Technology Commentary

—is not this: By now we take it for granted. To live your digital life on the Internet, you need accounts. Lots of them. You need one for every website that provides a service, plus your Mac or Win…

Last month, I had the unadulterated pleasure of presenting “No Observability Without Theory” at Monitorama 2024. If you’ve never been to Monitorama, I can’t recommend it eno…

Small improvements can lead to big changes

Open your eyes and see the truth. The Eizo FlexScan EV2730Q is about to change everything you know about monitors.

X11R1 on Sun Techfury90 CC0 I apologize that this post is a little late. On 19 th June the X Window System celebrated its 40th birthday. W...

Serverless was a big deal for a hot minute, but now it seems old-fashioned, even though its basic elements, agility and scalability, are still relevant.

Fueled by vibes and with stars in their eyes, enterprises are not taking the time to understand generative AI’s limitations and to create their own rules-based approach.

AI-powered NPCs that don’t need a script could make games—and other worlds—deeply immersive.

Unlike many tools for building generative AI apps, the Podman AI Lab was built specifically for developers, rather than data scientists.

Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web. Those are different ...

For a long time there were only two essential things that I carried everywhere: keys and wallet. Two was a manageable number of objects that I had to remember to put into pockets, and two was a man…

One Ruby thing I never noticed before

For a long time I've wanted to spend some time writing down my recollections of what I did on the TA graphics engine.  It was a weird time, ...

At WWDC24, Apple announced Private Cloud Compute. Relying heavily on crytographic attestation, it raises the bar on cloud privacy and security.

The tech is new, and people are still unfamiliar.

Trying to answer a complicated question for myself, as a computer user during the multimedia era: Why did the CD-ROM caddy exist, and why didn’t I have one?

Scaling will run out. The question is when.

An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse

Below is a lightly-edited transcript of a talk I gave recently at work where I walked through the story of how I built Quick BIN Lookup and how it rose and fell to irrelevancy over the last 8 years. Hello! Today, I wanted to tell the story of how I

Explore how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries in this large-scale research visualization.

Anatomy of an AI System - The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources. By Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler (2018)

Smart glasses that combine personal computing, AI, and augmented reality could be the next life-changing consumer tech device. Here's how.

Imbuing generative AI tools with character may be important for user adoption, but how do we do it well?

Wild ramblings, raport from the field about choosing Vector Database for a particular project and a little bit of a rant about the current state of AI and how it's perceived, why human brains are a wonder of nature, and why it's far from 'thinking' and 'consciousness'.