Technology Commentary

The Oxford University Press's word of the year is "brain rot." I believe that's two words, but whatever. Let an academic press have its moment in the sun, with headlines that, this time around, don't involve selling off its authors' IP to giant technology companies. "‘Brain rot’ is defined as

If I had wanted to write a column about presidential pardons, I’d find ChatGPT’s assistance a far better starting point than I’d have gotten through any general web search. But to quote Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”

Back in 2020, I wrote a piece called My skepticism towards current developer meta-productivity tools, which laid out my three core problems with developer productivity measurement tools of the time: Using productivity measures to evaluate rather than learn Instrumenting metrics required tweaks across too any different tools Generally I found tools forced an arbitrary, questionable model onto the problem Two and a half years later, I made an angel investment in DX, which at the time I largely viewed as taking a survey-driven, research-backed approach to developer productivity. I was recently chatting with Abi Noda, co-founder at DX, and thought it would be an interesting time to revise my original thesis both generally and in response to DX’s release of DX Core 4.

BLUF: On a team of around 12–20 engineers, I’m dedicating 2–3 of them solely to infrastructure—focusing on uptime, security, costs, and the developer experience.

Have you heard about Bell Labs? Recently, an article about it reached the Hacker News frontpage, triggering a flood of nostalgic comments. Bell Labs is, for many, a symbol of the ideal working environment for a curious mind: a place where there’s time, money and freedom to research whatever you want. In my own case, having a curious mind drew me from a young age towards computers and lured me into the world of programming.

Sometimes I’ll talk about something I like online and people will express shock that I can use a product that has such a clear downside. I’ve gotten people ask how I can use Things since it doesn’t have shared task lists. More recently I was told the

A new conference and a new approach for the DTrace Olympiad!

Open-source applications play a critical role in technology, offering powerful tools, innovation, and community-driven development. However, many users have noticed that the user interfaces (UIs) of open-source software often lack the polish and finesse of their commercial, closed-source counterparts. This perceived gap isn’t due to a lack of talent but arises from unique challenges and priorities inherent to open-source projects.

2.4K votes, 198 comments. 72K subscribers in the VHS community. Do you trip over a stack VHS tapes in the morning? Do you look through bins of old…

This person posted a bunch of images of their dad’s old VHS tapes with lovingly hand-drawn labels indicating their contents. Kids, this is what people did before the internet. Also, it’s weird/interesting that CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray, LaserD

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. I spent 18

Listen up, tech oligarchs; lend an ear, simpering brohanions. We’re doing this generative AI thing all wrong, and if you continue down your current path, your house of cards will fall, leaving all …

This shift in terminology is more than just semantics — it shapes culture, expectations, and, ultimately, the success of innovation.

The MapLibre Organization is an umbrella for open-source mapping libraries.

Did you know that most printer ink isn’t even expensive to make? Why then is it so expensive to refill the ink on your printer? The answer is actually pretty simple: monopolies, weird laws, and

The crusade against bright headlights has picked up speed in recent years, in large part due to a couple of Reddit nerds. Could they know what’s best for the auto industry better than the auto industry itself?

Learn about the benefits of policy and code, the challenges presented by OPA's Rego and Policy-as-Graph, and possible solutions.

Startups in Latvia and other nearby countries see the mobilization of Ukraine as a warning and as inspiration. They are now changing consumer products—from scooters to recreational drones—for use on the battlefield.

As autonomous vehicles continue to evolve, photonics technology plays an increasingly critical role in enhancing the accuracy, safety, and responsiveness of their systems. By utilizing the power of light for sensors, navigation, and environmental mapping, photonics enables vehicles to perceive their surroundings with unprecedented precision and reliability—even in challenging conditions

A cultural shift towards network automation can improve operational efficiency, reduce time to recovery, and reduce service delivery issues.

We’ve been fans of the Yosys / Nextpnr open-source FPGA toolchain for a long while now, and like [Michael] we had no idea that their oss-cad-suite installer sets up everything so that you can write…

Twitter and Threads aren’t meeting this news-driven moment—and Bluesky is showing the power of letting humans decide what they want to see.

Recently, there was a Mastodon post from [nixCraft] challenging people to drop their NAT routers for the month of November and use only IPv6. What would it be like to experience “No NAT Novem…

Chairman of Intel, 63, Santa Clara, California

And why is Pat Gelsinger out?

Grove’s words don’t read merely as advice — they read today as a postmortem for what happed to Intel over the last 20 years.

The internet felt like a limitless expanse of free expression. Now I usually end up at the same three or four websites.

When programmer Micah Lee was kicked off X for a post that offended Elon Musk, he didn't look back. His new tool for saving and deleting your X posts can give you that same sweet release.

Before we get going — please enjoy my speech from Web Summit, Why Are All Tech Products Now Shit? I didn’t write the title. What if what we're seeing today isn't a glimpse of the future, but the new terms of the present? What if artificial intelligence isn't actually capable