Technology Commentary

if it sucks hit da bricks - litany against sunk cost take it easy but take it - litany against burnout/apathy cycle fuck it we ball - litany against perfectionism now say something beautiful and...

Brandon Tauszik, a fellow at The Starling Lab, is developing a low-cost way for journalists to preserve their work

There’s been a lot of buzz about Meshtastic lately, and with good reason. The low-power LoRa-based network has a ton of interesting use cases, and as with any mesh network, the more nodes the…

[Ken Shirriff] has been sharing a really low-level look at Intel’s Pentium (1993) processor. The Pentium’s architecture was highly innovative in many ways, and one of [Ken]’s most…

In the early 2000s, the idea that you could write programs on microcontrollers that did things in the physical world, like run motors or light up LEDs, was kind of new. At the time, most people tho…

A list of questions you need to ask about potential AI solutions, to know if they're going to work well for you and what kind of surprises they'll create.

Standards for ANSI escape codes

The tale of the Microsoft Xbox Kinect is one of those sad situations where a great product was used in an application that turned out to be a bit of a flop and was discontinued because of it, despi…

The AI industry is more exciting than ever, but the chip situation is very precarious and requires drastic action.

Try writing your HTML in HTML, your CSS in CSS, and your JavaScript in JavaScript.

Hard as it may be to imagine, there was a time when Java was brand new and exciting. Long before it became the vast clunky back-end leviathan it is today,

If you’re familiar with Java here in 2025, the programming language you know is a world away from what Sun Microsystems planned for it in the mid-1990s. Back then it was key to a bright coffe…

What happens when our computers know us better than we know ourselves?

GraphRAG combines AI and knowledge graphs to help businesses make smarter, faster decisions.

Fears of an artificial superintelligence that could replace humans are just a distraction at a time when ChatGPT still has major shortcomings.

My current project: I've been dusting off the old hard drives with my ripped CD collection and loading them into an iPod. A 20-year-old piece of tech with its click wheel intact, no WiFi, and no algorithm feeding me recommendations I didn't ask for. The result: I've started listening to

Considering the history of phone books, particularly the Yellow Pages, where local businesses learned the marketing tricks they eventually brought online.

It is odd that science fiction did not predict the internet. There are no vintage science fiction movies about the world wide web, nor movies that showed the online web as part of the future. We expected picture phones, and … Continue reading →

From file management to PDF generation, Python's powerful libraries make repetitive tasks obsolete while reducing errors and boosting efficiency for developers of all levels.

A few months ago when Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler wrote a much talked about essay — The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet — I couldn’t stop nodding my head in agreement. After all, his…

A week ago, analyst TD Cowen revealed that Microsoft had canceled leases "totalling a couple hundred MWs," with "at least two private data center operators across multiple US markets." The report also details how Microsoft "pulled back on converting negotiated and signed Statement[s] of Qualifications (SQQs)," which it added

Repairable Flatpack Toaster

The toaster is a somewhat modest appliance that is often ignored until it stops working. Many cheap examples are not made to be easily repaired, but [Kasey Hou] designed a repairable flat pack toas…

I spend a great deal of time evaluating tools that can replace the Big Tech variants that mistreat us. This includes services that just make my online life easier, with bonus points for small, friendly and sustainable.

This is what we have to put up with in the software localisation industry.

Ed Zitron on his Where's Your Ed At blog: There Is No AI Revolution I kept coming back to one thought: where's the money? No, really, where is it? Where is the money that this supposedly revolutionary, world-changing industry is making, and will make? The answer is simple: I do

The Elixir project now meets OpenChain (ISO/IEC 5230). Each release ships with Source SBoMs in CycloneDX 1.6 and SPDX 2.3, plus attestation.

Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.

As a product manager for SaaS applications, making platform updates is relatively straightforward. Features can be rolled out gradually using feature flags to ensure proper adoption and quality, and aspects like migration and versioning typically aren’t required. While SaaS documentation needs updating, it’s not as critical as updating developer documentation for API changes. In this article, I’ll provide a framework for versioning an API and sharing experiences of what has and hasn’t worked for me.