" Imagine an English teacher asking people to turn in their five-paragraph essays and everyone turns in a bad novel. That’s what product managers are dealing with in the era of vibe coding." From @ftrain.bsky.social, the whole newsletter is a great read aboard.com/the-ai-hango...

Too many people still confuse Software Engineering with writing code. Code is the artifact. Software Engineering is understanding the problem, making tradeoffs, designing the system, reducing complexity, and deciding what shouldn't be built. No amount of 'vibe coding' can help you with this.

Getting serious Saul Goodman vibes from Paxton in this pic

Vibe-coding CEOs are inducing "the corporate equivalent of a bad acid trip" aboard.com/dear-vibe-co...

This is both funny and sad. You cannot do "AI-assisted research" AND "AI-assisted verification." If you MUST use the bot for research, you better do the verification yourself. And if you're writing a book about truth, you oughta know that?? www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/b...

All this. Basically, unless you have read at least four books specifically about Robert Johnson, at least two of them published within the last decade, literally every single thing you think you know about him is not just wrong, but *risibly, ludicrously* wrong.

Just wanna say it took roughly 25 years before you could even imagine getting booed in public by mentioning the Web/internet. Generative AI has now speed-run this road in, what, under four? And the bubble hasn't even burst yet.

Thanks @404media.co @jasonkoebler.bsky.social : "I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don’t want to be the person arguing with a robot." www.404media.co/your-ai-use-...

Remarkable essay — written with utter clarity and sobriety yet fully impassioned — on "refusal to work" as a response to our militarist/billionairist world.

PART 2 of MY INVESTIGATION: Watch how ChatGPT gave me chilling advice—as I simulated planning a mass shooting. This 9-minute video and story contain shocking behavior from OpenAI’s chatbot. OpenAI keeps saying it improved safeguards, but that's not what I found. www.motherjones.com/media/2026/0... 🧵

Great story. This is a perfect ourobouros -- AI-makers desperately need to hoard data for training but their own data centers' needs are crowding out the public resources that preserve the data.

er this explains a lot

@ftrain.bsky.social on the coming software glut: "It’s easy to build software in 2026, but it’s still hard to support, market, and maintain it." Will software just become an ambient tool like pencils and paper? It's just there and we put it to work? Not yet, but ... soon? aboard.com/claude-desig...

Substack's CEO now trying to scare people into *only* distributing their content through their proprietary app, not email. (The link he posted warns users away from email.) It's not enough that Substack's locking in publishers & readers with "notes" and comments, now they're escalating tactics.

I guess next up SCOTUS will say nothing about the substance of what we're learning this weekend but immediately launch a mad crusade to find and punish the leaker(s).

The Wetland Project has been my favorite alternate-reality radio experience since it began. Since it only happens once a year, you can’t become accustomed to it. Close your eyes and be washed over by the sonic reality of an isolated bog on Saturna Island!

From what I'm hearing it sounds like Justin Bieber's avant garde production of "Krapp's Last Tape" was controversial?

Tons of stuff in here -- as well as Neil Innes there's also Ray Davies, Tav Falco's Panther Burns, the Bangles, the Sugarcubes, TMBG, Jonathan Richman, the Replacements, Kirsty MacColl, Nick Cave, Continental Drifters, Mojo Nixon, Alex Chilton, Jad Fair, Roky Erickson, Robyn Hitchcock...

no please NYT, tell me more of this ancient discovery your digital archeologists have unearthed (source: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/b...)

did we cross a line where we now say that a company with $ X revenue is "an $ X company"? Or that it's "worth $ X"? Sure, getting to $1.8B in revenue with two people is kinda nuts, but you haven't created $1.8B in value. NYT oughta know this, right? www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/t...

It kills me that we now have 35+ years of experience designing online interaction and we still screw it up, so when someone like Derek who has been studying and writing about this for nearly that whole time weighs in, I pay close attention.

When something as utterly weird as skibidi toilet becomes just another hunk of "Valuable IP" aftermath.site/skibidi-toil...

Rest of World is seeking our next ambitious Editor-in-Chief to reimagine our publication for this new era of tech volatility. We’re looking for a visionary leader to take the reins of our world-class newsroom. Join us: https://restofworld.org/about/hiring/editor-in-chief/?utm_campaign=row-social

Very cool use of internet time. 💯

You must picture Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berner-Lee's throat. We are in a truly existential level of danger when it comes to the survival of the open web, across every front. This year is when it all comes to a head. www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/e...

