weekend ai reads for 2026-08-07

But here’s where I’ve landed: I could spend forever building a fortress against the worst people, or I could build a good tool for the honest majority and trust that most people aren’t the villain of this story. I’m choosing the second one. I’d rather bet on the human side of things and be occasionally wrong than treat every writer like a suspect — which is, you’ll notice, the exact thing I’m mad about in the first place.

I now feel awful for anyone who wants to tell a story post-2026. You will forever be doubted. If you love an em dash the way I do, or you like flowy run-on sentences like I do, if you grew up reading Proust to let the words flow over you in all their glory, if you memorized sonnets so the iambic pentameter would soak into your bones, you’re gonna sound like a bot.

But ultimately what matters most is solving the right problems.

I feel like all the real art I’ve made in my life came with some degree of risk and vulnerability, that showing other people the thing I made also gave them a mortifying access to my mind or soul, an access to either understand or misunderstand me as a person (both scary, in different ways).

Your LLM came with settings you didn't choose. It agrees with you, sounds sure, and writes in your place. Each dimension below is one of those factory defaults. Move its slider to tailor the result to your own needs and values, then paste it into your LLM once. Every chat after follows your rules.

“Frictionmaxxing,” a term that writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton coined to refer to a rejection of technologies of convenience in favor of slower and more analog processes, has escaped containment, coming to mean the general choice to choose pre-internet ways of creation and problem-solving. In this sense, it can refer to the choice of the handcrafted over the AI-generated.

TokenTown is an isometric city where every district is one stage of a transformer language model. A convoy carries a hidden state along the roads: it is cut into tokens at the docks, cast into a vector at the foundry, stamped with its position, then driven around the layer ring (attention, residual, feed-forward, residual) once per layer, before the stadium turns it into a probability distribution and the sampler picks one token. That token drives back up the feedback highway and the whole city runs again.

It depends on your organization, your customers, and your appetite for things going wrong. But there is a framework I keep coming back to that helps make the decision concrete rather than abstract.

It comes down to two variables: blast radius and reversibility.

Yes — if you pick the right model. See what runs locally on your exact phone, how fast, and which app to use.

When I was a university teacher in the pre-AI epoch, a student presented me with an essay which was entirely plagiarized from a celebrated critic except for the outstandingly intelligent bits, which had been deleted. With becoming modesty, the student said he knew he wasn’t up to much intellectually speaking and so dumbed down the essay he was hijacking.

Instead: stop doing the parts of your project that are not fun. Maybe that’s stable releases. Maybe that’s release notes. Maybe that’s backwards compatibility. Whatever it is: again, you don’t owe anyone anything. You can do OSS however you want to do it.

Software may have been better back in the day, but that was mainly because it was much simpler. Since then, we have kept coming up with new abstractions, new frontend frameworks, and more infrastructure complexity. The bar for “user experience” has kept rising, but everything has become increasingly fragile.

Advertised saving: 65%. Measured saving: 8.5%.

After centuries of simulated wars, wives, and wonders, a jaded aristocrat visits his neighborhood dreamspool dealer in search of something, anything, that still feels real.

From the tragic downfall of Toys “R” Us to the recent bankruptcy of Red Lobster, we unmask how these iconic brands were systematically destroyed at the hands of predatory Private Equity firms. We will break down complex financial engineering scams—like the Leveraged Buyout (LBO) and the Sale-Leaseback trap—into an entertaining, cinematic investigation showing how modern wealth is extracted at our expense.