This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). More details.

TL;DR: Copyright protects expression and leaves ideas free, because expression was the costly thing to produce. AI makes expression cheap and moves the value to judgment and taste.

You have never met a norm-maker

Minsky learned from Pitts and McCulloch. Then he buried their field for twenty years. The same institutional pattern that shaped the first AI winter is running again today.

On-device AI dictation for Mac and Windows. Press, speak, paste — no cloud round-trip, no app account, no waiting.

Think like everyone else. Think like no one else. A daily social prediction game.

I thought of a cute problem: what is the smallest (size) ./a.out binary I can create? Here are some rules the program should follow: ./a.out must run successfully. $? must deterministically be 0. The binary must be produced by GCC only; no post-processing with objcopy, hex editors, or manual patching. We begin with the simplest program possible: // compiled with gcc empty.c int main() { return 0; } This gives us a file size of 15816 bytes (from stat). Not too shabby, but we will need four of the RAM used in the Apollo guidance computer to fit our binary that does nothing.

Don't get your hopes up.

We have 50,000 registered participants in SSoC 2026. Three hundred projects. Five thousand mentors. The most impactful engineering work we did this season? A hidden admin dashboard that no participant will ever see.

You have seen the posts. The LinkedIn announcement that opens "In a world where", four hundred words long and not one of them the author's. The comment that thanks you for "this incredibly thoughtful piece" and then describes a piece you did not write. The company email so completely handed over to a machine, start to finish, that no human could have read it back without wincing, which is the tell, because plainly no human did. Bad work is not the part that gets to me. Bad work has always been with us. It is that nobody making it appears to feel a thing. Not a wince, not a flicker.