Technology Commentary

That’s what MyTerms does. Since I don’t have a photo of my own shot here in the natural world, the AI image above represents the degree of agentic scale MyTerms gives to a human meeting…

Lessons on laying out the 404 Media zine using a relatively weird setup—on Linux, using Affinity, with the help of the Windows translation layer WINE.

Considering the inherent tension of the Ovation guitar, which applied aerospace concepts to the acoustic guitar. It’s a brilliant-but-conflicted object.

The New York Times’ choice to publish a video op-ed by the CEO of Patreon points at why exec-produced video op-eds might be a bad idea.

Most agencies flinch when they hear the word productisation. It sounds like someone’s about to force their work into a neat little package with a bow on top. A fixed scope, a shiny cover, a rigid process. Something that takes the soul out of the work. But productisation, when

Ever heard of MUMPS? Both programming language and database, it was developed in the 1960s for the Massachusetts General Hospital. The goal was to streamline the increasingly enormous timesink that…

How the shipping container, a dominant force in ocean shipping, came from a truck driver whose invention proved to be too good at its job.

YouTuber ‘Plants in Jars’ explained how she was a driving force in accidentally crashing the rare plant market with one specific method.

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January 2007, his words made their way into history: Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device. So, three things; a […]

Today, it is hard to imagine a world without recorded audio, and for the most part that started with Edison’s invention of the phonograph. However, for most of its history, the phonograph was…

Plotters aren’t as common as they once were. Today, many printers can get high enough resolution with dots that drawing things with a pen isn’t as necessary as it once was. But certainl…

Explore the true history of convolutional neural networks, from Fukushima’s neocognitron to modern CNNs and LeCun’s influential work.

The recent ​announcement​ that Netflix formalized a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s television and film studios, as well as the HBO Max streaming service, ... Read more

As is his want, last week Fred Wilson wrote a provocative post I’ve been thinking about for the past few days. Titled “Netscape and Microsoft Redux?”, Fred notes the parallels bet…

Makerspaces help local communities in many different ways. They also rely on their support.

Generative artificial intelligence has amazed the World. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT 3, its user adoption has been staggering. In 2022, ChatGPT surpassed one million users in just five days. For comparison, Instagram needed 2.5 months back in 2010. And it’s not just OpenAI. Anthropic has Claude, one of the best models for programming...

Reflections from 2025 and What’s Ahead in 2026

Engineering Governance into the Stack

The debate about open source AI has largely featured open weight models. But that's a bit like arguing that in the PC era, the most important goal would have

NotebookLM is proprietary and is enjoying incredible popularity at the moment, but did you know that there's an open source take on this technology?

To vet open source software, evaluating the business model, funding and governance behind projects you depend on is essential for business continuity.

I spent a month debugging why our service availability was all over the place. Turns out we had some 50MB markdown files hiding in our database.

A blog mostly about Clojure programming

This article has been translated into English with AI, you can find the original language above.

elle's hypertext stuff

We’ve all been there. You’ve found a beautiful piece of older hardware at the thrift store, and bought it for a song. You rush it home, eager to tinker, but you soon find it’s jus…

Loko Scheme is a bare metal Scheme implementation

One of our newer writers, [Tyler August], recently wrote a love letter to plasma TV technology. Sitting between the ubiquitous LCD and the vanishing CRT, the plasma TV had its moment in the sun, bu…

As part of Talking Points Memo's 25th anniversary, I wrote an essay on early blogging, and what I miss about it. Here it is, in its entirety: Whether I like it or not, the first line of my obituary will probably be that I was the founding editor of Gawker.

I was at QCon SF during the recent Cloudflare outage (I was hosting the Stories Behind the Incidents track), so I hadn’t had a real chance to sit down and do a proper read-through of their pu…