Technology Commentary

If your favorite content management system feels like it’s sinking into a shallow well of hubris, you might want alternatives. I have a few ideas.

You’re getting hit by pre-election chaos everywhere online. Let’s take a step back and get a bit of a palate cleanser. A little Tedium goes a long way.

The man who attempted to sue Linux out of existence died a month and a half ago with little notice by the Linux and open source communities.

People might argue that JSON Schema is overkill or outdated. But in this article, we’ll explore that it is not the case and understand how…

Exploration of C++ complexity with first-hand experience of compiler bugs

Reflections on A Philosophy of Software Design — Part 1

Artificial intelligence has always been around us, with [Timothy J. O’Malley]’s 1985 book on AI projects for the Commodore 64 being one example of this. With AI defined as being the the…

Soundtrack: EL-P - Flyentology At the core of Microsoft, a three-trillion-dollar hardware and software company, lies a kind of social poison — an ill-defined, cult-like pseudo-scientific concept called 'The Growth Mindset" that drives company decision-making in everything from how products are sold, to how your on-the-job performance is judged. I am

Posted on Friday 1 Nov 2024. 1,016 words, 13 links. By Matt Webb.

Book review

Us technologists excel at not seeing the human aspects of why things work—-we assume it is just the good technology driving everything. There is a reason we are good at coding in isolation. It is because we aren’t good at human things. We are nerds, geeks, or whatever outsider phrase you use to describe yourself. We put a lot of faith in good and right technological solutions. It’s all very binary and easy-—it is either good or bad. On or off. When in reality these are all very human things. I strongly believe that much of the success of HTTP APIs over other solutions was the humans talking, sharing, and demonstrating how this free and ubiquitous technology can be used in useful and meaningful ways.

Basket of options versus option on a basket

After 20 years of blogging I am wondering where to go from here. The answer isn’t to quit. But continuing as-is won’t do either.

When I was writing MINISTRY OF SPACE, only the technical appendix to this book, THE MARS PROJECT, was available, and that was invaluable. I picked this up around 2006 to accompany it on a shelf, an…

By Om Malik I first met Matthew Prince in 2010, the day he launched Cloudflare at TechCrunch Disrupt. His original pitch for Cloudflare was “Content Delivery...

Step back & think about which system you're optimizing

I discovered Minimalissimo 15 years ago, literally on the day they started publishing. It became part of my RSS reader. It found a home in a folder called “The good stuff,” which had many such webs…

David Pierce: How Digg helped invent the social internet In its early days, Digg was something like the homepage of the internet. Any user could submit a link, and then any other user could either promote it with a “dig” or demote it with a “bury.” The best and most

On the state of evaluation for language models.

First published Dec 8, 2021.

There's been quite a bit of mumbling and grumbling in the last few days (weeks? months?) that this whole AI thing might be a bubble and that the bubble might be about to burst. "The AI bubble is looking worse than the dot-com bubble," MarketWatch cautioned this week. Me, I

“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better…

Apple will be announcing new Macs next week, and that could mean it’s finally time for them to update their Magic accessories (Mouse, Keyboard, and Trackpad) in some manner. Odds are, they’ll just get revved with USB-C instead of Lightning, but it’s always possible that they’ll

Shamelessly stolen from Peter Block.

Posted on Thursday 24 Oct 2024. 809 words, 6 links. By Matt Webb.

Anil Dash: It feels like 2004 again. A generation ago, those of us in tech might talk to our friends or family and hear them say, "I think the ads in my Hotmail account are terrible, and I can’t send any attachments. And Yahoo search is getting worse, plus

Posted on Monday 28 Oct 2024. 1,335 words, 21 links. By Matt Webb.

When I was developing a piece of rural property, I was in awe of the guy who ran the “escavator”.