Today we look specifically at the institutional racism against Jews established by Pope Innocent III in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Of the 70 canons of the council proceedings, the final four…

Yesterday, I shared Noah Smith’s observation that fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world — and now the real world is an escape from the internet. Smith recently…

Sovereignty has become one of the most common requirements in AI and digital procurement. The problem is that the word usually describes several different concerns at once.

Akismet, which I’ve used since 2010, spat the dummy in the last 24 hours and the WordPress sites that used my API key were bombarded with spam. Akismet has enshittified, leaving only a very narrow…

Transit resilient cities aren’t designed just for the 9-to-5 commute. It is time to stop benchmarking against 2019 and start planning grid networks for our post-car future.

This week: Questions about Singapore's pro-Mandarin policy, the use of the ISA, and salary issues for migrant workers (again).

*Anti-Muslim hate and antisemitism are twin crises. We must confront them together.* As usual, the religion that is really dangerous in the west is the majority religion here — Christianity.…

*[The saboteur's] cuts to intervention programs could increase violent crime, experts say. Community programs are more effective at reducing violence than simply making arrests, advocates say.*

Now It's Apps' Turn to Get Cheap Once the foundational tools are good enough, technique and training outperform hardware. — Seth Godin, "You don't need a better camera" Seth…

Video

Processing-Using-SRAM - When the Cache Becomes the Processor We have seen enough magic happen in DRAM via RowClone, Ambit and SIMDRAM. As I progressed in the later chapters of the primer I came…

Companies are halting graduate hires due to AI, and it's a mistake.

The death of engineering has been greatly exaggerated. You still need to know what you're doing.

A few days ago I wrote about consumer API governance in an agentic world, and as I keep giving versions of that talk — Munich is next — the most common response I get in the hallway afterward is some…

财新: 车站虽受国铁集团管理，但作为企业，无论国铁集团还是其下设的卫生监督所，都没有执法权。一名地方铁路系统人士介绍，车站和铁路卫生监督部门均无行政处罚权和罚没权，收缴罚款也无法上缴国家财政。 那么，谁才能开出罚单？华东交通大学铁路法治研究院院长朱新建称，铁路系统内真正有执法权的是铁路公安和铁路监管局。但铁路公安的执法主要集中在《治安管理处罚法》和《铁路安全管理条例》，让他们在站台上针对控烟执法不…

the industrial revolution type of thing once again

In January of this year, the Conference Board of Canada, now Signal49 Research, projected that 555,000 jobs in Canada would disappear by 2030 because of the widespread adoption of artificial…

Because the typical American diet sure ain’t what it used to be, this is an animated bar chart detailing the nation’s shifting food consumption over the last century. Each bar represents…

Reasonable people

We handed the shared meal to a screen, then mourned it in a thousand essays. Now a French artist has dragged a hand-painted dining installation into a Berlin club and dared strangers to look up and…

I had the pleasure to present at this year’s Livingmaps Conference, on the theme of Shared Earth, Unequal Burdens: Living Maps for Environmental Justice. The project I recently completed, Sins…

Cross-posted from my Intentional Teaching newsletter. The other day on Bluesky, education professor Jon Becker shared a few highlights from a panel he attended featuring high school students talking…

It’s been an incredibly long few weeks, and as a result my previously-planned Hater’s Guide just isn’t possible within what little time I have left in this week, which is why…

The implicit contract — work hard, stay employed, build a life — is broken.

Grain once moved through America by human muscle. Before automation, men climbed inside the holds of huge ships and pushed grain with metal shovels, ropes, and their own bodies. Photography Book…

perche’ non sono sorpreso ? il modello culturale e’ Biff Tannen Grok AI is for porn. Two former xAI employees estimate that well over half of all Grok traffic goes to pornographic images,…

If my scan rate at UPS was this slow, I would have been fired. A recent video online shows a humanoid robot sorting packages, mostly just flipping them label side up so they can be scanned. It was…

Work is inseparable from the human experience. It is the context in which we pour much of our energy and develop dimensions of our character that distinguish us within our communities. Work makes…

En plots was er de drang om iets te schrijven. Het is niet nagelezen, het is gewoon mijn gedachtenstroom vandaag, op mijn blog. Klinkt het niet, dan botst het, en dat is ook oké! fertiliteit Ik kwam…

A federal "disparate impact" guidance could persuade employers to stop requiring college degrees when they're not necessary.

徐贲： 学术共同体真正应当追究的是责任（responsibility），而不是来源（origin）。因为来源从来都是混合的，而责任必须是明确的。

how groups make choices they can respect

FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 2026 They slime the first lady — of France! Is the UFC's Josh Hokit a racist? Asking a slightly different question, was his pitiful statement on June 14 a racist act? We don't know…

I have admittedly taken a softer line on some “AI” gen since our clients use it, and combined with our awareness of how desktop publishing unfolded, and where Medinge Group’s own thinking is heading,…

A short documentary about A/B testing, algorithmic optimization, and the small act of ignoring both. In 2009, a Google designer quit over forty-one shades of blue. The machine was making his…

The OSS/BSS company Innovative Systems recently released its eleventh annual survey about rural household broadband usage. As usual, it contains a number of interesting insights. The survey was…

This is going to sound like I'm one-hundred years old. To be fair, I practically am. But in any event, when I started in the business--and going back 25 years before that because my father was in the…

I’m living in a strange fever dream, friends. I was told no one from overseas would want to come to America by our media. We’re too extreme, too loud, too—hell, everything’s just wrong with us if you…

As of today, I run my phone Google free (at least everywhere I can influence). With pure LineageOS 23.2 No Google account No Google Play Store or compatible clients like AuroraStore No Google Play…

The Endgame We live in interesting times. Like many people, I work in an industry that has become absorbed by an existential angst - the robots have invaded, proved surprisingly capable, and it is…

Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, known to many as “The Truthful Therapist,” joins CTA Co-Director Dr. Michael Olan for a conversation about psychotherapy, professional ethics, ideological…

Where the entire discussion about AI isn't about how great it is, but how biased and destructive it can be. I know, I'm shocked too.

WireGuard quickly became a popular VPN protocol: simple, fast, cleanly designed, and free of heavy legacy baggage. It stood out against monsters like IPsec and OpenVPN. But, as often happens, its…

LGTM culture is code review as theatre: rubber-stamp approvals and obligation nitpicks. Why teams drift into it, and how to make approval mean something.

After having been in touch online for many years, it felt like a special occasion to be able to finally meet my namesake Jonathan W. Gray IRL in London. Jonathan W. Gray is another of the research…

In folklore, a genie grants wishes without judgment — it gives you exactly what you asked for, whether or not it is what you needed. The danger was never the genie. It was the wish. Anthropic’s…

AI took away the constraints that brought discipline to MVPs. You must impose them yourself.

Many years ago, I attended one conference in the gifted world. One of the presenters told a story about a young girl who was simultaneously being denied gifted education appropriate to her needs and…

there's a software emulation for everything

Glue Services: Part Two — Data Synchronization. I recently talked about using glue services (Anti-Corruption Layers) to isolate modern platforms from legacy integrations. Today I want to talk about…