The Promises of Agentic AI and How to Sidestep Challenges
Following these suggestions could help today’s organizations fully realize the promises of agentic AI in 2025 and beyond.
Technology Commentary
Slow Is Officially the New Down. So Now What?
From the user perspective, a slow digital experience is no different than one that’s down. Here are five actions you can take to improve performance.
Observability Isn't Enough. It's Time To Federate Log Data
For enterprises that are stuck in contracts with observability or other platforms that don't provide data federation, it's time to consider new solutions.
Best Practices for Monitoring Network Conditions in Mobile
Learn several strategies to mitigate the impact of networking issues in mobile apps.
The Bear Manifesto
An outline of my philosophy and direction for the platform
Cyber Walkman Does It In Style
One of the best things about adulthood is that finally we get to, in most cases, afford ourselves the things that our parents couldn’t (or just didn’t for whatever reason). When [Yakroo…
Networking History Lessons
Do they teach networking history classes yet? Or is it still too soon? I was reading [Al]’s first installment of the Forgotten Internet series, on UUCP. The short summary is that it was a system fo…
It’s Raining From The BlueSky
Which would you rather feel? The blast of a fire hose, or a cool, digital rain? That’s what we thought. Introducing Blue Rain — the fire hose that is the BlueSky feed, falling semi-cryp…
Cool Kinetic Sculpture Has Tooling Secrets To Share
Occasionally, we get a tip for a project that is so compelling that we just have to write it up despite lacking details on how and why it was built. Alternatively, there are other projects where th…
Paper Tape – With LASERs!
Though it is many decades since paper tape was commonly used as a data input or storage medium, it still holds a fascination for many who work with computers. Over the years we’ve featured mo…
Digital Paint Mixing Has Been Greatly Improved With 1930s Math
You might not have noticed if you’re not a digital artist, but most painting and image apps still get color mixing wrong. As we all learned in kindergarten, blue paint and yellow paint makes …
The Engineer's Guide to Controlling Configuration Drift
Automated validation is key here — it involves running tests that compare your actual environment with what you’ve defined.
Manila Folder History: The Dossier On Dossier Containers
How we got Manila folders and envelopes, and what “Manila” means in the context of said folder. Hint: It’s not a color, and you may find the source surprising.
A computer can never be held accountable
This legendary page from an internal IBM training in 1979 could not be more appropriate for our new age of AI. 
How The Main Frame Became The Mainframe: An Etymological Dissertation
In his most recent article, [Ken Shirriff] takes a break from putting ASICs under a microscope, and instead does the same in a proverbial manner with the word ‘mainframe’. Although thes…
The Right Way To Use Tagging In The Cloud
This came up today at work and I realized that over my now-decades of cloud engineering, I have developed a very specific way of using tags that sets both infra dev teams and SRE teams up for succe…
AI & Skepticism: Is There Room For A Middle Lane?
On large language models, artificial intelligence, DeepSeek, and trying to find the middle lane between skepticism and surety.
System Operators to Timekeepers: What Will Replace Leap Seconds?
Water from the melting polar ice caps could be subtly affecting the earth's rotation, throwing off the ultra-precise atomic measurements of time.
Copying Files Across Drives: PIP, XCOPY, rsync & Everything Between
We take the idea of copying files across folders and drives for granted today, but the guy who invented the original tool considered it a leap of faith.
I’m Building A Webmail Client, And I’m Not Sure Why
They say you don’t know what email’s all about until you’ve built a webmail client of your own. I guess I kind of get it now.
The Vision Pro one year later: this product just ain’t for me
If you enjoy your Vision Pro, don't let this post imply that i think you're wrong to enjoy it. This is a personal blog with my personal experiences, not some neutral outlet trying to assign an objective score to each product.
It’s been one year to the day since
Why I abandoned IDEs
I’ve held many different roles in my career, from developer to CEO and just about all kinds of positions in between, but I’ve always…
Time Vs Money, 3D Printer Style
A few months ago, Hackaday’s own Al Williams convinced me to buy a couple of untested, returned-to-manufacturer 3D printers. Or rather, he convinced me to buy one, and the incredible success of the…
The Technological Poison Pill: How ATProtocol Encourages Competition, Resists Evil Billionaires, Lock-In & Enshittification
Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, even though part of this is cheering on a new entrant looking to build an alternative…
The Slow Death of OCSP | Feisty Duck
Your VAX In A Cloud Is Ready
For many people of a certain age, the DEC VAX was the first computer they ever used. They were everywhere, powerful for their day, and relatively affordable for schools and businesses. These minico…
Downtown Doug Brown » The invalid 68030 instruction that accidentally allowed the Mac Classic II to successfully boot up
Danga
Don't Be Afraid to Use the Linter Plugin in #Obsidian | Amerpie by Lou Plummer
One of the most powerful and seemingly complicated plugins …
AI is Creating a Generation of Illiterate Programmers
A couple of days ago, Cursor went down during the ChatGPT outage. I stared at my terminal facing those red error messages that I hate to see. An AWS error glared back at me. I didn’t want to figure it out without AI’s help. After 12 years of coding, I’d somehow become worse at my own craft. And this isn’t hyperbole—this is the new reality for software developers.