41 years ago, Samuel Lipman wrote that an artist’s life is a “constant—and constantly losing—battle” against one’s own limits. That image has lasted because print culture taught us to imagine the …

This is a partial synthesis of the books read through 2025 in the Contraptions Book Club. We live in a moment when the whole of human culture has become strangely available, no longer just an archive …

It was a small announcement on an innocuous page about “spring cleaning”. The herald, some guy with the kind of name that promised he was all yours. Four sentences you only find because you were …

start tiny and scale fast without vendor lock-in All biotech labs have data, tons of it. The problem is the same across scales. Accessing data across experiments is hard. Often data simply gets lost …

In his substack post today, Venkatesh Rao wrote about reading and writing in the age of LLMs as playing and making toys respectively. In one part he writes about how the dopamine feedback loop from …