Technology Commentary

An overview of the challenges in assigning field weights in a library catalog. This uses the example of a book about Hillbilly Elegy to explain demonstrate where challenges arise.

Personal blog of Marc Coquand.

Building your own entitlement service is key for supporting a modern, flexible SaaS product. Whenever I read about billing systems, there’s a lot of talk about the billing aspects but not so much around entitlements. In the spirit of sharing, and since I haven’t found any good articles about it, I decided to tell you […]

I feel like the tech industry is currently in the midst of the most bizarre cognitive dissonance I've ever seen — more so than the metaverse, even — as company after company simply lies about their intentions and the power of AI.  I get it. Everybody wants something to be excited about.

What is Crossplane? If you don’t already know, Crossplane is billed as an: Open source, CNCF project built on the foundation of Kubernetes to orchestrate anything. Encapsulate polic…

By bridging the gap between dev and ops teams with automated resource specifications, you can create a more harmonious and efficient deployment process.

Whether you’re sitting on a goldmine of data, looking to make things run smoother, or itching to share your top ideas, APIs are your ticket to a more connected, more profitable world.

I started programming in GW-BASIC on an IBM PC clone running MS-DOS. Back then, many so-called home and business computers came bundled with a BASIC interpreter, mostly made by or licensed from Microsoft. They all looked similar. You were greeted by a screen with a READY or OK prompt and a blinking cursor waiting for your input. The “screen editor” and interpreter were all in one in the true sense of the word – they weren’t bolted together like the separate text editors and interpreters/compilers we use these days…

We’ve often thought that while going to the moon in the 1960s was audacious, it was just the flashiest of many audacious feats attempted and accomplished in the 20th century. Imagine, for a m…

“Artisanal” refers to something made in a traditional way by hand by a skilled craftsman, requiring both time and expertise.

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Security issues resulting from the rapid advancement of AI-generated code remain unsolved and not fully understood.

Beyond just getting more done, automation provides teams with powerful ways to reduce risk across various workflows and processes.

For most people, you turn on your computer, and it starts the operating system. However, the reality is much more complex as [Thasso] discovered. Even modern x86 chips start in 16-bit real mode and…

Why do we keep building visual programming environments? Why do we never use them? What should we do instead?

Computer scientist Lance Fortnow writes that by embracing the computations that surround us, we can begin to understand and tame our seemingly random world.

Now that our 1987 Canon Cat is refurbished and ready to go another nine innings or so, it's time to get into the operating system and pull ...

If you are of a certain vintage, this image is burned indelibly somewhere in your posterior parietal complex: Oh, my old friend. How it’s been a long time. Cultural Significance For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moiré Error from Doom? Well, no. You are looking at (part of) the boot up screen for the X Window System, specifically the pattern it uses as the background of the root window.

It can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong

A physical directory for exploring the vast poetic web

This article outlines exactly how autonomous agents transform the process of adding, configuring, and managing API endpoints.

Programming book reviews, programming tutorials,programming news, C#, Ruby, Python,C, C++, PHP, Visual Basic, Computer book reviews, computer history, programming history, joomla, theory, spreadsheets and more.

A super silly idea

Julian Chokkattu writing for Wired: Nothing’s CMF Devices Prove Yet Again Cheap Doesn't Have to Mean Boring What's most remarkable about these devices is the price. I have tested cheap and flagship smartphones for nearly a decade, and after setting up the CMF Phone 1, I was pretty surprised

“Be even more suspicious […] of all those who employ the term ‘we’ or ‘us’ without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that ‘we’ are all agreed on ‘our’ interests and identity. […] Always ask who this ‘we’ is” – Christopher Hitchens in Letters to a Young Contrarian. It is so easy to write “Europe must invest more in AI”, but it is a red flag that reveals sloppy thinking on two levels.

Are you using AI as a crutch?