading Room
I.
Tech
GitHub Octoverse 2026
GitHub Octoverse 2026 I'm at GitHub Universe today (GitHub gave me a free ticket through their "GitHub Stars" program).…
[Repost] .well-known/slashpages
The October inflection point for vibe game development
Artificial Analysis v5 and the benchmarker's dilemma
II.
Culture
Is the book business distressed? Anxious? Optimistic? All of the above
Is the book business distressed? Anxious? Optimistic? All of the above
Eric Hobsbawm against the identitarians. Centering gender, race, and sexuality was not his “kind of history.” Nor was it Karl Marx’s
James Fessenden was indolent, wrote little, and inspired two of the most charismatic intellectuals of his time
"You can fight the premise that AI is a better writer than the best human, but you’ll be whistling past the graveyard of dead writers and metaphors"
We may daydream about a frictionless world, but consider tribology — the science of interacting surfaces — and you’ll realize that’s nonsense
III.
Life
What It Takes to Be Free
We spend our lives trying to find our power and our freedom. It is not easy: We live in a culture that has distorted the…
Sylvia Plath on Living with the Darkness and Making Art from the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being
Marcus Aurelius on the Good Luck of Your Bad Luck
Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life
Bob Dylan on the Unconscious Mind and the Ideal Conditions for Creative Work
IV.
Design
Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces
Why we need richer, thicker interfaces and better boundary objects for collaborative planning with agents
August 2026
In Memoriam, Encountering World War I, and Thinkable Horrors
One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment
Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale
V.
Economics
Wednesday assorted links
1. A new taxonomy of work, for the AI era. Thread here. 2. On Morel’s Invention (NYT). 3. Iranian brick architecture. 4.…
Do Prediction Markets Create Information?
Inequality in Equal Land
Hack Apocalypse Now
Why is the Dollar so Strong?
VI.
Finance
Wednesday links: being held accountable
Personal finance links: finding enough
Private Equity for Pension Plans? A New Look at Who Really Benefits
Animal Spirits: Why Baby Boomers Have All the Money
Gold reserves and exchange rate management
VII.
History
The Art of Blaming Israel For Everything
Notes Toward an Autopsy of Anti-Zionism
The future of Britain in 7 maps
Brotherist Without Being a Brother
The history of Britain in 7 maps
Intifada Everywhere All at Once
VIII.
Philosophy
Only Effective Altruists Should be Anti-Effective Altruism
The only situation in which you should think that the effective altruism movement has been bad is if you share many EA v…
AI writing in philosophy
The Argument For God From Knowledge
Epictetus argues against the death penalty
Unpopular Effective Altruist Views Are Simply Correct
IX.
Psychology
Cornell 7, Illicit Activities, Violence Interventions
Links and Recommendations
Fake it ‘til you make it (and then keep faking it)
Quiet Luxury for Academics
Pseudobeliefs
Poor People Lie Upward, Rich People Lie Downward
X.
Science
Off-grid data centers have 60-80% higher emissions
A rush to power is leading data centers to install the least efficient and leakiest types of fossil gas generators rathe…
Scott Aaronson: “I Heard That a Robot Solved the Math Problem You Worked On”
Scott Aaronson: “I Heard That a Robot Solved the Math Problem You Worked On”
What is a Differentiable Manifold?
How not to detect warming acceleration
Culture · Feature
The Moving Image Archive
The Moving Image Archive is a collection of over 120,000 clips from almost 2300 archival films drawn from public domain collections. The internet is full of forgotten films, and this archive is a growing library of that collection. When synthetic footage can now fabricate the past, preserving verifi...
From the Stacks
Browse the full archive → Five rediscoveries from the back issues, rotated by the day
Read slowly. There is no hurry.