2025-09-13 01:00:59
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss "free speech," keeping stupid thoughts in one's own head, and cancel culture.
JASON: In August 2014, I spoke to Drew Curtis, the founder of Fark.com, a timeless, seminal internet website, about a decision he had just made. Curtis banned misogyny from his website, partially in the name of facilitating free speech.
“We don't want to be the He Man Woman Hater's Club. This represents enough of a departure from pretty much how every other large internet community operates that I figure an announcement is necessary,” Curtis wrote when he announced the rule. “Adam Savage once described to me the problem this way: if the Internet was a dude, we'd all agree that dude has a serious problem with women.”
2025-09-12 23:18:03
A company-wide email from Comcast executives, sent to everyone working at NBCUniversal on Friday morning, mourns right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk’s death and reminds employees that saying the wrong thing about Kirk’s legacy can get you fired swiftly.
The email, obtained by 404 Media and first reported by Variety, has the subject line “A message from Brian Roberts, Mike Cavanagh, and Mark Lazarus.” In it, the executives eulogize Kirk, calling him an “advocate for open debate, whose faith was important to him.”
Roberts is the Chairman and CEO of Comcast Corporation, Cavanagh is the president, and Lazarus is the prospective CEO of VERSANT, Comcast’s new spinoff that will include the majority of its NBCUniversal cable network portfolio. NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo and more journalistic and entertainment properties are under the NBCUniversal umbrella.
“You may have seen that MSNBC recently ended its association with a contributor who made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event,” the executives wrote. “That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions.”
Political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC on Wednesday after speaking about Kirk’s death on air. During a broadcast on Wednesday following the shooting, anchor Katy Tur asked Dowd about “the environment in which a shooting like this happens,” according to Variety. Dowd answered: “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler issued an apology in response, calling Dowd’s words “inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable.” Dowd also apologized publicly, posting on Bluesky: “On an earlier appearance on MSNBC I was asked a question on the environment we are in. I apologize for my tone and words. Let me be clear, I in no way intended for my comments to blame Kirk for this horrendous attack.”
Jason Koebler
MSNBC is a division of NBCUniversal. The letter from Comcast executives reiterates to current employees that their jobs are on the line if they stray from bland, milquetoast statements about a man who spent his life fomenting hate will have consequences on their careers. The entire mainstream media environment has been working overtime to sanitize Kirk’s legacy since his murder—a legacy that includes targeted harassment of professors at schools across the country and normalizing the notion that basic human rights are up for “debate.”
The full email is below.
Dear Comcast NBCUniversal Team,
The tragic loss of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father, husband, and advocate for open debate, whose faith was important to him, reminds us of the fragility of life and the urgent need for unity in our nation. Our hearts are heavy, as his passing leaves a grieving family and a country grappling with division. There is no place for violence or hate in our society.
You may have seen that MSNBC recently ended its association with a contributor who made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event. That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions. We should be able to disagree, robustly and passionately, but, ultimately, with respect. We need to do better.
Charlie Kirk believed that "when people stop talking, really bad stuff starts." Regardless of whether you agreed with his political views, his words and actions underscore the urgency to maintain a respectful exchange of ideas a principle we must champion. We believe in the power of communication to bring us together. Today, that belief feels more vital than ever. Something essential has fractured in our public discourse, and as a company that values the power of information, we have a responsibility to help mend it.
As employees, we ask you to embody our values in your work and communities. We should engage with respect, listen, and treat people with kindness.
2025-09-12 03:00:43
There is an aggrieved cry reverberating through the places on the internet where gamers gather. To hear them tell it, Hollow Knight: Silksong, the sequel to the stone-cold classic 2017 platformer, is too damned hard. There’s a particular jumping puzzle involving spikes and red flowers that many are struggling with and they’re filming their frustration and putting it up on the internet, showing their ass for everyone to see.
Even 404 Media’s own Joseph Cox hit these red flowers and had the temerity to declare Silksong a “bad game” that he was “disappointed” in given his love for the original Hollow Knight.
Couldn't be me.
I, too, got to the area just outside Hunter’s March in Silksong where the horrible red flowers bloom. Unlike others, however, my gamer instincts kicked in. I knew what to do. “This is the Dark Souls Catacombs situation all over again,” I said to myself. Then I turned around and came back later.
And that has made all the difference.
In the original Dark Souls, once players clear the opening area they come to Firelink Shrine. From there they can go into Undead Burg, the preferred starting path, or descend into The Catacombs where horrifying undying skeletons block the entrance to a cave. One will open the game up before you, the other will kill new players dead. A lot of Dark Souls players have raged and quit the game over the years because they went into The Catacombs instead of the Undead Burg.
