Technology Commentary

Understand the key differences between IPFS and Filecoin and how to build your hardware infrastructure to meet the demanding workloads of each.

To protect the digital foundation of essential government services, governments should invest in Open Source as public infrastructure and shift from consumption to contribution.

Behold, the printer hate machine.

The manifesto for slop driven development

Without taking a position on the whole issue: Married to a professor of veterinary medicine, it seems to me comparing the results of AI coding to the results of evolution ought to make you nervous. https://wiki.oddly-influenced.dev/view/welcome-visitors/view/your-body-is-a-gross-kludge The lesson of medicine is that bodies are not designed for understandability or non-planned-for maintenance. You're essentially conceding that humans working on AI code will be as expensive and failure-prone as physicians working on bodies. It's worth considering how bad humans are at predicting nonlinear effects (Dörner's /The Logic of Failure/ is good at that, https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/dietrich-dorner/the-logic-of-failure/9780201479485/?lens=basic-books) That's the root of the oft-quoted Hemingway bit: “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” That's an effect of how profoundly bad we are at understanding exponential growth. If it were my money at stake, I'd want a some assurance that if AI hits a wall, I won't be left with the equivalent of a nasty autoimmune disease. That is: what are the risks? how will you monitor them? what's your disaster recovery plan? The problem with a ZIRP is that those questions are b-o-r-i-n-g and you can't compete with those who skip them. You're out of business before they crash. ("The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.") Similarly, there's a collective action problem. Our society is structured such that when the optimists' predictions go wrong, they don't pay for their mistakes – rather society as a whole does. See housing derivatives in 2008, the Asian financial crisis of the late '90s, etc. ZIRP makes it cheaper to be an optimist, but someone else pays the bill for failure (Silicon Valley Bank, Savings and Loan crisis) It's weird to see ZIRP touted as a model, given the incredible overspending that took place, which had to be clawed back once ZIRP went away. (Most notably in tech layoffs, but I'm more concerned about all the small companies that were crushed because of financials, not because of the merit of their products.) Please extend your analogy to the end of the AI ZIRP environment. Or will line go up forever?

Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.

Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.

If Tim Cook is busy having Apple make unnecessary ornaments as appeasement for political leaders, why not have Gil Amelio lead the company instead?

AOL is not required to continue running their dial-up service forever. But it would sure be nice.

When paradigms change, previous winners have the hardest time adjusting; that is why AI might be a challenge for Apple and Amazon

The best Stratechery content from the week of August 4, 2025 including what Nokia can teach us about the AI era, what the NFL wants from ESPN, and how Visa conquered debit cards.

Ever wonder why online advertising is so convoluted? A new book by an industry insider helps explain why—and how Google put its giant hand on the scale.

Weeknotes 352 - Companion Paradox: agency in the age of relatable AI - GPT-5 is everywhere in the news. It delivers and it underwhelms, depending who you ask. I dived in two the impact on being a relatable AI.

I recently read a great article by Sohail Saifi about how Japanese developers write code and it resonated with me beyond just programming. I come from a family closely tied to industrial work and quality systems: My wife is an engineer in the food industry.

In this post, I reveal the undisclosed information regarding Japanese 10x developers that I had the...

I’ve been diving into Japanese software development practices, and honestly, it’s totally changed the way I look at writing code. While a lot of developers in the West are caught up in chasing the …

Easy Ways to Improve Your Programming by Following Japanese Software Engineering Tips

For the past three years, I have delved into the software development landscape in Japan, and one of the things I learned completely…

When I first opened a Japanese codebase, I was confused.  There were pages of comments, layers of abstraction, and documentation longer…

I have pulled together some findings from my work with almost 100 companies and individuals over the last two years, and can share my conclusions about where teams excel, where they consistently struggle, and what the next steps should be for organizations seeking to advance. In my consultancy and t

This is No Gods No Masters, 2024, painted by me, in wax. 65x78” Join the $2 Lunch Club! This week’s question comes to us from Will Hopkins: When your job and...

Fresh computer science graduates are facing unemployment rates of 6.1% to 7.5% — more than double what biology and art history majors are experiencing, according to a recent Federal Reserve Bank of New York study.

Abstract Upstream HTTP/1.1 is inherently insecure and regularly exposes millions of websites to hostile takeover. Six years of attempted mitigations have hidden the issue, but failed to fix it. This p

I had a couple of days off and was relaxing at home, randomly browsing my music library on Apple Music, and trying to bring my Audio CDs…

The future of software development isn’t about better prompts. It’s about better context.

Fediverse, which is a portmanteau of Federation and Universe, is the name for a new protocol for the social internet: a bunch of different social networks and platforms that are connected to each other. Users on any of these services can follow users on any other one and respond to, like, and share posts. Here's how it works and how it could change social media.

At the frontiers of knowledge, researchers are discovering that A.I. doesn’t just take prompts—it gives them, too, sparking new forms of creativity and collaboration.

As US and Chinese tech giants chase artificial general intelligence, experts warn the hype may be outrunning the science

In the world of DevOps and Cloud Engineering, understanding HTTP status codes isn’t just for frontend developers — it’s essential. Whether…