Should I Learn Coding as a Second Language?
“I can’t code, and this bums me out because—with so many books and courses and camps—there are so many opportunities to learn these days. I suspect I’ll understand the machine…
The Case for Software Criticism
Here’s a quick typology of tech journalism today: news reporting (“Amazon announces layoffs affecting 18,000 employees”), gadget reviews, company and founder profiles, opinion essays (Zeynep Tufecki et al.), investigative journalism…
Imagine the Possibilities of Speaking Fluent Machine
It’s difficult to reflect on the past year—or forecast the next—without a sense of wonder regarding the sheer magnitude of innovation taking place across the AI landscape. On a weekly…
Billionaires Are A Security Threat
These success stories are wonderful, but they all pale in comparison to Wikipedia, the greatest work of human knowledge of all time and the single most important thing ever created…
AI Reveals the Most Human Parts of Writing
Still, in many cases, letting a computer impact the direction of a project, rather than craft a few choice sentences, can feel like giving the computer the reins when really,…
How an AI Became My Code-Writing Genie
Code pours from Feross Aboukhadijeh’s fingers. As a devotee of the open source software movement, he has written immensely popular web apps, peer-to-peer file exchanges, and more than 100 other…
The Most Efficient Way to Debug the Simulation
MNEY-3848, “Replace simulated real currency with simulated digital currency.” This is one of those tickets where engineers make up the solution to a problem that exists only in their heads.…
Climate Stress Was Getting Me Down, So I Made a Clicker Game
On cue, a flood came. We had prepared with long plastic gutter extenders that snaked away from the house, but water seeped into the basement anyway. I have a small…
Humans Can’t Be the Sole Keepers of Scientific Knowledge
There’s an old joke that physicists like to tell: Everything has already been discovered and reported in a Russian journal in the 1960s, we just don’t know about it. Though…
Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t
Something about the future defeats our imaginative capacity. “Present self screws over future self,” says Tim Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University who studies procrastination. He says that we regard…