Like Dark Souls, Silksong has an open-ish world where portions of the map are hardlocked by items and soft locked by player skill checks. One of the entrances into the flower laden Hunter’s March is in an early game area blocked by a mini-boss fight with a burly ant. The first time I fought the ant, it killed me over and over again and I took that as a sign I should go elsewhere.
High skilled players can kill the ant, but it’s much easier after you’ve gotten some basic items and abilities. I had several other paths I could take to progress the game, so I marked the ant’s location and moved on.
As I explored more of Silksong, I acquired several powerups that trivialized the fight with the ant and made it easy to navigate the flower jumping puzzles behind him. The first is Swift Step, a dash ability, which is in Deep Docks in the south-eastern portion of the map. The second is the Wanderer’s Crest, which is near the start of the game behind a locked door you get the key for in Silksong’s first town.
The dash allowed me to adjust my horizontal position in the air, but it’s the Wanderer’s Crest that made the flowers easy to navigate. The red flowers are littered throughout Hunter’s March and players have to hit them with a down attack to get a boosted jump and cross pits of spikes. By default, Hornet—the player character—down attacks at a 45 degree angle. The Wanderer’s Crest allows you to attack directly below you and makes the puzzles much easier to navigate.
Cox, bless his heart, hit the burly red ant miniboss and brute forced his way past. Then, like so many other desperate gamers, he proceeded to attempt to navigate the red flower jumping puzzles without the right power ups. He had no Swift Step. He had no Wanderer’s Crest. And thus, he raged.
He’s not alone. Watching the videos of jumping puzzles online I noticed that a lot of the players didn’t seem to have the dash or the downward attack.
Games communicate to players in different ways and gamers often complain about annoying an obvious signposting like big splashes of yellow paint. But when a truly amazing game comes along that tries to gently steer the player with burly ants and difficult puzzles, they don’t appreciate it and they don’t listen. If you’re really stuck in Silksong, try going somewhere else.
2025-09-12 01:44:39
Thursday morning, Ezra Klein at the New York Times published a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” Klein’s general thesis is that Kirk was willing to talk to anyone, regardless of their beliefs, as evidenced by what he was doing while he was shot, which was debating people on college campuses. Klein is not alone in this take; the overwhelming sentiment from America’s largest media institutions in the immediate aftermath of his death has been to paint Kirk as a mainstream political commentator, someone whose politics liberals and leftists may not agree with but someone who was open to dialogue and who espoused the virtues of free speech.
“You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him,” Klein wrote. “He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it.”
“I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness,” Klein continued.
Kirk is being posthumously celebrated by much of the mainstream press as a noble sparring partner for center-left politicians and pundits. Meanwhile, the very real, very negative, and sometimes violent impacts of his rhetoric and his political projects are being glossed over or ignored entirely. In the New York Times, Kirk was an “energetic” voice who was “critical of gay and transgender rights,” but few of the national pundits have encouraged people to actually go read what Kirk tweeted or listen to what he said on his podcast to millions and millions of people. “Whatever you think of Kirk (I had many disagreements with him, and he with me), when he died he was doing exactly what we ask people to do on campus: Show up. Debate. Talk. Engage peacefully, even when emotions run high,” David French wrote in the Times. “In fact, that’s how he made his name, in debate after debate on campus after campus.”
This does not mean Kirk deserved to die or that political violence is ever justified. What happened to Kirk is horrifying, and we fear deeply for whatever will happen next. But it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger. We do no one any favors by ignoring this, even in the immediate aftermath of an assassination like this.
Kirk claimed that his Turning Point USA sent “80+ buses full of patriots” to the January 6 insurrection. Turning Point USA has also run a “Professor Watchlist,”and a “School Board Watchlist” for nearly a decade.
2025-09-11 21:00:16
Freelance developers and entire companies are making a business out of fixing shoddy vibe coded software.
I first noticed this trend in the form of a meme that was circulating on LinkedIn, sharing a screenshot of several profiles who advertised themselves as “vibe coding cleanup specialists.” I couldn’t confirm if the accounts in that screenshot were genuinely making an income by fixing vibe coded software, but the meme gained traction because of the inherent irony in the existence of such a job existing.
The alleged benefit of vibe coding, which refers to the practice of building software with AI-coding tools without much attention to the underlying code, is that it allows anyone to build a piece of software very quickly and easily. As we’ve previously reported, in reality, vibe coded projects could result in security issues or a recipe app that generates recipes for “Cyanide Ice Cream.” If the resulting software is so poor you need to hire a human specialist software engineer to come in and rewrite the vibe coded software, it defeats the entire purpose.
