reading.

Books on the shelf, and things I’m reading around the web.

./from-the-web

things i’m reading, not necessarily endorsing.

June 2026

  1. The Rise and Fall of the ‘Hipster Music’ Era, 2000-2014: VICE’s Definitive Timeline ↗ (opens in new tab)

    Tony Alpsen · Vice

    An epic odyssey from (what they now call) Indie Sleaze: Part I to Future Islands on Letterman, with (nearly) no Mumford & Sons in sight.

  2. Epicure: Navigating the Emergent Geometry of Food Ingredient Embeddings ↗ (opens in new tab)

    Jakub Radzikowski, Josef Chen · arXiv.org

    We present Epicure, a family of three sibling skip-gram ingredient embeddings retrained from scratch on a multilingual recipe corpus. We aggregate 4.14M recipes from 11 sources spanning seven languages, English, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian, German, and Indian-English, and normalise the raw ingredient strings to 1,790 canonical entries via an LLM-augmented pipeline. A…

May 2026

  1. Karpathy said vibe coding is obsolete. What he described instead is product management. ↗ (opens in new tab)

    Jeff Gothelf

    Andrej Karpathy called "agentic engineering" the future of building. Strip the engineering vocabulary and he just described product management.

  2. AI as a Design Medium ↗ (opens in new tab)

    ERIC RODENBECK · Harvard Design Magazine

    Eric Rodenbeck, lecturer at the Harvard GSD, examines AI as a design medium that can reshape how designers think and produce knowledge.

  3. Escape from agentic loop - by David Hoang ↗ (opens in new tab)

    David Hoang · proofofconcept.pub

    Issue 297: Human-in-the-Loop is the new doom scrolling

  4. A Powerful New ‘QR Code’ Untangles Math’s Knottiest Knots | Quanta Magazine ↗ (opens in new tab)

    Erica Klarreich · Quanta Magazine

    With a newly discovered mathematical tool, researchers are hoping to gain unprecedented insight into the structure of complex knots.

  5. “It’s Strange To Be Talking About the Flaming Lips In The Past Tense”: An Interview With Steven Drozd ↗ (opens in new tab)

    ZS, By Zach Schonfeld · Stereogum

    Wayne Coyne's longtime musical partner on his decades in the Lips, his ouster from the band during addiction treatment, and his upcoming solo debut album.

April 2026

  1. What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools? | The New Yorker ↗ (opens in new tab)

    Jessica Winter · The New Yorker

    “I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives down the block,” Jessica Winter writes. Read her report on the push for A.I. in education.

  2. Stewart Lee: Kanye West’s banned. Meanwhile certain people get away with antisemitism scot-free ↗ (opens in new tab)

    Stewart Lee · The Nerve

    Obviously, rap stars advertising swastika T-shirts during the Super Bowl is unacceptable. There seem to be different rules for another kind of racism in Britain