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Rethinking space opera

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 07:35:18 GMT

Thoughts on space opera from Charlie Stross, touching on work from Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Ursula le Guin and Lois McMaster Bujold.

The romantic impulse renders space opera antithetical to solarpunk. A fictional setting composed entirely of wild individualists isn't going to end up as some sort of libertarian utopia, it's going to be a cat ranch: meanwhile someone needs to stay behind and tend the home fires, someone has to mind the grain silos on that "small farming planet", someone else needs to manage the shipyard that repairs the interstellar freighter.

Your documentation is still in your Mum's filing cabinet

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 07:31:59 GMT

There’s a theory called Information Foraging, which suggests that people follow clues rather than systematically exploring hierarchies.

Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card describe people as information foragers. This is such a rad term for people looking for stuff on the web. Like a badger foraging for small invertebrates, we humans look for signs that useful information might be nearby and constantly decide whether to continue the search.

“No Man’s Sky” and 10,000 Bowls of Plain Oatmeal

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 07:17:22 GMT

This article is 10 years old, but even with 10 years worth of constant updates to No Man's Sky I can still very much taste the oatmeal underneath. I reckon it might be impossible to escape the generative trap by layering more on top.

Some final words on Foursquare

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:52:53 GMT

A brutal ending for a business I liked a lot back in the day.

Via Rosieland.

Starting in Accessibility is like the Hype Cycle

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 09:50:52 GMT

Great observation. I think the same thing can happen to anything that can feel like a cause.

Harper: The Private Grammar Checker

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 09:19:25 GMT

Harper is a free, open-source grammar checker designed to be just right. Think of it as the private alternative to Grammarly, built after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition.

‘He had this electrical charge’: the short life and long legacy of Jason Molina, master of Americana

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 07:21:33 GMT

A nudge to revisit Songs: Ohia.

When Songs: Ohia started in the mid-1990s, it was via lo-fi skeletal songs recorded to tape that were tender yet raw and delivered with a quivering high tenor reminiscent of Neil Young and soon-to-be collaborator Will Oldham. As grunge and alt-rock boomed, Molina went against the grain. “There was nothing less cool than a ukulele in 1994,” laughs his former bandmate Max Winter in the film. “Holy shit, he may as well have been playing bagpipes.”

Own Your Web – Issue 18: Curators

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:10:58 GMT

The link – the Web’s most fundamental building block, the thing that connects one human’s work to another’s – is quietly being erased from the experience of finding things online. The search engine no longer says “here, go read what this person wrote.” It now says “here, I’ve already read it for you.” The contract is broken.

So what becomes valuable, in a world like this? Not more content. We are drowning in content. What becomes valuable is someone you trust, saying: This is worth your time. Here’s why.

The logo soup problem (and how to solve it)

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 16:48:06 GMT

A deep dive into the math behind making mismatched brand logos actually look good together. And a tiny React library that does it for you.

LAIKA presents Wildwood: The Exhibition

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 14:17:30 GMT

Our household is looking forward to Wildwood. We'll be heading to this exhibition if we can make it down to London before January.

Via It's Nice That.

Step behind the scenes of LAIKA's latest stop-motion film and explore how a world is built through original props, sketches, puppets, miniature sets, and more.

Quote from robinsloan.com, Cyberpunk Is Now

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 14:00:15 GMT

Slabs of compute running hot in offices, basements, dorm rooms … not a new thing, exactly, but their capabilities are new — their inhabitants are new — and the whole scene is just great. Exciting and strange. Gleaming and haunted. Pile on the adjectives, the vibes: it’s somehow all richer and weirder than anybody ever dreamed in 1984.

— robinsloan.com, Cyberpunk Is Now

BetterCapture - Free Screen Recorder for Mac

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 09:42:38 GMT

I feel like I have to swap out screen recording apps more than any other type of app.

Forever free and open-source. A lightweight, and intuitive screen recorder with a native look and feel.

The Digger disaster: what an epic movie flop means for Tom Cruise and Hollywood

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 08:25:16 GMT

Yet beyond Cruise’s usual acolytes, there are plenty of people who might well have been keen to see Digger if they’d known what it really was: an ambitious, meta-textual liberal satire that seeks to address collective culpability for ecological collapse. Unfortunately all of the promotion for the film has sought to suppress this – in part because explaining how necessitates revealing a key plot spoiler.

