Clay weekly context brief for the Blogs category (ISO week 2026-W44).

Clay tracks publications from the Blogs feed list. Below are recent items from this category, each with its source and a short description of what the publication covers when one is available in the source feed.

Recent publications:
1. Is the current tab active?
   Source: Lea Verou
   Link: https://lea.verou.me/2021/05/is-the-current-tab-active/
   Today I ran into an interesting problem.
2. The Economic Benefit of Refactoring
   Source: Martin Fowler
   Link: https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/refactoring-economic-benefit.html
   Giles Edwards-Alexander does an experiment to see if decomposing a large function helps reduce token costs, suggesting that is may now be possible to measure the economic benefit of refactoring more
3. Tweet refs
   Source: Bret Victor
   Link: https://worrydream.com/Tweets/
   Added refs for tweets.
4. "Rules" that terminal programs follow
   Source: Julia Evans
   Link: https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/26/terminal-rules/
   Recently Ive been thinking about how everything that happens in the terminal is some combination of: Your operating system s job Your shell s job Your terminal emulator s job The job of whatever program you happen to be running (like top or vim or cat ) The first three (your operating system, shell, and terminal emulator) are all kind of known quantities if youre using bash in GNOME Terminal on Linux, you can more or less reason about how how all of those things interact, and some of their behaviour is standardized by POSIX.
5. Seven years from China
   Source: DHH
   Link: https://world.hey.com/dhh/seven-years-from-china-a63b03cc
   I first went to China in 2011 , racing for the Lotus/Jetalliance team at Zhuhai in the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup.
6. Urgent: Defeat environmental protection rollbacks
   Source: Richard Stallman
   Link: https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jul-oct.html#22_October_2026_(Urgent:_Defeat_environmental_protection_rollbacks)
   US citizens: call on your senators to defeat environmental protection rollbacks in the Senate permitting bill.
7. Vote!
   Source: Scott Aaronson
   Link: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10222
   Today, I take a break from your regularly-scheduled AI mathocalypse programming to urge my American readers to vote in the Congressional midterms, early if possible, if you havent already.
8. Accelerating the search for antimicrobial peptides with Google Antigravity
   Source: Demis Hassabis
   Link: https://deepmind.google/blog/accelerating-antimicrobial-discovery/
   Accelerating the search for novel antimicrobial peptides using Google Antigravity for Science.
9. The dangerous myth behind AI agent hacks
   Source: Yoshua Bengio
   Link: https://yoshuabengio.org/en/blog/dangerous-myth-behind-ai-agent-hacks
   A dangerous myth has gained traction after the recent hacks perpetrated by the AI agents developed by leading companies: That these incidents are just cyber security problems, that it's only a matter of fixing the sandboxes in which theyre trained.
10. Whats the Future for Pure Math Research in the Age of AI?
   Source: Stephen Wolfram
   Link: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/09/whats-the-future-for-pure-math-research-in-the-age-of-ai/
   Headlines and History The headlines keep coming: such and such an AI system has solved such and such a math problem.
11. Where do AI norms come from?
   Source: Charity Majors
   Link: https://charity.wtf/p/where-do-ai-norms-come-from
   A dialogue with Dr Cat Hicks on ethics, learning, and what we owe each other. Part one: start by listening.
12. There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
   Source: Dan Luu
   Link: https://danluu.com/brain-off/
   In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs 1 .
13. Remove start and end margins with the margin-trim property
   Source: Rachel Andrew
   Link: https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2026/09/15/remove-start-and-end-margins-with-the-margin-trim-property/
   A frequently asked multiple-column layout question is why a new paragraph at the start of the column has additional space above it.
14. Home Hardware, Part 1: My Control4 Revenge Arc
   Source: Jessie Frazelle
   Link: https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/home-hardware-part-one/
   Fuck 1 it, were doing consumer hardware for ourselves now and getting fucked by economies of scale, I guess.
15. Bad code is kudzu
   Source: Vicki Boykis
   Link: https://vickiboykis.com/2026/09/01/bad-code-is-kudzu/
   Cultivation of the Vines, Henri Martin Kudzu is a plant that was once introduced from East Asia to the eastern United States as a way to combat soil erosion.
16. You Can't "Vibe Code" Love
   Source: Jeff Atwood
   Link: https://blog.codinghorror.com/you-cant-vibe-code-love/
   About a year ago, I was offered a presentation slot at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin.
17. Logic for Programmers is Now Available
   Source: Hillel Wayne
   Link: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/lfp/
   I am delighted to announce that my book, Logic for Programmers , is now available!
18. Being Linux Torvalds
   Source: Salvatore Sanfilippo
   Link: 
http://antirez.com/news/171

