The Fatal Trap UBI Boosters Keep Falling Into
To win the argument for universal basic income, advocates must confront the myth that less work means less worth. By: Karl Widerquist The general idea behind universal basic income (UBI) is almost as old as America itself. You can trace it back to 1797, when Thomas Paine argued for guaranteed payments in his political treatise […]
Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
I haven’t published since April because I’ve been afraid. I also avoided social media, news aggregators, and discussion forums for months. I’m done letting fear stop me. What was I afraid of? In this post I detail every single thing I’ve avoided admitting on this blog. Knowledge Gap Confessions First, why am I admitting these […]
A first look at Django’s new background tasks
Django 6.0 introduces a built-in background tasks framework in django.tasks. But don’t expect to phase out Celery, Huey or other preferred solutions just yet. The release notes are quite clear on this: Django handles task creation and queuing, but does not provide a worker mechanism to run tasks. Execution must be managed by external infrastructure, […]
Airbus A320 – intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical for flight
Toulouse, France, 28 November 2025 – Analysis of a recent event involving an A320 Family aircraft has revealed that intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls. Airbus has consequently identified a significant number of A320 Family aircraft currently in-service which may be impacted. Airbus has worked proactively with the […]
Flight disruption warning as Airbus requests modifications to 6k planes
Theo LeggettBusiness correspondent The issue was discovered after a JetBlue aircraft en-route from Mexico to the United States in October experienced a ‘sudden drop in altitude’. The plane made an emergency landing, with reports at the time suggesting 15 to 20 people suffered minor injuries. It’s thought the incident was caused by intense solar radiation, […]
Good engineers write bad code at big companies
Every couple of years somebody notices that large tech companies sometimes produce surprisingly sloppy code. If you haven’t worked at a big company, it might be hard to understand how this happens. Big tech companies pay well enough to attract many competent engineers. They move slowly enough that it looks like they’re able to take […]
The original ABC language, Python’s predecessor (1991)
ABC was Python’s most direct predecessor; I worked on it from around 1983-1986. I downloaded these sources from cwi.nl, specifically the abc-unix tarball. Another copy of the ABC sources lives in Luciano Ramalho’s GitHub. I hope one day to compare the two trees and unify them. Most files have 1991 as their latest modification time […]
Effective harnesses for long-running agents
As AI agents become more capable, developers are increasingly asking them to take on complex tasks requiring work that spans hours, or even days. However, getting agents to make consistent progress across multiple context windows remains an open problem. The core challenge of long-running agents is that they must work in discrete sessions, and each […]
How wealth dies
THE NOTIONAL VALUE TRAP Foreword Just as growth in the “real” economy of material products and services has been decelerating towards contraction, so aggregates of financial wealth have carried on increasing relentlessly. Since the widening disequilibrium between the monetary and the material must eventually crash the financial system, the probability is that notional wealth will […]
Imgur Geo-Blocked the UK, So I Geo-Unblocked My Network
Imgur decided to block UK users. Honestly? I don’t really care that much. I haven’t actively browsed the site in years. But it used to be everywhere. Back when Reddit embedded everything on Imgur, maybe fifteen years ago, it was genuinely useful. Then Reddit built their own image hosting, Discord did the same, and Imgur […]