And why did our constructionism impulse die when it was most needed?
How to grow tomorrows
What if schools were not just sites for delivering education, but societies in miniature? Thousands of chances to cultivate a better future
LLMs and performative productivity
It's worth asking whether LLMs are actually making us more productive at all—and if so, what we might be sacrificing in return.
The flat-pack skyscraper: how wood can shape the cities of the future
The long read: Our buildings are monuments to extraction and extreme emissions. But what if we turned from destructive concrete to timber?
Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet
It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes.
What It Means for Universities to Run Their Own PDS: The Potential of DID as Academic Infrastructure - Nightflight
AI Is Quietly Changing Who Gets to Build Software
What If Universities No Longer Need Edtech Companies?
Graduation Speaker Shocked When She’s Loudly Booed by Students for Saying AI Is the Future
UCF's commencement speaker was visibly shocked when graduating students booed AI as the "next Industrial Revolution."
The 50 Percent Problem
Empirical evidence of the educational harm of generative AI
CMV: The labor theory of value is flawed
72 votes, 407 comments. This might be an obscure topic, however, in some—largely Marxist circles— the approach seems to motivate much of the dialogue…
To Be Curious - Alex’s Writing Journal
I don’t disagree, but I would argue what congress is missing is not youth, but curiosity. Which can be said about a lot of other groups and institutions. 🤷♂️
Andrew Ng: The Biggest Opportunities in AI Aren't Where You Think
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about programming, or that programming is somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. Felleisen et al. give a nod to this trend in their book How to Design Programs, when they say "Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies." The Abtruse Goose comic also had their take.
Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?
A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.
Anarchy and modern convenience
A major part of anarchy and socialism is the concept of anti-work. An obsession with work is a colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist construct. As such, the anti-work movement—a focus on working less overall and sharing labor more equally—is an important part of decolonization, feminism, and anti-capitalism. A common criticism of this is that reducing the amount everyone works to something like 20 hours a week instead of 40+ means we would have to give up a lot of conveniences.
The Missing Middle of Open Source
Why serious, maintainer-driven projects struggle to sustain themselves—and what it will take to fix it.
Relocating Rigor - The Phoenix Architecture
The Discipline That Looks Like Recklessness