Technology Commentary

And how we are already fostering independent web communities

Scientists at Aston University in the UK have broken the world record for data transmission speed, achieving an astonishing 402 terabits per second (Tbps) over optical fiber....

Coding was a preserve of elites, until BASIC hit the streets.

Software industry has become more driven by profit and unnecessary complexity that by the ability to build and launch innovative products.

Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz, July 5, 2024

"Systems design" is a branch of study that tries to find universal architectural patterns that are valid across disciplines. You might thin...

I started programming in the 1990s living above my parent’s medical practice. We had 15 PCs for the business, and one for me. The standard OS was MS-DOS.The network started off using IPX over coax to a Novell Netware server, the fanciest software we ever owned. IPX was so much easier than TCP/IP. No DHCP and address allocation, it just worked. Eventually the PCs would run Windows, and a Windows NT server took over file sharing over TCP/IP. The business software survived this transition unchanged, though there was more operational overhead. We assigned IPs manually.

We don’t talk a lot in public about the big vision for Tailscale, why we’re really here. Usually I prefer to focus on what exists right now, and what we’re going to do in the next few months. But let’s look at the biggest of big pictures for a change.

The opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics is going on today. It’s an over-the-top presentation meant to draw people into sport. And for the next few weeks, we’ll be seeing people from all across …

We heard a story that after the recent hurricane, a man noted that while the house was sweltering hot because the power was still out, his kids were more anxious for the internet to come back onlin…

The demoscene has provided our community with its artistic outlet since the first computers which could handle graphics, and has stayed at the forefront of technology all the way. For all that thou…

I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes

I recently published heckorator on pypi. It’s a cursed little project to make Python decorators more readable. But I actually started (and abandoned) the project 4 years ago!

An overview of all the tools, standards and special languages used in the automotive industry where the official language is actually C.

In a recently uncovered 1983 speech, Steve Jobs predicted the ubiquity of personal computers. In 2024, AI has brought us to another inflection point.

This one weird trick saved countless hours and stress – no, really

Science and engineering usually create consistent results. Generally, when you figure out how to make something, you can repeat that at will to make more of something. But what if, one day, you ran…

Build your own AI app without hassle.

Software engineers are not (and should not be) technicians I don’t actually think predictability is a goo...

There might be a very simple explanation for why the masses have yet to adopt Linux as their desktop operating system, which the open-source community won't like.

I had to bite my tongue and not comment on this tweet from FTC Chair Lina Khan, who tried to make the current CrowdStrike situation a crisis because of “big tech” and “consolidation.” “How is it th…

Reflections on six decades of relations with computers

Many people, one way or another, got started programming computers using some kind of Basic. The language was developed at Dartmouth specifically so people could write simple programs without much …

When I got my first computer, a second hand 386 running MS-DOS 6.22, I didn’t have an Internet connection. But I did have QuickBASIC installed and a stack of programming magazines the local library…