Byung-Chul Han is widely received as an accessible critic of neoliberalism. Yet it is precisely this accessibility (and a prose calibrated to immediate intelligibility) that generates deeper problems. e-flux.com/notes/6783456/…

i built an entire x86 CPU emulator in CSS (no javascript) you can write programs in C, compile them to x86 machine code with GCC, and run them inside CSS

"Applications don't run on mainframes because they're written in COBOL," he said. "They run on mainframes because mainframes deliver a class of determinism, scalable compute and reliability that general purpose servers can't match." venturebeat.com/technology/ibm…

Derek Thompson I like this from Judea Pearl: LLMs "summarize world models authored by people like you and me available on the web and they do some sort of mysterious summary of it, rather than discovering those world models directly from the data." x.com/realbigbrainai…

In memory of Eco, I wrote a short essay on books we haven't read or, as Nassim Taleb calls them, antilibraries. We did not read them, but we live with them. peopleandthin.gs/antilibrary-61…

“They're literally writing checks against a scientific breakthrough that may not happen on any predictable timeline.” Remember, kids, no one has a good idea of what AGI even is.

A library is not just a personal memory, where we keep what we’ve read so that someday we can check it, but where a universal memory resides. “A library is where someday we can find what other people have read before.” medium.com/peopleandthing…

A while ago I wrote about AI and why using it feels like cheating, even if our use is perfectly legitimate. Eventually cheating loses its charm. But just WHEN that happens can have very different consequences. valenzine.com/why-using-ai-f…

And this was before generative AI, I bet now they can 10x their cases without sweating!

For all the George Costanzas out there, perhaps the greatest promise of our marvelous water-thirsty technological wonders is to spare us the displeasure of having to read and understand. On AI summaries and cognitive sovereignty. medium.com/@valenzine/ai-…

Ugh, this whole shtick is getting so old. It's quite literally spam.

From space, sidewalks are invisible. It is only when we sharpen our gaze that the silhouettes of urban life reveal the fragile balance between closeness and distance—the very architecture of coexistence that makes our cities the spaces we inhabit. peopleandthin.gs/sidewalks-8aec…

Shocked!

I am so sick of idiots shouting BREAKING and then commenting about a paper submitted on Oct. 1st, 2025 with an over the top summary that an AI vomited.

Marx prophesied that capitalism, by devaluing everything except profits, would inevitably self-destruct, dragging the rest of bourgeois culture down with it. scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-che…

Organizations that commit to highly flexible models, including remote-first, report strong output, healthier engagement, and faster growth than mandate-driven peers. thehill.com/opinion/techno…

Recipes encode migration, class, and cultural history. I wrote an essay on how recipes reveal how societies cook, remember, and change. peopleandthin.gs/a-recipe-is-ne…

Jeffrey Epstein understood what universities refuse to admit: in today's academic system, integrity has a price tag. valenzine.com/how-jeffrey-ep…