Technology Commentary

Research report on Fediverse microblogging server governance: risks and mitigations, moderation, server leadership, federated diplomacy, and governance tooling.

A software license towards a world beyond capitalism.

Honestly, it is a bit ridiculous to compare Postgres and ClickHouse. The two database solutions are as similar as grapes and grapefruit. ClickHouse…

Alex Russell is a self-confessed [Cassandra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra) - doomed to speak truth that the wider Web industry stubbornly ignores. With this latest series of posts he is _spitting fire_. The series …

It’s Mastodon, it’s Threads, it’s the future, and it’s extremely confusing

In 2007, a small team at Yahoo! briefly changed how we program the internet. This is their story.

Why is AWS deprecating a bunch of services all of a sudden, and what does it mean for you?

One of the things that happens when you spend decades (!?) dealing with complex application servers is that you kind of lose touch with what the state of the art is in fast web servers. The last time I remember really paying attention was in 2007 or so, when I remember someone going to great lengths to get 10,000 requests per second out of a single web server. I was impressed – that felt like a huge amount of traffic for a single machine to handle. I’m starting a new side project that will need a bit of static file serving performance, and I realized that I had no idea how fast the state of the art is in HTTP serving, so I decided to do a bit of measurement. After doing a bit of testing, it turns out that 10,000 requests per second is far from the state of the art today.

No.319 — Moving from naive to authentic progress ⊗ MUTEK Forum ⊗ Zero-carbon cement ⊗ How Sci-Fi movies have changed since the 50s

A quarter century after ‘don't be evil’ a judge has found that Google is abusing its monopoly in search. But no-one knows what happens next, and whether this ruling will change anything. Will Apple build a search engine? Will ChatGPT change search? Does it matter?

Overcomplicating simple problems and implementing overly elaborate solutions for show off

While high-voltage transmission lines are probably the most visible components of the electrical grid, they’re certainly among the least appreciated. They go largely unnoticed by the general …

The autonomy team’s goal is to build robotic agents. Agents that are open-source, useful, and that you can fully own. Our main product and current focus is building the world’s best ADAS system. But the methods and strategies we are using to solve these problems are generic, they are not specific to driving.

For the past few weeks I've been thinking about how hard it is to develop software.

Jeremy Ruston explores what made the BBC Micro attractive and what can be learned from it today.

In hyperconnected hybrid cloud environments, observability gives organizations the means to bolster cybersecurity, ensure sustainability, and improve employee morale.

The most important takeaway from Google’s Pixel event is that it is Android that matters most, and Google’s integration with Android is worth preserving if the goal is spurring innovati…

CrowdStrike has released their final (sigh) External Root Cause Analysis doc. The writeup contains some more data on the specific failure mode. I’m not going to summarize it here, mostly beca…

When I visited the Palouse earlier this month, I spent a lot of time driving around the backroads, traveling through many small towns and communities. These towns were no bigger than a few hundred …

Posted on Friday 9 Aug 2024. 1,415 words, 11 links. By Matt Webb.

I try not to go off on security rants in the newsletter, but this week I’m unable to hold back. An apparent breach of a data aggregator has resulted in a monster dataset of US, UK, and Canadi…

Programmers should be paranoid.

21 months later

Continuing the theme of my post from over the weekend, here is some more on generative models and the simulations of attentiveness, intimacy, or friendship they are purported to provide.

Hackaday’s own [Arya Voronova] has been on a multi-year kick to make technology more personal by making it herself, and has just now started writing about it. Her main point rings especially true i…

In July, Netlify partnered with Astro and added a cache primitive and a new API. It’s all to make the frontend simpler for web developers.

Apple, Meta, and Nvidia all agree — synthetic data, iterative training, human preference labels, and lots of filtering.