Technology Commentary

I swear I never intended to publish a bunch more on TDD. But here we are. This is one from the archives, first published November 2010. It’s for TDDers who want to stretch their skills. In Tidy First? land we talk about the Succession Problem—in what order do we make decisions? The more, different orders you can manage, the more options you have for:

Sites such as Twitter/X have been overrun by automated accounts

As social networks become less reliable distributors of the news, consumers of digital journalism are seeking out an older form of online real estate.

I enjoyed Ezra Klein’s podcast conversation with Nilay Patel, the editor of The Verge. They talked about media and AI mostly

Cilium’s future involves not just Kubernetes and containers, but also VMs, edge use cases and other environments.

A blog that's only available in your feed reader. Because nobody told me not to.

Starting each comment with a prefix makes it clear what needs to happen. It enables the reader to see the intention of the comment at a glance.

In his book On War, Clausewitz defines friction as the difference between military theory and reality: Thus, then, in strategy everything is very simple, but not on that account very easy. Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war. As an instance of [friction], take the weather.

A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.

This is how I remember the crazy journey that web development has gone through in the past few years. Or rather this is *my* journey being a web developer. So I will omit events. I may mess up the timeline. This whole article may not be of any use to you. But for me, putting all the history I know into writing helped me appreciate how much things stay the same no matter how much they change.

Intelligence, of a sort, is going to be all around us

At Reason, Christian Britschgi (“Do Not Under Any Circumstances Nationalize Greyhound”) celebrates America’s “extensive network of private, for-profit (and profitable) intercity bus services primarily serving lower-income people” as “a great example of how the free market can provide an essential service without public subsidies.” There are a lot of questionable, or outright ahistorical, assumptions implicit...

How digital wallets work, and how payment costs drive a lot of product decisions inside and around them.

AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a "kind of useful" tool justifies the harm.

A year ago in Feed Overload I wrote: 99% of all microblog (and chat) content is ephemeral by design, meant for a specific moment in ti...

It's been a year since I wrote about Weird web pages as a prospective catalyst for the reclamation of my digital identity. There's been s...

The popular YouTuber’s scathing review of the AI gadget should be a warning to Apple ahead of its iOS 18 release next month.

An ugly clock radio from the 1960s is re-imagined using a Raspberry Pi. By Alan Boris.

We always can use more tools for FPGA debugging, and the Manta project by [Fischer Moseley] delivers without a shadow of a doubt. Manta lets you add a debug and data transfer channel between your c…

Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

The Great Untangling: Postamble – An incomplete map of the Commune and Weird-aligned web of makers. There are already many awesome proje...

I plan to write the Commune version of what I already wrote for a former employer: https://blog.meilisearch.com/meilisearch-open-business...

The Great Untangling: Part 3 – Materializing the web from first principles. Right now I use GitHub as my go-to profile page: github.com/...

The Great Untangling: Part 2 – Paving a path to the new frontier. I've been feeling a growing sense of anxiety related to account lockou...

The Great Untangling: Part 1 – Shaping the foundations. To sufficiently express my identity as a netizen I require: global group messag...

This post is the preamble of a 5-part series called The Great Untangling. The following four posts have already been published and are li...

I've previously written about the multi-app platform of my dreams as a community professional: The Community OS stack. While undeniably ...