Issue 2 — Thinking about Machines

• ChatGPT Isn’t Bullshit

  A widely cited 2024 paper says ChatGPT is a bullshitter by definition. The definition doesn’t survive contact with code, spreadsheets, or a chimpanzee — and the concept left standing is borrowed from evolutionary biology, not moral philosophy.

• Checklist for Realistic Text Bots

  Chat software behaves like a spreadsheet: silent until addressed, answering exactly once, killable at any character without objection. That’s the right standard for a spreadsheet. Conversation analysis, grounding theory, and 2024–2026 dialogue-systems research say what it should be instead.

• The Keyboard Symmetry Tax

  Every split ergonomic keyboard sold today gives each hand the same number of keys. A brute-force search across 61,000 English words for the alphabet split that actually maximizes hand alternation finds an answer nowhere near fifty-fifty.

Issue 1 — Working with Machines

• Code You’ve Never Read

  Nearly every tool a programmer now takes for granted was once dismissed as a shortcut for people who couldn’t do the real thing. A short history of programmers distrusting the future, and being wrong about it in the same four ways every time.

• The Good Old Days Were the Bubble

  Every warning that AI is gutting software engineering assumes the thing being gutted was sound. It was not. A defense of the engineers being laid off that refuses to pretend the world they are being laid off from was in good shape.

• You Can’t Review What You Can’t Build

  People complain that AI writes code without architecture or a thought for the contract it breaks. True — but the machine is not the one who forgot how to do those things. The tool is a lens, and it magnifies whatever judgment is already holding it.

• Agile Reads Minds It Cannot See

  Scrum began as a rugby team with marketing inside it, and became a fence around the coders. But even done perfectly, Agile makes claims about other minds it has no right to — who is motivated, what is valuable, what the team has decided — and treats a group of separate people as if it were one.