Saturday, July 11, 2026
Archive'They Don't Need People': The Workers Left Behind by China's Robot Drive
Beijing's factories are automating faster than any labor policy anticipated, and the Times went to find the people already on the other side of it. The quotes are the story here.
Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
Tao's Java applets from 1999 had been dead for years — browsers stopped supporting them. He pointed a coding agent at the corpse and had them all running again by evening.
Look Closer: Pieter De Hooch's Puzzle Box
Vermeer got the fame; De Hooch got the doorways. Spend a few minutes inside one 1663 interior and you start noticing everything the painter deliberately declined to show.
Does playing tennis make you live 9.7 years longer?
The stat went viral because it's so specific: 9.7 years, not 'about a decade.' The BBC's numbers desk walks it back to the study and finds what that figure cannot mean.
Pluralistic: Workplace "flexibility" isn't
Doctorow's argument is a translation exercise: every time a platform says flexibility, substitute the word risk and read the sentence again. It holds up unnervingly well.