   (This blog post was adapted from the transcription obtained from my YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6lxgYeVZqs) When Linus Torvalds developed the first Linux kernel, he had studied the Minix sources, he had studied computer architecture, he had the base knowledge needed, and he was obviously a very brilliant programmer.
19. My perfect Berlin weekend
   Source: Ines Montani
   Link: https://ines.io/blog/my-perfect-berlin-weekend
   My perfect Berlin weekend was a regular feature in Exberliner, the English-language city magazine. I was never famous enough to be asked to do one, so Im writing up my own here to accompany my Berlin guide.
20. China and the Future of Science
   Source: Tanner Greer
   Link: https://scholars-stage.org/china-and-the-future-of-science/
   THE CHINESE socio-political system differs from our own.
21. Implementing the transcendental functions in Ivy
   Source: Rob Pike
   Link: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2026/01/implementing-transcendental-functions.html
   Towards the end of 2014, in need of pleasant distraction, I began writing, in Go, my second pseudo-APL, called Ivy.
22. Not Your Fathers Internet
   Source: Ray Kurzweil
   Link: https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/not-your-father-s-internet
   Bill Gates envisions the next-generation Internet as a single, unified interface to information instantly available to you anywhere, any time.
23. Tether's Troubles in November 2022
   Source: Patio11
   Link: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2022/11/11/tether-required-recapitalization-again/
   Tether's November 2022 attestation, even if believed, strongly suggests it blew up (again) during the recent crypto route.
24. Reasoning about asyncio.Semaphore
   Source: Guido van Rossum
   Link: https://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2022/10/reasoning-about-asynciosemaphore.html
   In Silicon Valley is a very exclusive fast-food restaurant, which is always open.
25. Deep Neural Nets: 33 years ago and 33 years from now
   Source: Andrej Karpathy
   Link: http://karpathy.github.io/2022/03/14/lecun1989/
   .post-header h1 { font-size: 35px; } .post pre, .post code { background-color: #fcfcfc; font-size: 13px; /* make code smaller for this post...
26. Making the web better. With blocks!
   Source: Joel Spolsky
   Link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2022/01/27/making-the-web-better-with-blocks/
   Youve probably seen web editors based on the idea of blocks. Im typing this in WordPress, which has a little + button that brings up a long Read more "Making the web better. With blocks!"
27. April 2021 newsletter
   Source: Gwern Branwen
   Link: https://gwern.substack.com/p/april-2021-newsletter
   with links on AI scaling, particular new East Asian record-breaking work & deep reinforcement learning.
28. This is a test
   Source: Eric S Raymond
   Link: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8772
   This is a test to see if the database server issue that froze this blog is resolved.
29. Cognitect dev-tools
   Source: Rich Hickey
   Link: https://www.cognitect.com/blog/2020/08/20/Cognitect-dev-tools
   We're excited to release Cognitect dev-tools , a set of free tools that we've created for Clojure developers.
30. Business Requirements are Bullshit
   Source: Steve Yegge
   Link: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/08/business-requirements-are-bullshit.html
   Some CEO emailed me the other day.
31. I haven't disappeared...
   Source: James Gosling
   Link: http://www.nighthacks.net/roller/jag/entry/i_haven_t_disappeared
   I've been in the clutches of a product release.
32. The Render Token
   Source: Brendan Eich
   Link: https://brendaneich.com/2017/09/the-render-token/
   I wrote about OTOY over four years ago, in Today I Saw The Future.
33. Probability, Paradox, and the Reasonable Person Principle
   Source: Peter Norvig
   Link: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Probability.ipynb
   An IPython notebook tutorial on Probability Paradoxes
34. 82% of developers get this 3 line CSS quiz wrong
   Source: Lea Verou
   Link: https://lea.verou.me/2021/05/82-of-developers-get-this-3-line-css-quiz-wrong/
   ( I always wanted to do a clickbait title like this and when this chance came along I could not pass it up.
35. The Conductor Developer
   Source: Martin Fowler
   Link: https://martinfowler.com/rachels-ramblings/conductor-developer.html
   TL;DR Why I think software development is starting to feel a little more like conducting an orchestra.
36. Computational Public Space
   Source: Bret Victor
   Link: https://dynamicland.org/2024/Computational_Public_Space/
   A talk about a values-driven approach to integrating computation into cities.
37. Importing a frontend Javascript library without a build system
   Source: Julia Evans
   Link: https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/18/how-to-import-a-javascript-library/
   I like writing Javascript without a build system and for the millionth time yesterday I ran into a problem where I needed to figure out how to import a Javascript library in my code without using a build system, and it took FOREVER to figure out how to import it because the librarys setup instructions assume that youre using a build system.
38. Be a tech bro
   Source: DHH
   Link: https://world.hey.com/dhh/be-a-tech-bro-30db1962
   We should all strive to be our brothers keeper: to look after each other, inspire each other, and simply enjoy each others company.
39. Urgent: Support for workers in unionizing
   Source: Richard Stallman
   Link: https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jul-oct.html#22_October_2026_(Urgent:_Support_for_workers_in_unionizing)
   US citizens: call on your state governor to give workers support in unionizing . See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

Sources in this brief: Andrej Karpathy; Brendan Eich; Bret Victor; Charity Majors; DHH; Dan Luu; Demis Hassabis; Eric S Raymond; Guido van Rossum; Gwern Branwen; Hillel Wayne; Ines Montani; James Gosling; Jeff Atwood; Jessie Frazelle; Joel Spolsky; Julia Evans; Lea Verou; Martin Fowler; Patio11; Peter Norvig; Rachel Andrew; Ray Kurzweil; Rich Hickey; Richard Stallman; Rob Pike; Salvatore Sanfilippo; Scott Aaronson; Stephen Wolfram; Steve Yegge; Tanner Greer; Vicki Boykis; Yoshua Bengio.
Selected 39 of 745 available items for this weekly brief.