Hardcover

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 10:32:21 GMT

A viable-looking alternative to Goodreads.

The Danger of Financial Overtraining - by Jordan Grumet

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 10:00:09 GMT

I know people who are totally on top of their money, worth millions of dollars, yet they are visibly stressed all the time. They are financially secure, highly optimized, and entirely unhappy.

Financial overtraining happens when we get so deep in the woods that the process itself becomes a source of pain. We get so efficient with all the tips and tricks that, instead of getting the results we actually want—peace of mind, freedom, security—we just feel worse. We become penny-wise and pound-foolish with our own well-being.

Design Systems for AI Agents

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 09:55:21 GMT

Design teams have spent years trying to get people to actually read their design system documentation. Agents read it every single time.

Gaming’s all‑digital future doesn’t include “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” and “Pikmin 2”

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:40:56 GMT

The core problem is that digital games are licenses, which forces an ongoing relationship between you and the owner of the media. And because there’s an ongoing relationship with you, any ongoing licensing relationships that the media owner has also affect you and your games. If a license for any media that is part of the game expires or is affected, then the developer must take action to remediate the “issue” in the game.

MCU Tracker & Viewing Planner

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:24:31 GMT

Outrageously complete (but filterable) MCU watch order guide.

Quote from Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:42:26 GMT

He had a sudden insight, something that many adults in technical cultures never attain. “I use these things all the time, but I don’t know exactly how they work. We can follow these directions, but how would we know what to change?”

— Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

Quote from Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:42:26 GMT

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience.

— Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

Quote from Nicholson Baker, A Box of Matches

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:40:48 GMT

I’ve been awake for an hour and a half, flipping through worry’s Rolodex.

— Nicholson Baker, A Box of Matches

Quote from Emily St. John Mandel, Exit Party

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 08:37:26 GMT

If you don’t have a witness, your past starts to feel fictional.

— Emily St. John Mandel, Exit Party

StreetComplete

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 09:06:56 GMT

Help improve OpenStreetMap with StreetComplete! This app finds missing map data in your vicinity and displays it on a map as quests. Solve each quest by visiting the location on-site and answering a simple question to update the map.

OSM2World

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 09:04:12 GMT

Create 3D models from OpenStreetMap data

I've gone back and forth between "we're so cooked" and "we're so back"...

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:48:33 GMT

There will emerge a market for code written by humans. This has to happen: I can't prove it, but I can feel it. Despite vast improvements in the generative models, AI-generated art and music are still slop. AI-generated prose has gotten sloppier with phenomena like the much-mocked "Claudese". It's so obviously devoid of a human mind behind it that Zoomers and Alphennials are starting to use "that's so AI" as an insult. Despite the leaps-and-bounds improvements of recent models, I have to believe that AI code is slop too; the major difference between code and these other expressive forms is that we are far more tolerant of slop code: for the most part we just care if the damn thing works.

Effective altruism is this century’s biggest idea

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 17:56:03 GMT

It is right to revere reason. But moral philosophers from Aristotle to Rawls knew that if an argument leads to intolerable places, it must have a hidden faulty step. EAs’ instinct, though, is to enjoy counterintuitive conclusions, even if they seem perverse.

SKF advert review – let’s hope this dull AI Greta Garbo is not the future | The Guardian

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 08:49:49 GMT

The AI Greta Garbo is a bizarre soignée figure, a Stepford robo-star, a Hallmark-greeting-card parody of the icy hauteur, distraite sensuality and deadpan comedy that Garbo projected in life. The AI Garbo is like the classiest ever presenter of a TV shopping channel, purring her way through a dull and humourless script that seeks to create a brand synergy between the frictionless ball-bearings manufactured by SKF and what the company imagines to be Garbo’s own all-important smoothness.

2026 in LLMs (so far)

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 08:54:02 GMT

On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological exploration of everything that happened in 2026. The video is on YouTube; here are my annotated slides and notes to accompany the talk.

Don’t let AI kill the author

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 12:38:10 GMT

What Even Is An OS Now? — A Final Ward

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 11:11:01 GMT

We’re building a phone that isn’t designed to run fixed-function applications. I doubt anyone will ever get up on a stage and show off a AAA mobile game (that nobody plays) on it. It’s not for TikTok and short-form video, though I guess you can ask it for that. You can ask it for whatever: it’ll build apps for you, on the phone, whenever you want.