The Architecture of the Wire: Infrastructures of Telecommunication
"It will make you stop and look at poles and antennas and will remind you how much digital technologies owe to the technological elements of the 19th century." –– Regine reviews latest book by art and architectural historian Carlotta Darò.
Disclaimer: This post was written May 2025, and the arguments apply to AI code capabilities at this time. The arguments around lack of competence are certainly likely to become less prevalent-while the parts about the desecration of the joys of programming, and fundamental human understanding of programming-are likely to become
rqlite turns 10: Observations from a decade building Distributed Systems – Vallified
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine and Raft for consensus. Ten years ago, I tagged the first release of rqlite—a project I started to explore distributed consensus, to learn Go, and to build something useful. I had no roadmap, no plans for scale, and certainly no…
If we asked you to think of a device that converts a chemical reaction into electricity, you’d probably say we were thinking of a battery. That’s true, but there is another device that …
The real smartphone (and environment) killer? The Operating System. - Gaël Duval (blog, Murena, /e/OS my data is my data, Mandrake Linux...)
What’s a smartphone in today’s world ? It’s the object in everyone’s pocket that gets thrown away in 2.7 years lifespan. It’s a little bit more for an iPhone but that’s the industry average. And as everyone already strolls around with it glued to their hands, increasing the number of sales for this product, could mean … Continue reading "The real smartphone (and environment) killer? The Operating System."
The World Wide Web And The Death Of Graceful Degradation
In the early days of the World Wide Web – with the Year 2000 and the threat of a global collapse of society were still years away – the crafting of a website on the WWW was both special…
Microsoft is putting forth compelling proposals for the Open Agentic Web. However, the proposal needs digital payments, which will be key to creating a new content marketplace for AI.
John Battelle's Search Blog A “White Collar Recession”? It Won’t Be AI’s Fault.
BULLSHIT! That’s what I found myself yelling at a recent board meeting, unimpeded by my usual filters of propriety or self-restraint. But I couldn’t help myself. The board was debating …
Earlier this month we covered the brewing controversy over libogc, the community-developed C library that functions as the backbone for GameCube and Wii homebrew software. Questions about how much …
On the podcast, [Tom] and I were talking about the continuing saga of the libogc debacle. [Tom] has been interviewing some of the principals involved, so he’s got some first-hand perspective on it …
Designing from cradle to grave is no longer good enough. We need to postpone that grave as long as possible. This is how to design for a right to repair.