Technology Commentary

Chasing the raster, glimpsing the future, and a critical disagreement.

In his keynote talk at the first Perl conference, Larry Wall couldn’t get the Windows computer on the podium to behave. So he SSH’d into his own machine and said, with relief and joy: &…

In the age of AI, knowing what not to build might be the most important skill of all.

My small space on the internet where I share some local happenings, my projects, some of my photography, perhaps some commentary on the absurdity of the world...

When you design an electronic badge, the goal is to make a device that’s interesting and has enough depth to keep your attendees engaged for the duration of the con but not so complicated tha…

Watching [sprite_tm]’s build of a handheld 486-based gaming computer, we got to thinking about retro computers and the eternal questions of how much of the computer needs to be actually “old” for i…

Let's take a look at why the common, horizontal code structure is not ideal, where it breaks down, and what we can do about it.

How to set up CI workflows on Tangled for Elixir, with specific Elixir and Erlang versions, and a PostgreSQL service.

Someday real soon, most of us — starting with young adults — will carry an always-on AI. This agent will help us navigate our journeys, answer our questions, tutor and teach us new skills, remember people we have met before, … Continue reading →

Yes, I am building a dystopian cyberpunk hellscape.

29 questions. Two axes. Which of 30 AI archetypes are you?

It's kind of wild that we're still organising knowledge like it's sitting in a 1970s filing cabinet. People and AI don't think in folders. They find information through search, context and connections.

This is not the cyberpunk dystopia we were promised

Harper Carroll on when fine-tuning beats prompting, why learning to code still matters, and why fear is the wrong introduction to AI

A Postgres-native approach to exactly-once execution coordination without Redis locks or Temporal workflows.

What research papers don’t teach you about consistent hashing, gossip protocols, and surviving node failures at 2am

Kicking off a little side project for automatically discovering content through blog post feeds and syncing to atproto and standard.site.

When Kubernetes first came onto the scene, it was a major turning point, a revision of the infrastructure and operations space that transformed the way

By now we’re all used to single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi Zero, but it’s likely we’ve all been frustrated at times by the number of support components required to u…

We’ve been talking a bunch of home automation on the Podcast lately, and this week, in the Mailbag segment, a reader asked us about our setups. Neither Kristina nor I are poster children for the ho…

About 3 weeks ago, Leo Laporte and I recorded the first episode of what will be a new monthly show on the TWiT network. Naming things is hard, and we almost voted on the name, like we did for Stack Overflow, but we quickly landed on Off By One with

Exploring how compilers lower ordinary loops into explicit data-parallel kernels.

npm, Yarn, pnpm, Bun, and Deno are not interchangeable install tools. They encode different assumptions about dependency layout, compatibility, reproducibility, and developer speed.

CISA and FBI warn against memory-unsafe languages

Most “risks in software development” lists are project-manager checklists. The real risk is knowing the blast radius of each change, and letting it set how

Naming in software goes way beyond any aesthetics. Good naming minimizes reconstruction work. Here is the style and habits that I've picked up.