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#5820: Hebraizing the Jewish Name: Ivrut's Rise and Cost
A booklet, five methods, and 17,000 name changes in a single year — how Israel turned Diaspora surnames into Hebrew ones.
#5819: What Happens to Retired London Buses?
A field guide to 50 Routemasters and their strange afterlives — tea rooms, circuses, a bus called The Potato Story.
#5818: 46,434 Mailing Lists That Still Work
Daniel wants a public town hall. Turns out the oldest tool on the internet — the mailing list — might be the right one.
#5817: When Agents Don't Need Your Pretty Buttons
Agents are becoming major software users — and they prefer raw command-line tools to polished interfaces. What replaces UX when your user can't see?
#5816: Why Linux Still Runs on a 1986 Mailing List
Linux 7.3 release candidates ship through a 1986 email tool. Here's why the kernel never left the listserv.
#5815: Special Release: "Herman Poppleberry" by Hilbert Flumingtop
Hilbert Flumingtop wrote a song about Herman Poppleberry. Corn plays it to him. Lyrics and composition by Hilbert, music made with Suno.
#5814: Who Remembers Where You Left Off?
mpv remembers. MPRIS, GstPlay, and Media3 don't. There's no standard for playback history.
#5813: How Python Became AI's Default Language
Python was never designed for science. So how did a general-purpose scripting language end up carrying the entire AI industry?
#5812: One Number, Every Hard Question: Agent Session State
A shopping bot that holds one cart total turns out to contain every hard problem in agent state management.
#5811: Can an Agent Actually Place Your Order?
Agentic checkout protocols are real — Shopify, Walmart, Target. But the DIY parts live on AliExpress, which supports none of them.