LinkedIn memes aside, people are in fact making money fixing vibe coded messes.
“I've been offering vibe coding fixer services for about two years now, starting in late 2023. Currently, I work with around 15-20 clients regularly, with additional one-off projects throughout the year,” Hamid Siddiqi, who offers to “review, fix your vibe code” on Fiverr, told me in an email. “I started fixing vibe-coded projects because I noticed a growing number of developers and small teams struggling to refine AI-generated code that was functional but lacked the polish or ‘vibe’ needed to align with their vision. I saw an opportunity to bridge that gap, combining my coding expertise with an eye for aesthetic and user experience.”
Siddiqi said common issues he fixes in vibe coded projects include inconsistent UI/UX design in AI-generated frontends, poorly optimized code that impacts performance, misaligned branding elements, and features that function but feel clunky or unintuitive. He said he also often refines color schemes, animations, and layouts to better match the creator’s intended aesthetic.
Siddiqi is one of dozens of people on Fiverr who is now offering services specifically catering to people with shoddy vibe coded projects. Established software development companies like Ulam Labs, now say “we clean up after vibe coding. Literally.”
“Built something fast? Now it’s time to make it solid,” Ulam Labs says on its site. “We know how it goes. You had to move quickly, get that MVP [minimally viable product] out, and validate the idea. But now the tech debt is holding you back: no tests, shaky architecture, CI/CD [Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment] is a dream, and every change feels like defusing a bomb. That’s where we come in.”
Swatantra Sohni, who started VibeCodeFixers.com, a site for people with vibe coded projects who need help from experienced developers to fix or finish their projects, says that almost 300 experienced developers have posted their profiles to the site. He said so far VibeCodeFixers.com has only connected between 30-40 vibe code projects with fixers, but that he hasn’t done anything to promote the service and at the moment is focused on adding as many software developers to the platform as possible.
Sohni said that he’s been vibe coding himself since before Andrej Karpathy coined the term in February. He bought a bunch of vibe coding related domains, and realized a service like VibeCodeFixers.com was necessary based on how often he had to seek help from experts on his own vibe coding projects. In March, the site got a lot of attention on X and has been slowly adding people to the platform since.
Sohni also wrote a “Vibecoding Community Research Report” based on interviews with non-technical people who are vibe coding their projects that he shared with me. The report identified a lot of the same issues as Siddiqi, mainly that existing features tend to break when new ones are added.
“Most of these vibe coders, either they are product managers or they are sales guys, or they are small business owners, and they think that they can build something,” Sohni told me. “So for them it’s more for prototyping. Vibe coding is, at the moment, kind of like infancy. It's very handy to convey the prototype they want, but I don't think they are really intended to make it like a production grade app.”
Another big issue Sohni identified is “credit burn,” meaning the money vibe coders waste on AI usage fees in the final 10-20 percent stage of developing the app, when adding new features breaks existing features. In theory, it might be cheaper and more efficient for vibe coders to start over at that point, but Sohni said people get attached to their first project.
“What happens is that the first time they build the app, it's like they think that they can build the app with one prompt, and then the app breaks, and they burn the credit. I think they are very emotionally connected to the app, because this act of vibe coding involves you, your creativity.”
In theory it might be cheaper and more efficient for vibe coders to start over if the LLM starts hallucinating and creating problems, but Sohni that’s when people come to VibeCodeFixers.com. They want someone to fix the bugs in their app, not create a new one.
Sohni told me he thinks vibe coding is not going anywhere, but neither are human developers.
“I feel like the role [of human developers] would be slightly limited, but we will still need humans to keep this AI on the leash,” he said.
2025-09-10 23:00:21
Scientists have captured the clearest ever gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime—a breakthrough that has resolved decades-old mysteries about black holes and the nature of our reality, according to a study published on Wednesday in Physical Review Letters.
Gravitational waves forged by an ancient merger between two massive black holes reached Earth on January 14 of this year, where they were picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) located in Washington and Louisiana. LIGO has discovered hundreds of these waves, but the January event, known as GW250114, is the cleanest detection ever made with a signal-to-noise ratio of 80 (meaning that the signal is about 80 times louder than the noise).
The unprecedented clarity allowed scientists to confirm predictions about black holes that were made a half-century ago by pioneering theorists Roy Kerr and Stephen Hawking, known respectively as the Kerr metric and Hawking area theorem. According to the new study, the results represent “a milestone in the decade-long history of gravitational wave science,” a field that was born in 2015 with the historic first detection of these elusive waves.
