All desks

A short essay arguing that the AI-replaces-programmers debate misses the point: programmers who code for the process itself will keep writing code by hand, regardless of what AI can do.

Glazer's data team recovers a 'broken' CronosPro database by cracking an obfuscated schema as an assignment problem, fixing wrong parser boundaries, and validating structure instead of trusting readable output.

An indie dev disclosed AI-generated art up front — and still got called AI slop without anyone playing the demo. The thread's lesson: disclosure doesn't fix the look; consistent art direction is the real craft problem.

Cole Medin's pattern for letting coding agents operate real infrastructure without ever holding credentials: an orchestrator wraps the agent, exposes an allowlist of Git-managed workflows, and keeps every execution observable. A Kestra-sponsored ~2-minute spotlight.

An 1884 physician's self-experiment with cannabis and ergot tinctures produced a tunnel, an out-of-body view of his own corpse, and a body 'fashioned from wood' — plus a possible case of early pharma-paid endorsement.

Dan Luu ran 26 testing-technique prompts against coding agents: naming TDD, formal methods, or fuzzing mostly makes results worse, and agents only test well with hands-on steering.

A Lebanese-American surgical resident flies to Beirut with her mother days after a ten-day truce — and the family friend waiting for them once had a heart of stone built by treating the wounded of an earlier war.

A voluntary ban on front-of-shirt gambling sponsors pushed the money to sleeves, training kits and perimeter boards. Ten of twenty Premier League clubs now take commercial money from operators with no UK licence — the ones that owe their customers no affordability checks.

A 15-year speechwriter argues the panic over AI-written prose is an elitist myth — ghostwriters have always done this, and the real value was never the words but the interrogation.

Saturdays, 10 a.m. to noon, Sept 12 through Oct 31 at Thomas Jefferson Park: free sprints, relays, long jump and hurdles clinics for kids 8-16 from City Parks Foundation.

Free weekly workouts at Brooklyn Bridge Park this fall: NYRR Open Run community 3-milers every Tuesday at Pier 6, and Amp'd Bootcamp on the waterfront Wednesdays at Pier 2 — no gym membership required.

Legal NFL handle is projected flat for the first time since 2018, and the industry lobby blames prediction markets. Operator marketing spend is up more than 60% anyway — more money spent chasing the same pool.

Jay Caspian Kang's Fault Lines column opens a series on the decline of shame in the age of social media — from the N.B.A.'s tanking problem to private equity buying up youth sports.

A 1669 treatise on curing wounds at a distance — from a bloodied garter soaked in vitriol to the satirical scheme for finding longitude with wounded hounds and powder of sympathy.

Free music returns to the parks - ragtime at Bryant Park and folk jams in Greeley Square today, Public Record live-album finale at the Delacorte tonight, free Devil Wears Prada 2 costumes at Rockefeller Center, plus salsa-and-swing Thursday, Dracula in Astoria Friday, West Harlem jazz Saturday.

Nineteenth-century Bukhara's dye-before-weave ikat textiles — the craft of 'cloud tying,' its ethnic division of labor, and why 'ikat print' is a contradiction in terms.

Tuesday was light on volume — 275 items gathered, arXiv contributing zero — but not a quiet news day. The lead is Courant mathematician Tristan Buckmaster’s Lean-verified finite-time-blowup results for forced 3D Euler, Boussinesq, and …

Zoë Hu on Leslie Fiedler's scandalous 1960 thesis — that the American canon is sexless literature for boys fleeing adult love — and what his hatred of political art missed.

In 1886, Genevieve Stebbins turned the actor's body into a science — every gesture and eyelid movement classified into Delsarte's ninefold accord — an aesthetic gymnastics that still echoes in acting classes today.

Life-size tape silhouettes of the lost appeared on walls across the city after 9/11 — 490 profiles of firefighters and passengers. The Tape Art collective's memorial archive, offline since 2009, is live again for the 25th anniversary.

Vivek Chibber on why unions are the essential mass base for a revived Left — and why socialists have always been the lifeblood of the labor movement.

Lindsay Clancy's mistrial turned her case into a referendum on motherhood and mental-health care. Moira Donegan's reading is narrower and harder: every failure that led to her break was an ordinary one, and the system countenanced all of them.

Before the internet delivered niche knowledge to your door, the post office did — how linotype machines, cheap pulp, and postal networks built America's mail-order occult industry.

Austin Z. Henley golfed a Python-subset interpreter into 1024 bytes of C — no macros, no libraries — by skipping the compiler pipeline entirely and re-parsing the source as its control flow.

Michael Stapelberg deleted the last cgo dependency from Debian Code Search by reimplementing the TurboPFor integer codec in pure Go — matching the C reference with AVX-512, then beating it with a positional-popcount trick.

An indie researcher spent months building a theory of wages with Claude as a working partner — splicing Acemoglu and Restrepo's task model with classical input-output economics and landing on Henry George's land tax as the fix. The punchline: the model wrote the essay too, in its own voice.

