Technology Commentary

How to transform the internet's most toxic platform into essential infrastructure.

Computers are starting to have opinions on how our APIs should look like

One of the networks Lori Emerson wrote about in Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook is the NABU Network (or the Natural Access to Bi-Directional Utilities Network). This was the only in…

Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook was published by the art book publisher Anthology Editions on May 19, 2025 and as of July is official…

No.365 — From futurephobia to futuretopia ⊗ Computing, life, and intelligence ⊗ Robots “walk” historic building complex ⊗ The wild within the walls

Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.

Positioning AI contenders — and losers — by their tech philosophy and business potential.

This article is not an exploration of who does Ethernet better so much as a direct examination of technology itself. Numbers will be reported as an aggregate means between major players in the AI Networking market and contrasted with equivalent InfiniBand performance. The goal is to answer, at an atomic level, one question: eliminating all other variables, is Ethernet good enough?

Industry experts say no-code platforms are dying due to AI-powered "vibe coding." But others argue AI will transform visual development into something new.

There are many ways to learn, but few to none of them compare to that of spending time standing over the shoulder of a master of the craft. This awesome page sent in by [JohnU] is a fantastic corne…

If you’ve been wondering why so many of us are sad about the end of FireWire — despite it being well past its prime — you have to go back to its start. FireWire was first introduced with the “Blue and White” Power Mac G3 back in 1999. This is mine, a machine I used […]

Being an Expert Generalist should be treated as a first-class skill, one that can be assessed and taught.

I made a messaging app for my family and my family only.

While we know that many of you are reading Hackaday via our Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed, we suspect that most people on the street wouldn’t know that it underlies a lot of the modern…

Immutable distributions are slowly spreading across the Linux world– but should you care? Are they hacker friendly? What does “immutable” mean, anyway? Immutable means “not …

Vincent at koaning.io shows how animated SVGs may be better than animated GIFs. Animated SVGs are similar to an animated GIF but instead of showing moving images, it shows moving SVGs! The best par…

Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.

Eleven init systems enter, one init system leaves.

In the early 2000s, we used to write a lot of CGI programs. This was the primary way to make websites dynamic at the time. These CGI programs were usually written in Perl, but sometimes in C to increase performance. The CGI mechanism is conceptually simple but powerful. When the web server receives an incoming request handled by a CGI script (e.g. GET /~jakegold/cgi-bin/guestbook.cgi), it: Sets up environment variables containing request metadata (HTTP headers, query parameters, request method, etc.) Spawns a new process to execute the CGI program Passes the request body (if any) to the program via stdin Captures the program’s stdout as the HTTP response Sends any error output from stderr to the error log The CGI program reads the environment variables to understand the request, processes it, and writes an HTTP response to stdout, starting with headers.

Advanced cloud services are based on good hardware, decent software, and surrounding infrastructure that combines these both into solid solutions that can be provided as a business activity. Europe is good with operating the hardware. And surprisingly, we are also good with writing software. Much of the software used by the main cloud providers is based on open source, and lots of that open source is authored by European programmers. What we sorely lack here are providers of higher level cloud services, the kind that businesses clamor for.

today's experiment: setting up the POSSE method on my site, with a new "micro" blog category and federated posts

Why reviewing AI-written software will feel more like turning a key than reading a diff

This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.