Technology Commentary

One of the most powerful and seemingly complicated plugins …

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.

Everybody hates working on legacy projects, myself included. As fate would have it, one landed in my lap recently. While working on it didn’t make me hate legacy projects any less, it did help me get a deeper understanding of the processes and practices we use today.  I am proud that I am a part […]

You live with your family in Area Delta-44 of floor 212. Floors 140 through 266 are your world. Your life is walls and corridors, air ducts and stairwells, and—if you’re lucky—elevators. You live…

Ursula K. Le Guin on the presence of technology in her work

Pre-internet newspapers contained huge libraries of knowledge and skilled experts, much of that was lost when they moved from print to digital.

I have been asked a couple times to switch from Emacs to VS Code or from Firefox/Safari to Chrome. Here’s why I will never do it.

In 2010, a college student wrote a piece of code that would help him start a company. Thirteen years later, he would walk away from a multi-billion-dollar public company he built, only to start tin…

As an artist, writer, and general creative, I know that it takes many iterations to finalize a piece. I know…

Welcome to the ELIZA Archaeology Project. This research project brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars, artists, and programmers to explore the history and ideas around the ELIZA chatbot. ELIZA is the original and highly influential chatbot that launched the genre of human-computer

ELIZA is one of the most influential computer programs ever written. Developed by Joseph Weizenbaum, at MIT in the mid 1960s, long before ChatGPT, ELIZA was the world’s first chatbot; the fir…

To the credit of the team that put this presentation together, they mostly got it.

The TikTok ban and Donald Trump's rise to power show how fragile our social media accounts are. We must normalize and invest in decentralized social media.

Many engineers are leaving the IT industry, seeking better benefits, work-life balance and stability by bringing their IT skills to other sectors.

Humans make mistakes all the time. All of us do, every day, in tasks both new and routine. Some of our mistakes are minor and some are catastrophic. Mistakes can break trust with our friends, lose the confidence of our bosses, and sometimes be the difference between life and death. Over the millennia, we have created security systems to deal with the sorts of mistakes humans commonly make. These days, casinos rotate their dealers regularly, because they make mistakes if they do the same task for too long. Hospital personnel write on limbs before surgery so that doctors operate on the correct body part, and they count surgical instruments to make sure none were left inside the body. From copyediting to double-entry bookkeeping to appellate courts, we humans have gotten really good at correcting human mistakes...

The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.

PESOS is an acronym for Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site. It's a syndication model where publishing starts by posting to a 3rd party service, then using infrastructure (e.g. feeds, Micropub, webhooks) to create an archive copy on your site.

Issue #250: foraging, pickling, and dead husbands who haunt your dreams

Rockwell famously used 6502-based cores in modems for many years, but that doesn't mean other 6502s couldn't be used. If only there were a w...

No.340 — Artists challenge us to imagine a more optimistic world ⊗ How AI uncovers new ways to tackle difficult diseases ⊗ Libraries positively impact community health and well-being

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things -- Phil Karlton (bonus variations on the page)

The testing pyramid made a lot of sense when it conceived - but this is no longer the case.

Programming book reviews, programming tutorials,programming news, C#, Ruby, Python,C, C++, PHP, Visual Basic, Computer book reviews, computer history, programming history, joomla, theory, spreadsheets and more.

So, you have a shiny new piece of technology that everyone’s talking about and at least one enthusiast ready to light the fire. How do you start?

The history of color bars, the most common television test pattern out there, and what they actually do. (Also, Netflix has some weird test programming.)

About Henry Ford, AI search results and building better horses for your users.