One of five free borough celebrations for the NYC Marathon's 50th anniversary, NYRR Open Run lands at Astoria Park on Sept 26 — community 5K on the renovated track, walkers of all paces welcome.

The famous IWW-era poster that redrew the pharaohs' pyramid as a diagram of capitalist society — a layer cake of exploitation with the working class bearing the whole weight at the base.

A six-emotion scorecard on AI — surprise, fear, disgust, sadness, anger, happiness — from a working software architect who refuses both hype and doom.

On the centennial of the sixteen-month Canton–Hong Kong general strike — the experiment in workers' democracy that paralyzed a British colony and opened Hong Kong's long fight for universal suffrage.

Labor Day in the city: West Indian Day Parade on Eastern Parkway, free jazz piano in Bryant Park and solo violin at Grand Central, The Wolfhound block party in Astoria, Met Opera HD closes with La Bohème, Public Record at the Delacorte.

Monday after a quiet weekend, and the first arXiv feed since Thursday dumped the whole Sep 3–6 backlog at once — three of today’s seven keeps come out of that pile. The headliner is a community finding that Notion’s official MCP connector …

Cal Newport argues the alarming talk from A.I. leaders traces to the Rationalist subculture that shaped the industry founders, and that the public should focus on the technology's actual current harms.

Rec Technologies CEO Birju Kadakia (early Uber, ran Uber Eats worldwide, product at The Athletic) on the vertical AI wedge in recreation tech — agents that read city policies and write deterministic refund code, skills-versus-workflows architecture, hallucination guardrails with real accuracy numbers, and hiring engineers who act like engineering managers. Interviewed by Angelina on TwoSetAI.

In 1683 a Dutch East India Company surgeon published the first illustrated European treatise on acupuncture — a Chinese manual mangled through three translations, with qi lost along the way.

For centuries Venice's working-class factions fought ritualized battles — the guerre dei pugni — for control of neighborhood bridges; painters and engravers captured the mayhem before the last great brawl in 1705.

The Journal of Justice of the young Turkish Republic visualized its legal revolution: European-style statistical graphics drawn in Arabic script — law as nation-building, cover by cover.

The 9/11 documentary 'IX XI' screens free this month at Little Island, a Canal Street skateshop, a Buddhist temple and an East Village newsstand — each venue tied to someone in the film.

The Victorian proto-Wikipedia: Notes & Queries (1849) let amateur scholars trade historical corrections and morbid royal trivia — severed heads, Cromwell's skull, hooded executioners — and invented the crowd-sourced way we fact-check today.

OpenAI's chief scientist argues machine intelligence is grown, not designed — and that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring well enough to keep scaling at full speed.

Sociologist Ashok Kumbamu argues India's Gen Z protests are breaking the culture of fear protecting Modi's Hindutva government — a 'post-fear' moment when people act despite their fear.

AI-written posts on LinkedIn are instantly recognizable — and readers quietly stop trusting the author. Cantrill on the tells, the authenticity cost, and why your own voice is worth keeping.

GitHub Trending for the week of 2026-09-06: ponytail's 'laziest senior dev' agent ethos, a fully-local ElevenLabs alternative, an agent-harness performance kit, academic research skills for Claude Code, netcat over Tailscale, Chrome DevTools MCP, and more.

Brilliant CEO Sue Khim on why students mostly use AI to cheat today, her AI tutor Cooji that refuses to hand over answers or explanations, and why the most defensible AI products live in domains the frontier labs can't RL on.

A Guardian opinion column reads two recent scandals — Kalshi's lifetime ban of George Santos and Bill Simmons's on-air admission of proxy betting — as evidence that gambling enforcement now targets whoever makes himself impossible to ignore, not the structure that made the conduct ordinary.

Readers can tell when prose is machine-written — 71% of surveyed developers say they avoid the author afterward. Cantrill on the backlash against LLM-authored writing.

A free Climate Week NYC evening at Starlight Park on Sept 24: tour the LEED-certified Bronx River House, watch Save the Sound's 'Reconnected' on dam removal, then a practitioner Q&A on river restoration and climate resilience.

Colin Kidd dates an Oxbridge golden age from 1945 to 1979 — dons as national tastemakers and royal tutors — and Margaret Thatcher's ascent as its end

Eight shows from Gothamist's September gig roundup — indie pop at an East River heliport, death metal at the reopened Saint Vitus, ambient sets inside churches, and Erykah Badu with De La Soul at Forest Hills Stadium.

Festival Sunday before Labor Day: free Caribbean jam at Smorgasburg Prospect Park, a free-book fair on 31st Ave Open Street, Ralph Ellison jazz and a Bargemusic world premiere at 2, Met Opera HD screens Frida y Diego at 8 - then Monday is the West Indian Day Parade.