A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, July 7th, 2025
In a scene of the vastly underrated 2003 sequel film "The Matrix Reloaded", Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, meets "The Oracle", a sentient program interpreted by the late Gloria Foster. In that fragment, The Oracle offers Neo a piece of candy, and Neo asks whether she knows if he is going to accept it or not. The unfazed Oracle responds "Wouldn't be much of an Oracle if I didn't!"
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, June 2nd, 2025
"Compiler Explorer" is the name of a fascinating project by Matt Godbolt, a British C++ software developer living in Chicago. It is the simplest and most wonderful thing; just paste a snippet of code on the left pane (in C, C++, D, C#, Java, Python, and a myriad more languages), and you will see on the right its equivalent in assembly code, as produced by one of a long list of compilers, including some commercial ones, for a wide variety of CPU architectures and software versions.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, January 6th, 2025
Carl Sagan, in the opening words of his 1977 best-seller book, "The Dragons of Eden", quotes a phrase from Plato's Phaedrus, saying "In good speaking, should not the mind of the speaker know the truth of the matter about which he is to speak?" In this occasion I ask myself the same question, and thus I start this article by stating openly that I am no expert in the game of chess (I actually think I have a negative Elo rating!) I am just a fascinated onlooker who happens to marvel at the intricacies of a game that I have never mastered, most probably never will, but one which I greatly enjoy watching and reading about.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, December 2nd, 2024
Last month, OpenAI, the company (in)famous for their ChatGPT product, released a course called "ChatGPT Foundations for K-12 Educators", an event that has raised more than a few eyebrows, and even some outrage. We must have a serious conversation about the value of a bullshit generator in the context of teaching programming skills to new generations.
by Graham Lee, February 1st, 2021
You may be worried that I am going to talk about an author of books that are not about programming, and you are correct and incorrect. Correct, in that Hofstadter's books are not about programming (the intellectually hollow like to claim that they are not about anything at all, or that if you think you know what they are about then you did not understand them; this is untrue). Incorrect, in that Hofstadter's books and computer programs themselves are about the same thing.
by Adam Jones, August 5th, 2019
I once opened my eyes to the possibility that maybe one day, we could build software that could build itself. It was an idea that sat running around the back of my mind for a while, but sadly it was more of a solution looking for a problem than anything actually useful.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, August 5th, 2019
Dear Artificial Intelligence, some of us humans call ourselves technologists, and have predated your creators (presumably) by quite a few decades, if not a couple of centuries. As technologists, we used to share an unbounded love for a certain literary and cinematography genre, called "science-fiction." Authors like Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, James Cameron, the Wachowskis and Spike Jonze have told us countless times of the power, possibilities, and also the danger of AI in our society for the past seventy years. I am quite sure you have watched those movies by the time you reached this humble letter.
by Graham Lee, August 5th, 2019
I do not want to sound like a tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist, but your country, your neighbourhood, your job…your entire life is already controlled by artificial intelligence. If you do not like the bit in Star Trek: Discovery where we find that Control has taken over Starfleet, then I have bad news: an AI is running the military, too.