An archive of illustration from c.1950-1975, shining a spotlight on pioneering illustrators and their work.
Simon ported a Python HTML5 parsing library to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2. Lots of interesting details but the most interesting part to me is the questions he had at the end:
- Does this library represent a legal violation of copyright of either the Rust library or the Python one?
- Even if this is legal, is it ethical to build a library in this way?
- Does this format of development hurt the open source ecosystem?
- Can I even assert copyright over this, given how much of the work was produced by the LLM?
- Is it responsible to publish software libraries built in this way?
- How much better would this library be if an expert team hand crafted it over the course of several months?
Something that Jana came across that I immediately added to my to-read pile.
According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future.
When businesses start to realize that they’re paying vast amounts to get LLMs to do tasks that could be accomplished by a old-school coder writing a regex script … “I do think we’re about to see a lot of companies realize that a thinking model connected to an MCP server is way more expensive than just paying someone to write a bash script. Starting now, you’ll be able to make a career out of un-LLM-ifying applications.”
— Alan Jacobs
Building a fully-feature docs site with Astro and Starlight, including authentication and CMS support.
To promote the use of native plants in gardens and landscapes, TN-IPC developed a set of three brochures in the 1990s, each designed specifically for East, Middle, and West Tennessee.
Once a semblance of context has been conjured, and through a plentitude of poor attempts, we can finally uncover the solution. The dissonance of bad design must be felt: it’s only when we write repulsive and repetitive code that we realize that there is a better, more succinct, elegant, compositional, and reusable way. It causes pause. A step back to think about the problem deeply. Start over. Rinse repeat. Diametrically, AI Agent work is frictionless; we avoid alternative solutions and can’t know if what we accept is flawless, mediocre, terrible, or even harmful. Quality is crafted by iteration—how else might we imagine good designs if we never explore objectionable ones?
Thought does emerge from writing. Something ineffable happens when you write down a thought. You think something you did not know you could or would think and it leads you to another thought almost unbidden.
What is that something ineffable and how do I know this? I do not belong to some kind of occult organization with special séances on the magic of writing, unless you want to so describe, with some reason, the guild of scholars more generally. Everyone who has written at any substantial length, whether prose or poetry, knows that the process of writing itself leads to previously unthought thoughts. Or to be more precise, writing crystallizes previously half-formulated or unformulated thoughts, gives them form, and extends chains of thoughts in new directions.
Lynn Hunt, in a 2010 essay for Perspectives on History, quoted by Nick Heer
Students, scientists, and anyone else who lets AI do the writing for them will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.