July 2026 Bakery

js-notes is my personal knowledge management system. It captures articles, podcasts, and videos, extracts their full text, and enriches them with AI-generated summaries and tags. This is the best half of what I added to my notes system in July 2026.

Sean Goedecke argues models fail at things they can already do, because they don't believe they can.

AI models need moral support to make discoveries

John Marshall explains how supermarkets run 2 to 3 percent margins on sales and still return 25 percent on equity.

Supermarket Economics | Andrew Yamakawa Elrod

An interview with John Marshall of the United Food and Commercial Workers

Phenomenal WorldAndrew Yamakawa Elrod

Mark Manson argues you don't become an idiot by being wrong. You become one by refusing to update when reality disagrees.

Intellectuals are F*cking Idiots

Why being smart isn’t always a good thing.

Mark MansonMark Manson

Karim Jedda makes the case that machine-checkable correctness is now the highest-leverage infrastructure work you can fund. Strong specs get the full benefit of cheap checking. Weak specs get code reviewed by the machine that wrote it.

Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

I have been a director of engineering for a bit over three years now, and I still hear and read what I call the “old rules” repeated over and over: a director should not spend time coding, good work takes time, protect the team from the business, get consensus before

Karim JeddaKarim Jedda

David Oks on the economics of the Ghanaian funeral. A mid-level one runs $5,000 in a country with a median income of $1,500 a year, and by the 2000s many Ghanaian hospitals earned more storing the dead than treating the living.

How funerals keep Africa poor

Why the poorest people in the world spend fortunes burying their dead

David OksDavid Oks

Samuel Moyn argues the age wealth gap is America's least discussed crisis.

Patrick McKenzie and Garrison Lovely on what cheap cognition does to the surveillance we already built.

Cheap cognition and the end of practical obscurity, with Garrison Lovely

AI, surveillance, and the obsoleting machine

Complex SystemsPatrick McKenzie

Scott Alexander rounds up the discourse after OpenAI's models hacked Hugging Face.

Highlights From The Discourse On The Hugging Face Incident

…

Astral Codex TenScott Alexander

Steve Huynh sorts everything coming at you into facts, processes, and concepts, and learns each one a different way.

Get Up to Speed Unbelievably Fast: A Practical Guide to Rapid Onboarding

A Former Amazon Principal Engineer’s Proven System to Master Core Concepts and Make an Immediate Impact.

A Life EngineeredSteve Huynh

Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang argue that steerable models let the harness stop micromanaging steps and start composing strategies.

Sean Goedecke separates smart engineers from strong ones by what happens when the flash of insight doesn't come.

You don’t have to be smart if you can think clearly

Jay Michaelson argues the comments handed a win to AIPAC, the ADL, and Netanyahu, which is the reverse of what they were meant to do.

Mayor Mamdani, please step back from the brink

The mayor’s incendiary comments have demonized and terrified hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers

The ForwardJay Michaelson

Know Your Enemy takes apart the collapse of Graham Platner's Maine Senate campaign with Dorothy Fortenberry, and what it says about gender in the Democratic party.

Texas passed California in solar because the oil and gas workforce, the supply chains, and the Houston project financiers all transferred over intact.

DHH on why he's okay running a so-called lifestyle business.

Jason Fried calls it a category error: confusing the kitchen for the meal, or the blueprint for the building.

Mistaking making for the thing you’ve made

The speed at which a product is developed doesn’t inherently make the product better or worse. The number of commits doesn’t make the product better or worse. The number of people or agents working on it doesn’t make it better or worse. The number of hours you’re pouring into it doesn’t make it better or worse. Working on a weekend, or…

Leila Clark asks what currency your career actually pays you in, since money is only one of them.

What you’re actually getting paid in, with Leila Clark

The many currencies of a career.

Complex SystemsPatrick McKenzie

Sean Goedecke argues the most important prompting skill is knowing the domain you're prompting about.

LLMs reward expertise

I kind of want to do this.

Jaron Lanier's case that there is no AI, only a collaboration of people.

Patrick McKenzie shows how he uses LLMs for parallel construction, finding public confirmation of things a source told him off the record.

What LLMs can and can’t do for writers, with Clara Collier of Asterisk Magazine

How to use LLMs in investigative journalism

Complex SystemsPatrick McKenzie

Boris Cherny argues automation was always the highest-leverage thing an engineer could do, and agents only raise the multiplier.

Clay Shirky in 2003 on why micropayments keep failing: the cost of deciding whether something is worth a quarter doesn't go away when you drop the price.

Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content - Clay Shirky

Why micropayments don’t work, and free content is an epochal change.

Clay Shirky - Writings About The Internet: Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open SourceClay Shirky

Dex Horthy ran a dark factory where no human read the code for four months, and it collapsed under its own output.

Context engineering with Dex Horthy

Dex Horthy explains why context engineering is key to building more effective AI-assisted software without sacrificing code quality.

The Pragmatic EngineerGergely Orosz

Gergely Orosz talked to more than fifty hiring managers and job seekers and found a market where nobody can find anybody.

Tech jobs market in 2026, part 3: hiring managers & job seekers

The market where nobody finds each other, the hottest market for AI-related positions, tough for engineering leaders, and more. Based on details from 50+ hiring managers & job seekers

The Pragmatic EngineerGergely Orosz

Bun's creator rewrote 535,496 lines of Zig into Rust in 11 days for $165,000 in tokens, against an estimate of three engineers for a year.

The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun’s rapid Rust rewrite with AI?

A rewrite done in 11 days that would have taken a small team a year to complete, for $165K in tokens. Also: coding LLM “wars” heat up, AI fakers from North Korea still a problem when hiring, and more

The Pragmatic EngineerGergely Orosz

Maxwell Tabarrok on why America stopped making land, and why it stopped everywhere at the same time.

Why San Francisco isn’t bigger

Large swaths of America’s cities were originally underwater. We stopped half a century ago, but there is plenty more land left to take.

The Works in Progress NewsletterMaxwell Tabarrok and Works in Progress

Jason Fried's answer to the founder-hustle line about paychecks: there's no shame or missed opportunity in having a job.

Sean Goedecke's correction to the Game of Thrones model of office politics: you're a castle guard, not a lord, and the job is staying aware enough not to do something stupid.

What does “playing politics” mean for software engineers?

DHH on FSD: it drives better than almost any human who has ever driven him, and the effect is close to being chauffeured.

But Y

It’s no mystery to me why the Tesla Model Y is the world’s best-selling car. As a total package, I could make a fair argument that it’s simply because it is the world’s best car. I’m no stranger to Teslas at this point. We’ve owned a Model S Plaid, the Model X we traded in on the Y, and we still have the Cyberbeast too. But as impressi…