Technology Commentary

Technology Commentary

Agent Skills
Agent Skills
A senior engineer’s job is mostly the parts that don’t show up in the diff. Specs. Tests. Reviews. Scope discipline. Refusing to ship what can’t be verified. AI coding agents skip those parts by default. Agent Skills is my attempt to make them not optional.
·oreilly.com·
Agent Skills
Open Source Ecosystems
Open Source Ecosystems
When open strategy meets private tactics
·oreilly.com·
Open Source Ecosystems
Tech In Plain Sight: The Mechanics Of String Trimmers
Tech In Plain Sight: The Mechanics Of String Trimmers
My old friend Jeff was always vocally upset that he didn’t come up with the idea of a string trimmer, commonly known as a Weed Eater or Weed Whacker. On the one hand, the idea is totally simp…
·hackaday.com·
Tech In Plain Sight: The Mechanics Of String Trimmers
The Email Of The Future In 1986
The Email Of The Future In 1986
With so many online messaging services to choose from it’s almost as though the daddy of them all, email, has faded into the background as something you only use for more formal contacts. But…
·hackaday.com·
The Email Of The Future In 1986
A History of Apple Cables, Interfaces & Connection Types
A History of Apple Cables, Interfaces & Connection Types
When it comes to connectors, cables, and interfaces, Apple has always been different. See which are the most common Apple connectors and how to use them.
·eshop.macsales.com·
A History of Apple Cables, Interfaces & Connection Types
Get on the Bus: Data Busses Used in Macs, 1984 to 2000 - Low End Mac
Get on the Bus: Data Busses Used in Macs, 1984 to 2000 - Low End Mac
A lot has changed since the first Macintosh. Apple no longer uses a phone connector for its keyboard or DE-9 serial ports for its mouse, printer, and modem. As others have recently pointed out, the only connector still in use from 1984 through today is the analog headphone jack. Macs have always had some form […]
·lowendmac.com·
Get on the Bus: Data Busses Used in Macs, 1984 to 2000 - Low End Mac
Mobile won the platform war on distribution, not capability
Mobile won the platform war on distribution, not capability
Mobile didn't beat the web on capability. It beat the web on the channel. A platform-war retrospective on distribution, store lock-in, and update friction.
·prashamhtrivedi.in·
Mobile won the platform war on distribution, not capability
John Battelle's Search Blog Is AI Inherently Anti-Social?
John Battelle's Search Blog Is AI Inherently Anti-Social?
All aboard ha ha ha ha ha ha ha AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI! – Crazy Train, Ozzy Osborne (with slight modifications) *** If you can remember the early web, when the tech was novel and b…
·battellemedia.com·
John Battelle's Search Blog Is AI Inherently Anti-Social?
NOSHIT.SOFTWARE
NOSHIT.SOFTWARE
No Shit Software — Spite-Driven Development. No bloat solutions for everyday problems.
·noshit.software·
NOSHIT.SOFTWARE
Kroxylicious
Kroxylicious
Network proxy framework for Apache Kafka
·kroxylicious.io·
Kroxylicious
Does my proxy look big in this cluster?
Does my proxy look big in this cluster?
Every good benchmarking story starts with a hunch. Mine was that Kroxylicious is cheap to run — I’d stake my career on it, in fact — but it turns out that “trust me, I wrote it” is not a widely accepted unit of measurement. People want proof. Sensibly.
·kroxylicious.io·
Does my proxy look big in this cluster?
Don't just 'quote' the AI
Don't just 'quote' the AI
If your reply is a wall of unedited LLM junk, you are the problem.
·dontquotetheai.com·
Don't just 'quote' the AI
- Introducing the Predictive Application
- Introducing the Predictive Application
A new architecture for B2B SaaS where every interaction is predictive by default. Three open-source demos: accounting, ERP, e-commerce.
·aito.ai·
- Introducing the Predictive Application
Affordances for me, but not for thee
Affordances for me, but not for thee
For years, people have tried hard to get websites to build accessibility affordances. Now developers are willingly building them for AI.
·werd.io·
Affordances for me, but not for thee
Predicting AI job exposure — Benedict Evans
Predicting AI job exposure — Benedict Evans
Many people would like to analyse which jobs, companies and industries are most exposed to AI, and assign scores, build charts, and map that against the progress of LLMs. I think this is mostly impossible: you don’t know how the jobs will change, you don’t know what else will change around this, an
·ben-evans.com·
Predicting AI job exposure — Benedict Evans
Reliability as a game of improving the odds
Reliability as a game of improving the odds
I’m a betting man; I just enjoy making bets, even when there are no stakes at all. Examples of my enjoyment of betting And when you talk about bets, you end up talking about odds. It turns ou…
·surfingcomplexity.blog·
Reliability as a game of improving the odds
The coming coordination calamity
The coming coordination calamity
We cut middle managers across the organization because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively. – Matthew Prince, How I Choose…
·surfingcomplexity.blog·
The coming coordination calamity
Form may follow function, but use doesn’t follow design
Form may follow function, but use doesn’t follow design
At this point, you have no doubt heard about GitHub’s availability woes over the past several months. In April, Mitchell Hashimoto (of Hashicorp fame) wrote a post about how he is moving his …
·surfingcomplexity.blog·
Form may follow function, but use doesn’t follow design
We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World
We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World
I have always wanted to own a Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Carlo Collodi, the Italian author whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He took his pen name from the Tuscan village where his mo…
·om.co·
We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World
find — Vivian Voss
find — Vivian Voss
Technical Beauty Episode 37. The reduction is conceptual: most Unix tools take flags, a verb and switches, but find takes an expression, a small query language. The arguments after the starting path are terms: primaries that test or act (-name matches a glob, -type f selects regular files, -mtime +30 means modified more than thirty days ago, -size +100M means larger than a hundred megabytes, -newer ref means changed more recently than a reference), and operators that combine them (terms next to each other are joined by an implicit logical AND, -o is OR, ! is NOT, escaped parentheses group). find walks the directory tree and evaluates the expression for each file, firing the actions where it is true. The surface is small (find . -type f -name '*.conf'; find /var/log -mtime +30 -delete; find . -size +100M -exec ls -lh {} +) and the -exec action has two forms: {} + batches matches into as few invocations as possible, {} ; runs once per file. For safe composition, find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 cmd terminates each filename with a null byte so spaces and newlines do not corrupt the pipeline, where the naive for f in $(ls) breaks. FreeBSD ships BSD find in base, BSD-licensed and POSIX-clean; GNU findutils (GPL) grew more primaries (-printf, regex variants) and is a pkg install away as gfind. Dick Haight wrote find, along with cpio and expr, for Version 7 Unix (1979), in the Unix Support Group rather than the research room; the researchers were faintly put off by the prefix-expression syntax and kept it because it was useful. Forty-seven years on the grammar is unchanged, and the modern descendant fd (David Peter, sharkdp, Rust, 2017, MIT and Apache licensed) reproduces the same idea: a small set of predicates over a tree walk. find is the rare Unix tool that is a little language pretending to be a command.
·vivianvoss.net·
find — Vivian Voss
Your code is worthless
Your code is worthless
Why "Vibe Coding" and vanity metrics are creating a technical debt bubble.
·nathanielfishel.substack.com·
Your code is worthless