Technology Commentary

The parts of the web/tech industry we lit on fire and probably aren't going to get back.

Recently [Florin] was in the market for a basic uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to provide some peace of mind for the smart home equipment he had stashed around. Unfortunately, the cheap Serioux…

Until the release of Windows 11, the upgrade proposition for Windows operating systems was rather straightforward: you considered whether the current version of Windows on your system still fulfill…

Today we heard from [Richard James Howe] about his new CPU. This new 16-bit CPU is implemented in VHDL for an FPGA. The really cool thing about this CPU is that it eschews the typical program count…

Main features: + Play audio CD using ATAPI + SPDIF + Nice but simple graphical user interface using a VFD (no OLEDs/LCDs, unless someone codes in the support for those) + CDDB and MusicBrainz connectivity for metadata + Last.FM scrobbling + Time-synced lyrics display ? Multi-disc changer drive support + Internet radio receiver in MP3 and AAC format with metadata + Bluetooth reception with metadata display + IR and physical button controls - OTA firmware updates with CI/CD Stretch goals: - Bluetooth audio transmission from CD - HTTP web interface OOS/Rev.2 ideation: - SPDIF coax I/O and TOSLINK I/O (it's already on the chip but not on the Rev.1 PCB!) - FM/AM radio - Higher speed IDE bus using SPI expanders instead of I2C - ... to allow reading MOD/XM/S3M/MP3/M4A files - ... and potentially stream raw data off the disc, eliminating the SPDIF Out requirement on the drive - ... potentially even allowing to use a SATA drive via an IDE-SATA converter

What do you get when you combine an ESP32, a 16-bit DAC, an antique VFD, and an IDE CD-ROM drive? Not much, unless you put in the work, which [Akasaka Ryuunosuke] did to create ESPer-CDP, a modern …

Today we’re going to make a little digression from things that we do to look at perhaps why we do the things that we do. This one is philosophical folks, so strap yourselves in. We’ve h…

In a marvelous college lecture in front of a class of engineering students, V. Hunter Adams professed his love for embedded engineering, but he might as well have been singing the songs of our peop…

Devadath PR's automatic homework machine was arguably more educational to build than the homework it wrote.

Rethinking systems for structuring and using time  Time is fundamental for human existence and experience. Societal frameworks for structuring and understanding time and temporal experience have, however, remained stagnant and are potentially no longer fit for their intended purpose or, more importantly, the purposes we might intend for them at present. Indeed, when considering the...

It's time for another entry in the Prior Art Department and today we'll consider a forgotten yet still extant sidebar of the early 1990s ...

With search getting worse by the day, maybe it's time we rebounded in the other direction. The long forgotten directory.

Neatnik Notes

Weeknotes 341 - New value mechanics for the agentic web What is the consequence of an agentic web for the mechanics of values? And a lot of other news after a week of announcements by Big AI Tech.

On the ground at the Microsoft Build conference with CTO Kevin Scott

We mostly don’t want to read the docs, but we do want to converse with them. When we build search interfaces for our docs, we have always tried to anticipate search intentions. People aren’t just l…

MCP's simplicity means that, like RSS autodiscovery and OpenSearch, it can catch on quickly and deliver powerful leverage for developers.

Google workers at Netscape Sacrifice Zone exposed to toxic levels of trichloroethylene. For at least two months, Google employees were exposed to excessive levels of a hazardous chemical after workers disabled a critical part of the ventilation system at the company's new satellite campus on a Superfund toxic waste site. [...] "We take several proactive measures to ensure the healthiest ...

Casey Newton writing for his Platformer newsletter: The AI Browser Wars Are About to Begin Here, I think we begin to understand the opportunity that companies see here — and why "web browser" probably isn't the best word for what they are building. Setting all the drama of the current browser

Artificial intelligence is already writing an obituary for the internet as we know it. So why is everyone building new web browsers?

Dive into the History of Java, from its inception by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems to its evolution as a pivotal programming language in technology.

It was never the sexiest language, but for decades Java has been a mainstay of modern technology, and it's going to be with us for years to come.

Source code is a form of expression with its own idioms and styles. It's also a historical relic that reveals how programmers have developed solutions that underpin the software that has changed our world.

Get in, loser, we’re doing an old fashioned conversation by blog post. Dan Sinker wrote recently about the Who Cares Era: The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care. The production people didn’t care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn’t care either. It’s so emblematic of the moment we’re in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore. Then Les Orchard wrote in response that Only the Metrics Care: The user isn’t the customer. And they’re not the product either. The real product is behavioral optimization—metrics on a dashboard. The paying customer is somewhere else entirely, and the “content” is just a means to nudge behavior and juice KPIs. … The point isn’t to communicate. It’s to simulate relevance in order to optimize growth. It’s all goal-tracking, A/B tests, fake doors, and dark patterns. Both of those posts are great and you should read them, but reading them is not a prerequisite to reading this one. I just wanted to place this post in context of the conversation I’m dropping into.

You may have noticed a trend recently: ‘AI is going to replace all of the developers’. I'll admit that I have quite a lot of skin in this game, having been a software engineer for the best part of 30 years - so I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot recently To get started, I find that breaking c

Today in material science news we have a report from [German Science Guy] about a new supermaterial which is as strong as steel and as light as Styrofoam! A supermaterial is a type of material that…

Since 2023, the rise of interest rates has caused a sea change in how software companies relate to their engineers. It’s harder to be a software engineer now…