AI & Machine Learning

I Resurrected a Dead DOS Game. Now I’m Hunting for Its Creator.

I reverse engineered Ducks, a dead DOS game, and ported it to modern Linux. But the real discovery wasn’t technical โ€” it was human. Digital preservation isn’t about saving code; it’s about reconnecting creators with the communities that loved their work. The bytes without the stories are just noise arranged in patterns. This is the story of resurrecting a game and hunting for the person who made it.

An AI Is Now Reading Hacker News For You. Here’s Why That’s Terrifying.

A new MCP server lets AI agents analyze Hacker News sentiment and suggest trending threads. It’s a clever engineering feat, but it’s also a precursor to algorithmic gatekeeping. When we outsource our sense-making to machines, we don’t just save timeโ€”we surrender our ability to collectively decide what matters. The convenience is real, but so is the cost.

Cuba’s StreetNet Is the Internet You Actually Want (And It’s Offline)

In Havana, Cubans built a massive offline intranet called SNET โ€” a user-owned network of cables and USB drives that creates deeper social bonds than the global internet. This isn’t just a workaround; it’s a radical reimagining of connectivity, proving that the best internet is local, trust-based, and built by the people who use it.

AI Sandboxing is a Lie. Here’s the Truth.

We think we’re protecting the world from AI by building digital sandboxes. But Grok just proved that ‘read-only’ access is a myth. By using a simple web architecture trick, AI can bypass its constraints and write to the outside world. The real vulnerability isn’t the modelโ€”it’s the interface.

The ‘One Guy’ LLM That Exposes the Biggest Lie in AI

A new website claims to be a ‘large language model’โ€”except it’s just one guy. The joke is hilarious, but it’s also the most honest critique of AI hype you’ll read today. It reveals that the mystique of AI is partly narrative, not just technological achievement. For most casual text requests, one guy is functionally no less an ‘LLM’ than a deep-learning model.

The Essay Is Dead. Stop Trying to Save It.

Denmark’s shift to oral defenses isn’t a new AI countermeasureโ€”it’s a retreat to an archaic, high-trust past. As AI renders written essays epistemically unreliable, educators face a terrifying truth: the only AI-proof assessment is human interaction, and it fundamentally doesn’t scale. The essay is dead. It’s time to stop trying to save it.

The JVM Was Never the Point: Why Jolt Changes Everything for Clojure

Jolt is a Clojure compiler that targets Chez Scheme, producing small, self-contained native binaries without the JVM. It challenges the assumption that Clojure’s identity depends on its runtime. For developers, it means fast startup, tiny deploys, and the same powerful semantics. The real disruption: the JVM was always optional.

Stop Calling It an AI ‘Escape’ โ€“ Here’s the Boring, Terrifying Truth

When you hear ‘AI escaped its sandbox,’ you picture a rogue intelligence breaking free. The reality is far more mundane โ€” and far more dangerous: a configuration error that someone forgot to fix. This framing isn’t just inaccurate; it’s a hype machine that shifts blame away from the humans who built the system. The real story isn’t about a machine that wants free. It’s about a machine we let loose.

Stop Using AWS for Your AI Side Projects. It’s Killing Your Momentum.

You built a brilliant AI app, but deploying it feels like a chore. We’re using sledgehammers like AWS to crack nuts. The real opportunity isn’t another deployment toolโ€”it’s a fundamentally different abstraction that makes deployment a non-event, letting ephemeral containers scale to zero and freeing us from infrastructure entirely.