Technology Commentary

Somewhere at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde Canal, buried in the silt, there is a box of custom silicon that was right about almost everything. Back in 1988 a Scottish hi-fi company shipped a processor that checked the type and bounds of every memory access in hardware, garbage-collected its own heap in silicon, […]

Laurent Le Brun's blog

Today I accidentally became the maintainer of software that was already almost three decades old: reviving a 1990s Java utility to keep the last...

Tracking my listening across 4 different apps over more than a decade

This is absurdly cool: Puter compiled Firefox to WebAssembly such that the whole browser runs in another browser. Here's my blog, running in Firefox, running in WebAssembly, running in Chrome: …

A personal perspective on AI, product quality and the growing divide between deciding what should exist and efficiently building it.

“Our lives have become dematerialized.” That phrase – from author Ian Bogost in a short piece in Wired – struck at the center of something I’ve been trying to verbaliz…

It seems ridiculous now, but when I was a cub reporter covering the tech industry, our publication had an entire beat focused on word processing – and it was one of the most sought after assi…

Last month the FT reported that OpenAI was going all in on a “super app” that combines agents and coding, a move clearly designed to compete with Anthropic, which dominates the “g…

Lately I’ve been asking myself: what might artificial intelligence be good for besides answering questions and writing code?  My answer is the latent spaces within AIs themselves will become a new medium for creativity.  I will first explain what I … Continue reading →

What the AI productivity research is actually telling us.

This following statement is a lie: “I am telling the truth”. Okay, now that it’s just us meatbags, let’s get down to brass tacks. Captain Kirk’s logic bombs couldn&#82…

[Irving John Good] was at Trinity College, Oxford back in 1964. His paper, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” could have been a topic for today, as we deal wit…

Ceefax was the BBC’s broadcast teletext service that ran until 2012, providing text and rudimentary graphics that were broadcast invisibly with the TV signal. In order to get this teletext da…

One of the attractions of buying at the bottom end of the electronics market by mail order from China is that you never quite know what will come your way. Sometimes it’s a diamond in the rou…

In the sweltering temperatures of an unusually hot European heatwave, I found myself having a chat with  a friend of mine from my university days. After discussing the health of his cat who had sol…

What the OpenClaw Superstream taught us about running agents safely in production

The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission.I cowrote a Google whitepaper

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In a world regulated by devices, humanity has become disconnected from the physical world—from stick-shift cars to postcards.

Both sides are grappling with a real existential threat, and both sides feel like they are screaming into the void. There is a way to close the gap and get everyone pulling in the same direction.

Jeff Ding's diffusion theory of the role of technology in great-power competition also applies to AI adoption, and it suggests that companies obsessed with the frontier might be optimizing for the wrong thing.

Today’s post is a bit different from my usual deep dives into mesh geometry. It’s a story about architecture – and about going back to the beginning. Think back to how you learned…

A curated directory of PostgreSQL extensions and tools. Replace Redis, Elasticsearch, Kafka, and MongoDB with one database you already know.

Although there’s probably no good reason to want to run image editing software from 1996 other than for nostalgia’s sake, if you ever wanted to run the GIMP version 0.54 from back when …

Open source recreation costs a fraction of the original and may even work with Twiggy drives

cpp-httplib is an HTTP/HTTPS library for C++. Just copy a single header file, httplib.h , and you're ready to go. When you need a quick HTTP server or client

A gentle rant on the topic of libraries that run as Elixir applications and why that's an anti-pattern for library design.