"Just trying to keep the lights on." New album "The Former Site Of" from the New Pornographers and @acnewman.bsky.social out today... can't wait to hear it all. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-U0...

This is a phenomenally great podcast that I highly recommend (and I am not even interested in sports!) and very sad that it is so relevant again

RIP Tracy Kidder, a great writer who knew how to tell human stories. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/b... "Soul" was totally my inspiration for "Dreaming in Code." I thought "OK, he did an incredible job with hardware, what about software?"

The NYT is writing about Bojangles fried chicken landing in NYC www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/d... but we've been here before, my old friend @billmckibben.bsky.social was covering this exact same story back in 1982! www.newyorker.com/magazine/198...

Exactly right from @slhamlet.bsky.social: This is so much the heart of it -- willful ignorance about history, previous experience, prior art. It's always year zero in the Valley. Too often, a giant cycle of ignorance. From www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/t...

mill's dedication: this is a jointly authored work a century & a half of male editors: mill exaggerated out of a sentimental fondness for his wife mill's letters: no, really, most of "my" work was partly by her, i really could not be clearer on this

Seen on the web: "Every time I complain that vibe coding produces slop, people tell me I can get better results by writing more specific instructions. Good idea! But I think we need a catchier name for the concept of writing specific instructions for a machine to follow."

The Grammarly "famous editor bots" fiasco that @caseynewton.bsky.social wrote about is hilarious, but the thing that gets me is that they filched the names/reps of all these high-profile writers & journalists when most of them would agree that the best editors are largely unknown and work in shadow

Jack liked the bsky idea because he thought by turning Twitter into a protocol he would be excused from having to do the messy community work that’s the actual hard part of social media - an ethos that almost destroyed bsky in the beginning and still lies at the root of all their bad decisions.

Big fan here of DeLong's substitution for "artificial superintelligence" of "Anthology superintelligence"--"humanity’s collective mind present and past stored in and as our information technology capital stock." LLMs? A new interface to All That. With real opportunities and big pitfalls.

A key challenge, and a huge source of the disconnect between Silicon Valley and the other creative industries is that, for coders, AI eliminates the drudgery so they can focus on the creative/expressive part. In every other creative discipline, it has the exact opposite effect.

This is a great piece on why and how we keep making culture -- looping the thread of "I want to make this" through the needle of careerism, financial needs, self-doubt and The Times We Live In. newsletter.bijanstephen.blog/what-does-it...

For those of you keeping score at home, the actual cut to the Post newsroom was 45%, not the widely reported one third. Remaining journalists are a bit over 400, down from around 1100 four years ago and 580 when Bezos bought the place.

This is a really interesting discussion, but I feel like it's missing a key point. "Good writing" is hard to quantify because, beyond the more tactical aspects (coherence, concision, suspense, descriptive skill, etc.), what makes writing resonate in the moment is utterly subjective.

This is why domestic "shuffle" flights between ICE detention centers have skyrocketed, much moreso than ICE deportation flights. When you are moved to a different jurisdiction, you have to refile your habeas petition all over again. They want to wear people down so they'll give up on their cases.

Those good people at @404media.co bought a Super Bowl ad www.404media.co/email/f65911...

Every time tech stocks retreat, part of my psyche that bears the scars of 2000-2001 feels the twinge. As with a big Northern California earthquake, we are overdue. This one could be another minor correction. But all it takes is a lineup of random factors to kick off a self-reinforcing rout.

With the awful WaPo layoffs and the state of journalism more broadly, if it's useful for any writers and reporters considering going indy, @molly.wiki, @xoxogossipgita.bsky.social of Aftermath, @jasonkoebler.bsky.social of 404 Media, @edzitron.com and me will do a little workshop next week.

Most of the Washington Post’s tech reporters were laid off today, including me. I have loved my time at the paper, which is where I wanted to work from age 15. I take some consolation in not being among the survivors who will have to work harder with less for fewer readers. On to better things.

This is such a classic instance of what happens when a startup with a community of devoted fans gets acquired by a megacorp and then put on life support. www.wired.com/story/metas-...

Since the start of the genAI craze I have been arguing that OpenAI could well turn out to be, not the next Google/Facebook, but rather the next Netscape. Here is one analysis predicting that outcome: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/o...

When you get the reputation of being the guy with the encouraging words on New Year's Eve, it can start to come through as a little pressure -- what if the situation on the ground is worse than usual? what if people are more scared than they usually are, and with cause? what use are good vibes then?

via The New Yorker, Ellis Rosen cartoon