This is absurdly cool: Puter compiled Firefox to WebAssembly such that the whole browser runs in another browser. Here's my blog, running in Firefox, running in WebAssembly, running in Chrome: …
John Battelle's Search Blog Have We Lost The Plot?
“Our lives have become dematerialized.” That phrase – from author Ian Bogost in a short piece in Wired – struck at the center of something I’ve been trying to verbaliz…
John Battelle's Search Blog The Rhymes of Tech History
It seems ridiculous now, but when I was a cub reporter covering the tech industry, our publication had an entire beat focused on word processing – and it was one of the most sought after assi…
John Battelle's Search Blog Again, What About the AI Ads?
Last month the FT reported that OpenAI was going all in on a “super app” that combines agents and coding, a move clearly designed to compete with Anthropic, which dominates the “g…
Lately I’ve been asking myself: what might artificial intelligence be good for besides answering questions and writing code? My answer is the latent spaces within AIs themselves will become a new medium for creativity. I will first explain what I … Continue reading →
This following statement is a lie: “I am telling the truth”. Okay, now that it’s just us meatbags, let’s get down to brass tacks. Captain Kirk’s logic bombs couldnR…
[Irving John Good] was at Trinity College, Oxford back in 1964. His paper, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” could have been a topic for today, as we deal wit…
Ceefax was the BBC’s broadcast teletext service that ran until 2012, providing text and rudimentary graphics that were broadcast invisibly with the TV signal. In order to get this teletext da…
One of the attractions of buying at the bottom end of the electronics market by mail order from China is that you never quite know what will come your way. Sometimes it’s a diamond in the rou…
When An Engineering Education Doesn’t Teach You How To Really Make Anything
In the sweltering temperatures of an unusually hot European heatwave, I found myself having a chat with a friend of mine from my university days. After discussing the health of his cat who had sol…
The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission.I cowrote a Google whitepaper
AI Enthusiasts Are in a Race Against Time, AI Skeptics Are in a Race Against Entropy
Both sides are grappling with a real existential threat, and both sides feel like they are screaming into the void. There is a way to close the gap and get everyone pulling in the same direction.
Jeff Ding's diffusion theory of the role of technology in great-power competition also applies to AI adoption, and it suggests that companies obsessed with the frontier might be optimizing for the wrong thing.
How I Stopped Designing Architecture and Started Writing a 3D Editor. Part 1
Today’s post is a bit different from my usual deep dives into mesh geometry. It’s a story about architecture – and about going back to the beginning. Think back to how you learned…
Using Flatpak To Run A 1996 Version Of The GIMP On Modern Linux
Although there’s probably no good reason to want to run image editing software from 1996 other than for nostalgia’s sake, if you ever wanted to run the GIMP version 0.54 from back when …
cpp-httplib is an HTTP/HTTPS library for C++. Just copy a single header file, httplib.h , and you're ready to go. When you need a quick HTTP server or client
Hate “The Algorithm?” RSS Is One of the Tools You’ve Been Looking For
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