Technology Commentary

Markets, Technology & Musings

One day, after a particularly arduous coding session with Rust, I decided to vent my frustrations with this language on pen and paper (or keyboard and pixel?). My rant ended up going viral. The…

Pondering the screen saver, a cultural artifact which means one of two things: Offbeat graphics and screens that automatically go dark. The difference matters.

Neatnik Notes

Chris Krycho, a person I really respect, is learning Racket to build programming languages. Racket is generally slotted as a language to build languages. The popular books focus on Racket innovations related to constructing Domain Specific Languages. This include hygienic macros, the Racket loading and evaluation phases and the module system. While it is uniquely suited for creating languages 1, Racket is also a research vehicle for a large body of programming language research.

What makes Python the BASIC of today?

I can’t even browse LinkedIn without seeing some product manager hype about agents coming “just around the corner”. And before you jump into the comment’s section, I am not biased. I’ve worked with l

SteamOS is spreading beyond Valve's hardware. That could threaten Microsoft's hold on PC gaming...or even Windows' hold on the PC market.

Moravec's paradox is the observation in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics that, contrary to traditional assumptions, reasoning requires very little computation, but sensorimotor and perception skills require enormous computational resources. The principle was articulated in the 1980s by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky, and others. Moravec wrote in 1988: "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility".[1]

Maggie's digital garden filled with visual essays on programming, design, and anthropology

While CES 2025 showcased many new exciting products, it also introduced plenty of gadgets with unnecessary waste, cost, and surveillance.

So, we are coming up on a little anniversary for me this weekend. On the 5th of January 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Aqua user interface of Mac OS X to the world at Macworld Expo. The Age of A…

How Apple's Macintosh design philosphy affects the web.

This is my dashboard for Los Angeles as it looks this morning: Five TV stations, one radio station, one newspaper: KNBC/4 “4 Los Angeles” KTLA/5 “LA’s Very Own” KABC/7…

Introduction Can you believe it’s been almost a year since my last blog? It’s incredible how fast time flies. Thank you all for continuing to read the blog and sharing it with engineers in the community. I can’t thank you enough for all the support and encouragement I’ve received on this journey. This blog is going to take a bit of a turn. I usually write in the form of a tool I have used or been presented with and think, “This is incredible; more people should know about it.

Posted on Friday 10 Jan 2025. 932 words, 8 links. By Matt Webb.

8 pieces of technology that have dramatically improved my life

What to make of the statements of the AI labs?

Automattic decides to pull back on the WordPress project. But in the process, the firm may have accidentally explained why competitors were able to one-up them.

After the Civil War, the economic recovery of the southern United States hinged on trade with the North and moving goods westward via the railroad. But there was a problem. Tracks in the South had been built with a gauge (or track width) of 5 feet but the

Watch now (54 mins) | A re-record of my NeurIPS tutorial on language modeling (plus some added content).

Part 2: Navigating Ambiguity

Many developers hesitate to adopt GraphQL for their fullstack projects, believing the setup overhead outweighs the benefits, especially for smaller teams or solo projects. Recent discussions around GraphQL often highlight its enterprise-level advantages, particularly in federation and tooling—as seen with WunderGraph Cosmo or Hive Router. But what if GraphQL’s power isn’t reserved just for large-scale systems? Let’s explore how GraphQL can offer tangible benefits, even for small teams or individual developers.

I recently watched Netflix’s Bryan Johnson documentary (Netflix Link) and came away both intrigued and amused by his extreme quest to maximize health and minimize biological age.

Generalist multimodal models (GMMs) can learn easily across diverse modalities and perform well with different types of tasks.

Strong relationships with data require more than relevant context and controls in the era of AI.