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Create 3D models from OpenStreetMap data

There will emerge a market for code written by humans. This has to happen: I can't prove it, but I can feel it. Despite vast improvements in the generative models, AI-generated art and music are still slop. AI-generated prose has gotten sloppier with phenomena like the much-mocked "Claudese". It's so obviously devoid of a human mind behind it that Zoomers and Alphennials are starting to use "that's so AI" as an insult. Despite the leaps-and-bounds improvements of recent models, I have to believe that AI code is slop too; the major difference between code and these other expressive forms is that we are far more tolerant of slop code: for the most part we just care if the damn thing works.

It is right to revere reason. But moral philosophers from Aristotle to Rawls knew that if an argument leads to intolerable places, it must have a hidden faulty step. EAs’ instinct, though, is to enjoy counterintuitive conclusions, even if they seem perverse.

The AI Greta Garbo is a bizarre soignée figure, a Stepford robo-star, a Hallmark-greeting-card parody of the icy hauteur, distraite sensuality and deadpan comedy that Garbo projected in life. The AI Garbo is like the classiest ever presenter of a TV shopping channel, purring her way through a dull and humourless script that seeks to create a brand synergy between the frictionless ball-bearings manufactured by SKF and what the company imagines to be Garbo’s own all-important smoothness.

On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological exploration of everything that happened in 2026. The video is on YouTube; here are my annotated slides and notes to accompany the talk.

We’re building a phone that isn’t designed to run fixed-function applications. I doubt anyone will ever get up on a stage and show off a AAA mobile game (that nobody plays) on it. It’s not for TikTok and short-form video, though I guess you can ask it for that. You can ask it for whatever: it’ll build apps for you, on the phone, whenever you want.

The primary science fiction scenario for out-of-control AIs involves machines developing their own malevolent intentions. This has provoked a host of discussions as to whether an AI could develop consciousness or have something like human intentionality. These speculations are misplaced, however: an AI does not need either consciousness or autonomous intentionality to become dangerous. It can be directed by a human to achieve one goal and develop intentions to achieve the subordinate goals necessary to carry out the human directive it was given.

Poptimism has become the perfect example of Gramscian hegemony™—where late-stage capitalism has so commandeered the human value system that well-meaning liberals believe their full-throated defense of art-for-money's-sake is somehow chipping away at the class structure.

Cultural-political mic-drop.

Stop listening to emergency podcasts; stop doomscrolling; go for a walk and talk to people; buy your local newspaper – and, finally, stop believing that we are living “through one of the most difficult, anxious and chaotic times in human history”.

If PJ Harvey had her way, she would have made her public debut on Slint’s Spiderland. At age 20 or so, she answered the Kentucky five-piece’s call for a female backing vocalist, but never heard back. In one way, you can imagine it: both subtly violent acts from their respective south, with the accents to prove it. But even at the turn of the 1990s, the idea of Polly Jean Harvey bringing up the rear is hard to fathom—her Westcountry leer would have unleashed the devil incarnate into Slint’s whispered intimations of evil.

What an absolute frontier operator.

The cost of writing code collapsed, and the cost of reviewing, fixing and operating it is following, and I'm assuming it gets there. What's left of making software is finding out what people actually want, defining it precisely, and making it pleasant to use. That cost is per piece of software and doesn't transfer, so as the amount of software goes to infinity, which it will because there's no ceiling on demand, that cost becomes the whole job.

A world that keeps removing the unlikely also removes the things that could have become the next likely. Ecologists have known this for a long time already and even priced it: they call it the insurance value of biodiversity, the standing reserve of rare species that cost energy and contribute nothing, until the climate shifts and one of them turns out to be what survives. A monoculture is efficient right up until the weather changes.

Why trust us? We pay full price for the shoes we review and never publish sponsored content.

Great mini-essay on business and market growth.

Clever way of running some cheeky internal fibre.

AI is the best thing that ever happened to a company like ours. Not because it changes what we believe, but because it stops us having to compromise. The reason we couldn't stay small, flat and senior at enterprise scale was that making at that scale needs bodies. Now, it doesn’t.

Back when dog technology was first being developed, it was far from obvious that it was safe for people—who were literally inviting wolves into their caves. They had to train them not to eat babies. Thousands of years later, dogs still sometimes escape and go rogue. But overall, people are happy with how things have worked out. (It did not end so well for the Neanderthals.)

Great analogy.

This is where the culture stuff comes in: Bluesky is hostile in different ways to new normie users and to new power users. The absence of a default algorithm makes Bluesky quite boring and difficult to a new user. Yes, there are starter packs and custom feeds, etc, but that’s all quite complicated. Just like most users don’t use Linux on desktop, most people want a plug-in-and-play social experience. Bluesky isn’t that.

Or maybe all text-based social media (including Bluesky) has become riven by politics, which is exhausting and just not that much fun.

Generational change (for the worse)

A Pinboard alternative on AT Protocol.

Skyreader gathers your reading from across the internet into one calm place and helps you make sense of it all.

A web service for managing lists of feeds, sharing them with other users, both in and outside of FeedLand, and reading and sharing news. The goal of FeedLand is to make news a social thing, following the pattern of social media apps, but using open formats and protocols.

It is the systematic loss of responsibility, reflection, and intuition. These habits do not stop at the level of the individual. They scale. They become culture. And culture, eventually, becomes politics.

Big AI models like ChatGPT and Claude get all the attention, but the continually increasing amount of fast, low cost models means today's software can embed little bits of intelligence anywhere they're needed. And when software can think, we can rethink the UI of software.

You can think of the doorman fallacy as an extension or example of the Chesterton's fence fallacy: getting rid of the fence (doorman) without fully understanding why it was there in the first place.

Everything an agent shows mid-conversation: thinking states, tool calls, streaming text, tables and more.

Many of those I speak to think tech has pushed this change forward – and rapidly. The shift away from cash towards card and digital payments is usually framed as removing “friction”, says Prof John Vines, the chair of design informatics at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. “It’s about being more convenient. This is all a trend towards making it easier for us to spend our money.” The software in point-of-sale terminals prompts the customer for a tip. “These systems are presented as a way of making giving a tip easier. We don’t have to think about it too much, we don’t have to fiddle with coins and notes. But, really, it’s about encouraging us to spend more.”

What an excellent technical essay.

Another focus for African innovation is so-called “small language models” for specific tasks, which have at most a few billion parameters (frontier LLMs have trillions) [...]

All this amounts to a somewhat counter-cultural vision of AI, prizing modesty over scale and context over omniscience. It may not survive the all-conquering ambitions of Silicon Valley. But for now African researchers have found a niche.

Rules for the robust and accessible UIs that the web deserves, encompassing architecture, typography, colors, layout, and motion. One fetchable file.

From Mr Hallows.

Great diagnosis, not great solution.

Rich, engaging mathematical resources for ages 3 to 18, including research-informed teacher support. NRICH resources are free to use for teachers, students and parents, and open to all.