GoKawiil
Tech News
Recent developments highlight how Common Lisp's unique image-based architecture allows for instant code updates and debugging, reducing wait times during development. This enables large language models to more effectively generate, test, and refine code without lengthy rebuilds or crashes. As a result, Common Lisp offers a more seamless environment for AI-assisted programming compared to traditional languages.
A roundup lists 125 new science fiction, horror, and fantasy titles scheduled for release in October, spanning debut and established authors. Among the writers featured are Cassandra Khaw, Annalee Newitz, Stephen King, Stephen Graham Jones, Sarah J. Maas, and Jane Schoenbrun.
Graham Farmelo's book 'Hawking: His Life and Work' (John Murray, 2026) chronicles the physicist's scientific achievements alongside his personal struggles, including his motor neuron disease diagnosis, two marriages ending, and his relationships with students and colleagues. The review, written by a physicist who was a close friend of Hawking's from 1996 while working together at the University of Cambridge, praises the book's research and readability.
After an Akademy talk proposed a 'lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE,' developer Nate Graham opened a forum thread to set guardrails on LLM-assisted contributions. The thread was overrun by outsiders debating AI's morality generally, a petition site called kdeforpeople.com sprang up, and moderators eventually locked and hid the discussion. Separately, GNOME developer Jordan Petridis published his own proposed policy that would bar LLMs from creating or modifying code submitted to or hosted by GNOME.
Gerrit Graham, a veteran character actor recognized for cult roles in 'Phantom of the Paradise' and 'Child's Play 2,' has died. His career spanned decades and included guest appearances across multiple 'Star Trek' series and the lead role in 'CHUD II: Bud the CHUD.'
CSS-Tricks, the web development site DigitalOcean acquired in 2022 and briefly revived in mid-2024 under editor Geoff Graham, has gone inactive again with no explanation from its owner. Meanwhile, DigitalOcean quickly arranged a $3 million donation to Omarchy, a set of Arch Linux scripts led by David Heinemeier Hansson, and has also stopped small monthly payments to GNOME and Flathub infrastructure.
According to the New York Times, thousands of Kenyan workers who once earned income writing essays for foreign college students have seen that business evaporate since ChatGPT launched in 2022. One worker, Teresios Bundi, once earned $40-$70 per paper—far more than his public health training would have paid—but now struggles financially as demand has dried up. At its height, the essay-writing trade employed more than 40,000 people in Nairobi alone.
The piece traces how Western Electric, the manufacturing backbone that later became central to AT&T's Bell System, was founded in 1872 by Enos Barton and Elisha Gray—the same Gray who disputed Alexander Graham Bell's claim to inventing the telephone. Gray bought out co-founder George Shawk and became half-owner of the firm, partly intending to manufacture his own competing telephone design.
A writer describes a recurring pattern in reading fiction: novels often begin tediously before hitting a turning point—borrowed from the poetic term 'volta'—after which they become compulsively readable. To test the idea, the author had several friends read Graham Greene's 'The End of the Affair' and report when this shift occurred for them, finding the moment varied widely, from page 20 to much later in the book.
Tech entrepreneur Paul Graham argued publicly that companies should always hire the most qualified candidate regardless of nationality, prompting Palmer Luckey to challenge him for suggesting that hiring any foreign worker undermines an 'American firms should hire Americans' stance. The dispute unfolded as a lengthy public exchange over how immigration and merit intersect in tech hiring decisions. The author uses a personal family story about an Army-drafted tool engineer who ended up working on early heat-shield research under Wernher von Braun to question what 'qualified' really means.
A literary essay examines how Edgar Allan Poe's stories derive their terror not from the murders depicted but from the confessions that follow them, tracing this back to Poe's own career struggles as an editor at Graham's magazine in 1841 Philadelphia. It details Poe's financial precariousness as a writer, noting he earned little from his early books despite growing critical respect, and had to rely on magazine work to make a living.
A go-to-market consultant who has worked with over 100 startups—including Temporal, Netlify, Pinecone, and Pydantic—argues that founders routinely fail to communicate in terms customers actually care about. The core prescription is deceptively simple: instead of pitching your product's features or vision, describe it using the language and priorities of the people you're trying to reach.