Technology Commentary

Since at least the moment Facebook introduced (and apologized for) its News Feed, “the algorithm” has been shorthand for the ways the tech giants control what we see and when we see it. In the age of

ChatGPT uses too many dream sequences and Gemini won’t stop describing characters.

Posted on Saturday 11 Jul 2026. 1,204 words, 15 links. By Matt Webb.

The world of software has seen many paradigms come and go, all of which were supposed to revolutionize its development. Still, one of the basic tenets in engineering of there being no shortcuts to …

An old algebra teacher used to say, “You have to take what you know and use it to get what you don’t know.” You might say the same thing about converting analog signals into digit…

You know what they used to say– once you go Commodore, you’ll never leave by any door. Well, they might not have said that, but given the prevalence of projects still using Commodore-br…

[Popular Mechanics] has an interesting article about Alan Turing’s nearly-forgotten speech encryption device. Codenamed Delilah, it was in many ways an early form of digital encryption. It wa…

Choreo is an Elixir library for building domain-specific diagrams (C4, FSM, ERD, Sequence, Workflow, Threat Model) and performing semantic graph analysis on top of Yog.

Stop scrolling thousands of modules - get coverage for the files you touched, and a PR comment that tells you if you made things better or worse

I get asked fairly often what people need to know to be hireable as a graphics programmer. I figured it was time to make a page to link instead of re-typing it each time. We are in a strange time w…

Old web forums were poorly coded and rough around the edges, but maybe we gave up on them too quickly in the social media era.

It seems almost quaint now, but there was once a version of the Internet ruled by influencers that were honest, high integrity folks who genuinely cared about the impact of their words. Perhaps the…

While the original name of what much of the world knows as the NES was the Nintendo Family Computer, or Famicom for short, it was very rarely used as a family computer. Sure, there was a basic cart…

Hunk is a review-first terminal diff viewer for agent-authored changesets. Multi-file review stream, inline AI annotations, watch mode, and Git/Jujutsu integration.

Using APIs to enforce policy at the boundary between interacting systems is no longer enough.

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?