Technology Commentary

will we know it when we see it?

A community platform for a vibrant, diverse social web.

What Musk is branding, Bluesky may build.

Long before the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) was said to take the world by storm, the p-System  (pseudo-system, or virtual machine) developed at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) provide…

Using Generative AI for Personal-Scale Projects

The next generation of AR glasses starts now!

My whole desk setup now easily fits into a backpack and I can take it anywhere

If you think about it, the main use case for virtualization is isolation: Given that you have several applications running at the same time, how can you make sure they don't interfere with each...

Yes, Clippy made the cut.

“Can We Go to the Neighbourhood?” Amber Lapp has a lovely essay on how her daughter helped her live in her neighborhood: “The sight of this toddler in a sparkly pink tutu and Paw Patrol sneakers bulldozing norms of privacy and leading me deeper into the lives of neighbours felt especially audacious because, as Americana […]

The Spotify CTO maps out his mission to broaden your musical palate — via Swedish innovation, the nature of change, and more.

The world changed a lot in 1995. And for the web, it was a transformational year.

After I built my little counter last year, it got a flurry of attention. It got pretty large and was killed off a bunch as well. But after a while the attention fell off and I was really the only one tending to it, growing it. And something so b...

MIT Associate Professor Dwai Banerjee studies the impact of technology on society, ranging from cancer treatment to the global spread of computing.

Maintaining Paths for Career Growth in an AI-Driven World

“We’re still around and leading things because we accept change.”

Posted on Thursday 3 Apr 2025. 881 words, 31 links. By Matt Webb.

A digital investigation reveals how AI can latch on to technical terminology, despite it being complete nonsense.

“Hello! I am a developer. Here is my relevant experience: I code in Hoobijag and sometimes jabbernocks and of course ABCDE++++ (but never ABCDE+/^+ are you kidding? ha!)  and I...

Computer systems are poorly built, badly maintained, and often locked in a maze of vendor contracts and outdated spaghetti code that amounts to a death spiral. This is true of nothing else we buy.

responding with slowness in relations

Foursquare is still going strong, and all thanks to you! You might think it's gone, so here's the story of how it survived, evolved and thrived.

A new take on Trump’s tariffs, including using a disruption lens to understand the U.S.’s manufacturing problem, and why a better plan would leverage demand, not kill it.

Can AI Do Revolutionary Science? And If It Can, What Does That Mean?

Discover Graft, an open-source transactional storage engine built to solve the challenges of syncing data at the edge. Inspired by lessons from SQLSync, Graft enables lazy, partial, and strongly consistent replication—allowing edge applications to sync only the data they need, exactly when they need it.

For people whose job it is to manage complexity, we're pretty bad at describing it.