Technology Commentary

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I’ve previously thought of Jamie Zawinski not just as an excellent hacker but also as a marketing talent, creator of the original mozilla.org “brand.” (Imagined conversation: “You know, these open source and free software types are all radical anarchists or Marxist hippies; they’ll really go for a brand image that reminds them of trashing a WTO meeting” “Well, Jamie, you’re the expert. . . .”) Now based on his “groupware bad” rant it turns out that JWZ is also a leading-edge corporate competitive strategist; maybe the people getting Harvard Business School MBAs could take a break and hang out at the DNA Lounge instead.

Since the first time I heard the word “groupware” in…. I think it was ’91, referring to Lotus Notes, I have wondered what it was supposed to be. Like, in an ideal world wher…

"The trick you want to accomplish is that when one person is using your software, it suddenly provides value to that person and their entire circle of friends, without the friends having had to do anything at all. Then, later, you pull ...

Microsoft’s 3.8B parameter Phi-3 may rival GPT-3.5, signaling a new era of “small language models."

Firstyear's blog

Paul Thurrott: Windows 11 Recall Is Not a Privacy Concern But we all knew this was coming, that privacy advocates would immediately stomp all over this functionality without taking the time to understand how it even works. To be fair, it doesn’t help that we’re still reeling from

404 Media: Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a

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Software as a Point of Failure

Unlearn programming to learn Ruby

For the first ten years of development, prior to its usage of BitKeeper, the Linux Kernel version control tool of choice had just been Linus himself. The system worked like this: developers would submit tarballs and patches to a handful of Linsus’s trusted lieutenants.

When you talk to a doctor about a medical issue they will often present you with all of the options but shy away from providing an unambiguous recommendation. When you talk to a lawyer about a lega…

In order to understand something, it helps to observe it up close and study its inner workings. This is no less true for the brain, whether it is the brain of a mouse, that of a whale, or the squis…

Cybersecurity journalist Joseph Cox joins Decoder to discuss his new book Dark Wire all about the FBI’s secretive secure phone startup.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: a streaming provider is joining up with another streaming provider to offer a bundle. Last week it…

How I detected that Let's Encrypt issued 645 non-compliant certificates

Why certificates issued by "Cloudflare" and "Baltimore" are really issued by DigiCert

wingolog: article: growing a bootie

Some governmental agencies have started to adopt No Wrong Door policies, which aim to provide help–often health or mental health services–to individuals even if they show up to the wrong agency to request help. The core insight is that the employees at those agencies are far better equipped to navigate their own bureaucracies than an individual who knows nothing about the bureaucracy’s internal function. For the most part, technology organizations are not complex bureaucracies, but sometimes they do seem to operate that way.

It certainly isn’t a new idea to compile a language into an intermediate language. The original C++ compiler outputs C code, for example. Enhanced versions of Fortran were often just conversi…

Lisp is an ambiguous category. But Common Lisp isn't, right? It's a restricted self-sufficient language, after all.