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Essays and field notes.

Standalone articles on the history of technology — the people, the moments, and the machines that shaped the screen you're reading this on. Written when there's something to say, not on a schedule.

Essays
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Topics
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Latest · 2026
2026
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NYT v. OpenAI & Microsoft: The Fair-Use Trial

NYT v. OpenAI — the December 2023 lawsuit that will likely define whether training LLMs on copyrighted articles is fair use or infringement.

Ishaan · Jul 21, 2026 · 19 min read
  • NYT v. OpenAI
  • Copyright
  • Fair Use
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Getty Images v. Stability AI: The Copyright Test

Getty v. Stability AI — the January 2023 lawsuit over Stable Diffusion's training on 12 million Getty photos and the 2025 UK ruling.

Ishaan · Jul 16, 2026 · 20 min read
  • Getty Images
  • Stability AI
  • Stable Diffusion
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The Colorado State Fair AI-Art Win, August 2022

The Colorado State Fair — August 2022, when Jason Allen's "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" became the first AI-generated image to win a fine-art competition.

Ishaan · Jul 14, 2026 · 12 min read
  • Colorado State Fair
  • AI Art
  • Jason Allen
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Open vs Closed: The Defining Fault Line of Modern AI

Hugging Face, LLaMA, Mistral, DeepSeek — the open-weights movement and why open vs closed is the defining AI industry fault line of the 2020s.

Ishaan · Jul 9, 2026 · 11 min read
  • Open Source AI
  • Open Weights
  • LLaMA
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Stable Diffusion Release, August 2022: Open AI Art

Stable Diffusion — Stability AI's August 2022 open-weights release that democratised image generation, triggered artist lawsuits, and seeded the open-AI debate.

Ishaan · Jul 7, 2026 · 12 min read
  • Stable Diffusion
  • Stability AI
  • Emad Mostaque
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Liang Wenfeng: DeepSeek and the Open-Weight Earthquake

Liang Wenfeng — the hedge-fund founder behind DeepSeek, whose January 2025 R1 release triggered a US stock rout and reset the AI race.

Ishaan · Jul 2, 2026 · 8 min read
  • Liang Wenfeng
  • DeepSeek
  • High-Flyer
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DeepSeek-R1 and the Reset of the AI Race, January 2025

DeepSeek-R1 — the January 2025 release that matched OpenAI's o1 at a fraction of the cost, triggered a $589B NVIDIA stock rout, and reset the AI race.

Ishaan · Jun 30, 2026 · 21 min read
  • DeepSeek-R1
  • Reasoning Models
  • NVIDIA