writing

At the same time, I understood almost immediately why Haskell was—and still is—considered a language more admired than used. Even one of its most basic concepts, that of the “monad,” has spawned a cottage industry of explainers, analogies,…

Joel Lewenstein, a head of product design at Anthropic, was recently crawling beneath his new house to adjust the irrigation system when he ran into a conundrum: The device’s knobs made no sense. Instead of scouring the internet for a…

Earlier this year, we shared the story of how a classic NES Tetris player hit the game's "kill screen" for the first time, activating a crash after an incredible 40-minute, 1,511-line performance. Now, some players are using that kill…

There was nothing funny about the way Jeff Lawson left Twilio, the startup he cofounded in 2008 and built into a multibillion-dollar public company enabling businesses to communicate with customers via text messages and phone calls.…

Philosopher Nick Bostrom is surprisingly cheerful for someone who has spent so much time worrying about ways that humanity might destroy itself. In photographs he often looks deadly serious, perhaps appropriately haunted by the existential…

On May 29, 2007, journals and communities began disappearing from LiveJournal. The missing journals and groups went unclickable, mute, struck through with a single-line font effect. To a banhammer, every query looks like a nail: depictions…

I’ve used only one image that I created with Midjourney, for a blog post. It was a fun process, but the image itself is low quality and has random elements that make no sense. With Midjourney, you get four square images as output and can…

This week a startup called Cognition AI caused a bit of a stir by releasing a demo showing an artificial intelligence program called Devin performing work usually done by well-paid software engineers. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini can…

There are things we can do. When our members tell us that they've had a negative interaction, whether it's any type of physical safety risk, assault, financial fraud, we act on those reports immediately. That’s a lot of what my team is…

Carol Pinchefsky has written almost 2,000 articles about geek culture for outlets such as Forbes.com, Playboy.com, and Syfy.com. Over the past 20 years, she’s watched fantasy and science fiction grow from a niche interest to a massive…