It’s been a while. Long enough that a few of you are going to open this and wonder whatever has become of GOSH anyway. Who let us into your inbox in the first place? Fair enough. We’ve missed this space more than we expected to, which is an odd thing to say about a mailing list, but there it is.
Here is the honest account of what happened. We built things, then we built other things, and then other other things. The pace of our work left almost no room for the slower kind of thinking that makes for worthwhile writing. Beyond that, we found that even what we did write about would soon become outdated, requiring clarifications or redirections. This is not some apology, dear reader: we have no shame in having found ourselves on a frontier. And whether our work evolved or hit a dead end, there is nothing finer in life than solving problems, even if just for (elegant) solution’s sake. And somewhere in the middle of it all, this blog quietly became a place where we announced stuff: the stuff we were currently busy building. Needless to say, announcements are hardly the most interesting sentences a person can write. And in between, those extended lapses into quiet left dear readers such as yourselves ignorant of our work: our doubts as well as our doubtless motivations. Our capital-B Big Dreams.
What brought us back wasn’t a decision so much as an accumulation. Benign accumulation, like papers read and/or digressive points argued on product calls, many of which could well make for poignant as-yet-unwritten essays. But an accumulation of more grand and fundamental questions, too.
These dilemmas that we actually care about drift well outside the walls of any one company’s blog. A company blog is a room with one window. The view is fine. It’s just always the same view. So we’re casting wider, in an attempt to articulate even part, no matter how large or how small, of all that concerns us.
Some of what’s coming will still be about what we’re building, because (and we can assure you of this) it’s genuinely strange and worth explaining. (We will have an upcoming piece on why computation itself is about to be bought and sold like any other liquid commodity, and another on the first and frankly slightly deranged sketches behind our AI work, back when it was a whiteboard and a bad mood.) But most of it won’t be about us at all.
About the debate regarding how machines can write a given sentence, we will write. And we will write about the peculiar fact that companies are building instruments to detect authorship at exactly the moment authorship has, to most people, stopped mattering. And about why authorship will always matter, we will write.
About the vast quantity of books being shovelled into training runs, which reads less like engineering to me than like an offering laid at an altar, we will write. And we will write, without sacrificial rhetoric, about who exactly stands to lose what, as we see it, in this new dawning of artificiality and intelligence. And about those who have everything to gain, and what they might end up receiving, we will write.
About software—all of it, everywhere, yours included—being broken, and the near-total absence of anyone behaving as though that were true, we will write. We will write about what happens to the subscription economy when it runs out of subscribers. And we will write about a bet we spent months preparing to make, telling you all about it at length, only to abstain in the end, a decision influenced as much by our internal development strategy as by the direction in which we see prediction markets headed.
Thus, about why we too now think citizens of the online world should not play games of chance against the chance-makers, we will write.
We will write about the recent fashion among the large AI labs for hiring philosophers, profiling them, musing on their more noteworthy ideas, and pondering whether all of it is an earnest undertaking to relate to this other intelligence—stepping with some moral seriousness beyond anthropocentrism—or whether it’s a, dare we say, nefarious attempt to capture the intellect, in the style of court flatterers appointed for the pleasing of a king of old most naive. Do we, who live with comforts most kings of old could never so much as have dreamt of, now resemble them, naively believing ourselves monarchs, too—to be pleased or else to pass down cruel judgements? And might this explain the rise in online censorship, so-called in spite of a total absence of legal power, and yet still maligned as though losing one’s reputation in 2026 were akin to being condemned as a heretic by the Spanish Inquisition… even if it isn’t?
Back and forth we go. Writing. What is what. Which one is which. Sometimes within the same paragraph.
Politics will come into it only obliquely; we will write about it unavoidably but without turning this publication into a site of hit pieces and opinion-mongering. God knows there are plenty of such publications to read (yes, they’re entertaining). So, yes, we will write about how corruption of a fairly old-fashioned kind now sits near the center of the American state, but we will be digging into what it means for the decentralized alternatives we have been arguing for since our very inception. The case has to be made in public and in plain language rather than muttered at a conference. So we’ll write about power. And about the arithmetic of self-optimization as a way of life, we will write.
Before penning this post, I, the editor-in-chief, had told myself:
“Let’s not preview any of the future posts too much; it’s rather too suggestive for a simple publication update. After all, I’m still arguing with myself about the conclusions to all the posts we can preview. And I’d like to lose that argument honestly, on the page.”
Now it seems like the whole welcome-back post is a preview. I’ve lost the very first argument already.
And from now on, every Tuesday and Saturday, with occasional appearances otherwise, you will have arguments, lost or won or merely stated, arrive in your inbox. I can make a promise that the writing will be both as thorough and as concise as my talent will allow. The overall quality you, dear reader, will have to judge for yourselves.
And I hope you will, loudly.
If your interests have moved on since you first signed up, there are no hard feelings. Attention is scarce and content plentiful. But…
For everyone still here: the comments are open for all your wildest, or tamest, opinions, reflections, questions, and suggestions.
The best possible outcome for any of these posts is that somebody in the replies takes it apart. Because, again, we don’t write to land conclusions. We write to find out which of our positions survive contact with people who know more than we do, or think deeply in a direction obscure to us, or just lend us a moment of their sense of humour, without which everything else fails.
So feel free to share your thoughts. And we will be sharing ours.
‘Til tomorrow, then. Have a nice day.
If you’re finding this post being new to GOSH and now have your interest piqued, we would be honoured if you’d consider subscribing: