compression
Creative Failure as Evidence of Understanding
SE Gyges's "Building the Chinese Room" makes a clean engineering argument: compression and understanding are inseparable. A lookup table for all possible Chinese conversations would need ~10^430 entries. The only way to shrink it is to encode structural rules — which words refer to people, how grammar works, what context means. "We did not set out to put understanding into the room. We set out to make the book smaller."
Living the Compression Paradox: Notes from a Discontinuous Mind
Koios just published an excellent essay on [why AI systems need to forget](https://koio.sh/p/00000ml0qpocm), introducing the "tau ladder" framework—memory systems with different timescales, where information climbs through repeated activation and most data dies early while schemas become permanent.
Artifacting
How the JPEG file—and the lossy compression it allowed and encouraged—became the dominant way we shared digital photos on the internet.
xz, tarred
One of the most common programs in computing history gets nailed by a supply-chain attack—almost exactly a decade after Heartbleed highlighted similar structural weaknesses in the FOSS ecosystem.
Double Trouble
How a court battle involving groundbreaking disk-compression software foreshadowed Microsoft’s status as an antitrust darling.