Calls, puts & mise en place

Appel & Mise

Vol. IWednesday, September 9, 2026 · 66° & overcast on the UWSThe daily, for Jeremy Ettlinger

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The lede

Terence Tao on open problems being mined non-renewably

Simon Willison

Tao's worry is not that machines solve mathematics badly but that a rumor of someone working on a problem now summons enough AI-powered effort to finish it first, which turns a shared commons into a claim to be staked. The predicted response is that researchers simply stop saying what they are working on, reversing centuries of open science. Anyone who has watched a team go quiet about its roadmap once a competitor started shipping fast will recognize the shape of this exactly.

AI & Agents

Thomas Johnson, LeadDev

We're on call for code nobody wrote

The premise is that comprehension is no longer recoverable — GitHub commits going from roughly a billion in 2025 to a projected fourteen billion in 2026 means nobody is reading their way back to safety, so runtime behavior becomes the only honest source of truth. The supporting number is the one to sit with: time from disclosure to active exploitation fell from 771 days in 2018 to four hours in 2024, which means publishing the patch is now most of the attack. The recommendations are containment and observability rather than review, which is either bracing or bleak depending on the hour.

Engineering & Leadership

Kelli Korducki, LeadDev

Ageism is squeezing everyone out of tech jobs

The unusual finding is that the squeeze runs from both ends at once — Gen Z at large public tech firms fell from 15% to 7% between early 2023 and late 2025, while workers over 40 also thinned out and the average age climbed five years. A Stanford and ADP study puts a 20% employment drop on developers aged 22 to 25 specifically. If you are staffing a team this year, the market is quietly handing you a mid-career-only roster and calling it a hiring bar.

Web & Product Craft

Cloudflare

Automatic Key Exchange: faster, post-quantum secure origin handshakes

TLS 1.3 forces you to guess the key agreement algorithm in the first packet, and guessing wrong costs a full extra round trip; Cloudflare was guessing X25519 for everyone and missing on about 30% of origins. So they now probe each origin daily, weight the answer by real traffic per subdomain, and roll the preference out gradually — HelloRetryRequest rates fell from 52% to 3.7% and P90 handshake latency by over 150ms. A tidy demonstration that measuring the thing beats defaulting the thing, and it lands without anyone touching a config.

New York & the Table

West Side Rag · made the Sunday

Jake's Dilemma will close after 32 years

The bar at 420 Amsterdam between 80th and 81st goes dark on October 18 after losing its lease, and the wrinkle is that the building was sold in May by a partnership sharing managing partners with the bar itself. The comment thread is the real document — three decades of people who met someone or survived something in that basement, and a running tally of the dead storefronts left on Amsterdam.

Holly Pretsky, Hell Gate

Contemplating the subject-author relationship from the Times Square Margaritaville

Pretsky expensed a $120.88 day pass to the Margaritaville rooftop pool and files the rare piece that admits the reporter is standing in the frame, visibly pregnant and menacing tourists with a pen. It is funnier and more honest than most writing about tourist Manhattan, and it is a useful reminder that the city's most engineered spaces still have people in them having an ordinary afternoon.

Diversions

Joshua Rivera, Aftermath

A Zelda game ought to leave more to the imagination than this

Rivera's objection to the Ocarina of Time remake is not fidelity but foreclosure — the mossy caves and cobblestones are rendered so completely that the imagining has been done for you, and Link comes out doll-like rather than alive. The argument that games are strongest in what they decline to show is the same argument people make badly about interfaces, and Rivera makes it well.

Loose Change

Consuelo Araos, Aeon

The neverending house

Two decades of fieldwork in Santiago's self-built neighborhoods, where a house is never finished because finishing it would mean the family had stopped changing — rooms go up at the back or on top, and where they go encodes who is close to whom. The materials move through kin networks as loans and gifts, so when a son-in-law withholds the cement he is withholding the relationship, not the cement. Set against housing as a financial asset, it produces the essay's sharpest image: empty dwellings on one side of the ledger and unhoused people on the other.

The Back Page

The Knowledge, The Guardian

Football's most damaging red cards: a brief history of collapses and turnarounds

The Knowledge goes looking for teams who threw a lead away after a sending-off and turns up Foggia 4-1 up at Atalanta before Petrescu walked, a 14-minute Atalanta hat-trick, and 4-4. Newcastle 0-4 down to Arsenal until Diaby manhandled Barton, and Tioté's volley, gets the retelling it deserves. Southampton appear twice, which is its own kind of achievement.

Around town

Thu Sep 10 · 8:30am

Build, Raise, Exit — AI Founder & Investor Breakfast

Reitler, 885 Third Ave, Midtown East

A breakfast room is the honest version of this conversation, because nobody is on a panel. Worth it for the exit half, which is the part people actually plan badly.

professional

Fri Sep 18 · 10:00am

Coffee Club — Early-Stage B2B Founders & Funders

Manhattan, venue announced to registrants

Forum Ventures runs these small enough that you talk rather than listen. A morning slot, so it costs a coffee and not an evening.

professional

Through Sun Sep 13 · Q&A Sat Sep 12

Barbara Forever

Film Forum, 209 W Houston St, West Village

A documentary with its producer and composer in the room afterward, which is the only reliable way to learn how a film was actually assembled. Downtown and done by dinner.

casual

Through Wed Sep 16

Filipiñana

Film Forum, 209 W Houston St, West Village

A first feature getting a real theatrical run at the city's most stubborn arthouse. Catch it now or wait two years for it to surface on a service you have forgotten you pay for.

casual

Quote of the day

“Jake's is significantly responsible for the life I have today.”

— a regular, on 32 years of a bar at 80th and Amsterdam

On this day

1947: Grace Hopper's team logs a moth taped into the Harvard Mark II relay panel — the first computer bug anyone bothered to keep.

The puzzle corner

The Mini · Wordle · Connections

Nothing from Chelsea worth your time today — the Champions League has the floor, and the Knowledge column is better company than another transfer rumor.