Technology Commentary

When local-first beats cloud-first for SaaS: the sync problem, CRDT trade-offs, why Notion's offline mode disappointed, and a practical decision framework.

Eight long held and common beliefs about the network have been shown, time after time, to be false. What are they, and what do they mean?

I’ve been telling people for the last 25 years that Jane Street as an organization was just not interested in formal methods.

Developers share how they handle deadlines, pressure, and the small lies that keep teams moving.

You know the meeting. The board wants an AI agent strategy by end of quarter. Someone on the leadership team has read a McKinsey report. You've been voluntold

The Missing Optimization Layer in Agent Systems

AI-generated code copyright explained for builders.

BERTopic creator and Google DeepMind developer relations engineer Maarten Grootendorst has spent years helping practitioners build intuition for how AI systems actually work—not just how to prompt them. Maarten joined Ben Lorica to cover the enduring relevance of embeddings and topic models in an LLM-dominated world, his hot take that agents are essentially just an …

[drop_cap]A[/drop_cap]dobe isn’t exactly a beloved company these days. People begrudgingly use their stuff, because the Creative Suite is an industry standard (read: monopoly) or there are simply no worthwhile alternatives, not because anyone is genuinely excited about these tools. I’m happy to report that I (mostly) make do without Adobeware these days (shoutout to Photopea), […]

Hallucination isn't a bug in LLMs — it's the mechanism. The real problem is misallocating non-determinism, and why "SKILLS.md is enough" is exactly backwards.

AI Debt Bubble and the Post-Productive Economy

It’s an interesting new obsession of ours. Don’t get me wrong, disregarding context for a second, I think generative AI is potentially revolutionary technology, I just don’t believe you. I’m not trying to be mean, I’m trying to be helpful, and that means I have to be critical. I don’t like rhetorical questions either, nor do I think you’re helped by me beating the living daylights out of a strawman of my making, so let’s honestly grapple with this. I can’t promise it’s all going to be comfortabl...

The aspects engineering leaders should weigh before betting on on-device AI - and the one phrase it all hinges on.

We’ve talked before about number stations — mysterious shortwave transmitters repeating numbers, presumably for clandestine purposes. But, of course, the mere fact that they are unusual…

If you are an American of a certain age, you know the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, beating the United States to orbit. You might even remember ham radio operators tuning into…

My guess is that most software development teams in the world are at a point where we are drawing the two circles. Those are all the teams where developers use LLMs daily. But then you hear about teams that might be getting closer to building software factories. And that's the

I profiled the API surface of 219 of the world's top-ranked universities — the QS 2025 set — and found 634 APIs across 40 countries. The headline isn't the c...

Do note that this is a slightly sarcastic post, there is alot of sarcasm on the internet at the moment. Take a moment to reflect if you want to expose yourself to more sarcasm. There are plenty of …

Firstyear's blog

My client was a utility company, and they had a big problem...

Reading the tea leaves

This was published in English (and Polish) in 1986 under the title One Human Minute: So it was not humanoid automata that former the new armies but synthetic insects (synsects) — ceramic microcrustacea, titanium annelids, and flying pseudo-hymenoptera with nerve centers made of arsenic compounds and with stingers of heavy, fissionable elements…The flying synsect combined […]

I spend a lot of time thinking about the open web. We talk about it a lot. But I'm not sure it exists, at least not in the way it's often described. Embedded within the underlying architecture of the web is an ideal of openness. One can publish anything and one can link to anything.

Thoughts about how our feed readers homogenize the web

I use AI for some things. I’m putting that out there right from the start because it will get rid of those people who are so unreasonable that they can’t even be arsed to hear me out. I get most of the arguments against “Artificial Intelligence”. In fact, I agree with a lot of them. From the environmental and human costs to the apocalyptic possibilities, the arguments make a lot of sense. There are a lot of dangers when it comes to this “AI” revolution, and the corporations who are in charge of this revolution cannot be trusted to do anything but try to pad their bottom line.

The determination to move away from the addictive doom-scrolling of social media has given me pause, given me space to look around at how I use the internet and figure out where I get most value an…