Iain Harper's Blog

In December 1577, a party of Carmelite friars seized one of their own in Ávila, carried him to their priory in Toledo, and locked him in a converted closet, six feet by ten, with a slit high in one wall for light.

The deal that sent organic traffic to your website for free has almost entirely collapsed.

In the early 2000s, grime MCs poured out of pirate radio sets across East London, their voices bleeding from tower block frequencies, recognisable by flow and cadence alone.

In June, computer scientist Chris Olah stood beside Pope Leo XIV at the launch of a papal encyclical on artificial intelligence and told the assembled audience that the things he studies keep producing features that are, in his words, unsettling.

“After gazing at the sky for some time, I came to the conclusion that such beauty had been reserved for remote and dangerous places, and that nature has good reasons for demanding special sacrifices from those who dare to contemplate it.”

Scott Hansen brought a dead machine back to life, and the first thing it played was Midnight in a Perfect World.

Today, I turn 50.

For two weeks in January 2026, a browser extension removed AI Overviews from the Google search results of 374 people.

Ask Claude how many legs the animal that spins webs has, and it answers eight.

In the last years of his life, Kurt Gödel starved himself to death.