“We had promised that gravitational waves would open a new window into the universe, and that has materialized,” said Maximiliano Isi, a gravitational-wave astrophysicist and assistant professor at Columbia University and the Flatiron Institute who co-led the study, in a call with 404 Media.
“Over the past 10 years, the instruments have continued to improve,” added Isi. “We are at a point now where we are detecting a collision of black holes every other day or so. That said, this one detection, which has an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio, really drives home how far this field has come along.”
Gravitational waves are subtle ripples in spacetime that are produced by energetic cosmic events, such as supernovas or mergers between black holes. Albert Einstein was the first to predict their existence in his 1916 general theory of relativity, though he was doubtful humans could ever develop technologies sensitive enough to detect them.
These waves oscillate at tiny distances that are thousands of times smaller than the width of a proton. To capture them, LIGO’s detectors shoot lasers across corridors that stretch for 2.5 miles and act like ultra-sensitive tripwires. The advent of gravitational wave astronomy earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 and marked the dawn of "multimessenger astronomy,” in which observations about the universe can emerge from different sources beyond light.
GW250114 has a lot in common with that inaugural gravitational wave signal detected in 2015; both signals came from mergers between black holes that are about 30 times as massive as the Sun with relatively slow spins. Gravitational wave astronomy has revealed that black holes often fall into this mass range for reasons that remain unexplained, but the similarity of the 2015 and 2025 events throws the technological progress of LIGO into sharp relief.
“Every pair of black holes is different, but this one is almost an exact twin” to the first detection, Isi said. “It really allows for an apples-to-apples comparison. The new signal is detected with around four times more fidelity, more clarity, and less relative noise than the previous one. Even though, intrinsically, the signal is equally powerful to the first one, it's so much neater and we can see so much more detail. This has been made possible by painstaking work on the instrument.”
The high quality of the signal enabled Isi and his colleagues to test a prediction about black holes proposed by mathematician Roy Kerr in 1963. Kerr suggested that black holes are simple astrophysical objects that can be boiled down to just two properties: mass and spin. GW250114 was clear enough to produce precise measurements of the “ringdown” signatures of the merging black holes as they coalesced into a single remnant, which is a pattern akin to the sound waves from a ringing bell. These measurements confirmed Kerr’s early insight about the nature of these strange objects.
“Because we see it so clearly for the first time, we see this ringing for an extended period where there is an equivocal, clear signature that this is coming from the final black hole,” explained Isi. “We can identify and isolate this ringing from the final black hole and tease out that there are two modes of oscillation.”
“It's like having two tuning forks that are vibrating at the same time with slightly different pitches,” he continued. “We can identify those two tones and check that they're both consistent with a single mass and spin. This is the most direct way we have of checking if the black holes out there are really conforming to the mathematical idealization that we expect in general relativity—through Kerr.”
In addition to confirming Kerr’s prediction, GW250114 also validated Stephen Hawking’s 1971 prediction that the surface area of a black hole could only increase, known as Hawking's area theorem. Before they merged, the black holes were each about 33 times as massive as the Sun, and the final remnant was about 63 solar masses (the remaining mass was emitted as energy in the form of gravitational waves). Crucially, however, the final remnant’s surface area was bigger than the combined sum of the areas of the black holes that created it, confirming the area theorem.
“We are in an era of experimental gravitation,” said Isi. “We can study space and time in these dynamically crazy configurations, observationally. That is really amazing for a field that has, for decades, just worked on pure mathematical abstraction. We are hunting these things with reality.”
The much-anticipated confirmation of these predictions puts constraints on some of the most intractable problems in physics, including how the laws of general relativity—which governs cosmic scales of stars and galaxies—can coexist with the very different laws that rule the tiny quantum scales of atoms.
Scientists hope more answers can be revealed by increasingly sophisticated detections from observatories like LIGO and Virgo in Italy, along with future projects like the European Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), due for launch in the 2030s. Despite LIGO’s massive contribution to science, the Trump administration has proposed big cuts to the observatory and a possible closure to one of its detectors, which would be a major setback.
Regardless of how the field develops in the future, the new discovery demonstrates that the efforts of generations of scientists are now coming to fruition with startling clarity.
“It is humbling to be inscribed in this long tradition,” Isi said. “Of course, Einstein never expected that gravitational waves would be detected. It was a ludicrous idea. Many people didn't think it would ever happen, even right up to 2015. It is thanks to the vision and grit of those early scientists who fully committed despite how crazy it sounded.”
“I hope that support for this type of research is maintained, that I'll be talking to you in 10 years, and I will tell you: ‘Wow, we had no idea what spacetime was like,’” he concluded. “Maybe this is just the beginning.”
