Heidegger thinks about tools like so: a tool is something (a thing that has being in the Heideggerian sense, not necessarily an object) that represents an extension of human capabilities in some way. A tool is thus any kind of thing that *lets you do something you wouldn't otherwise have been able to*. The important (for us) conceptual leap here is that when a tool works well, or isn't broken, it develops what Heidegger describes as a "ready-to-hand" quality: the tool fades into the background as a kind of human-tool gestalt of a human with the additional capability afforded by a tool forms. As a simple example of this, consider eating with a fork. When the fork is well-designed and not broken, *you don't explicitly have "I am using a fork" in your conscious mind while eating dinner*.

Counting tokens is better than nothing. It’s also not the discipline.

A contrarian view

For a decade, identity and access management meant one thing: governing the humans who log in. Employee joins, gets provisioned, gets a manager, gets a

There was a brief window where AI agent security felt like a future problem. Organizations deployed copilots, coding assistants, and autonomous workflows on

To keep pace with modern business, data strategy is shifting toward more autonomous real-time systems that deliver intelligence at the moment decisions are

There are so many great places to learn about out there on the internet, and one of those great places is the legendary Linux Kernel. If you stumble around s...

multilinear map on some combination of scalars, vectors, covectors, and tensors

programming language

With their new company, General Magic, the creators of the Macintosh aim to revolutionize computing - again.

When people in Silicon Valley recall General Magic, they generally remember it as a tragedy. Originally an internal project at Apple, General Magic proposed making personal communicators that would let individuals get messages, perform computing functions and take calls remotely. In other words, a smart phone. Then Apple CEO John Sculley spun [...]

AI makes projects with weak engineering culture fail much faster.

Interview essays on how writers write— their workflows, note-taking, and storytelling, distilled through my lens. Show your workflow.

real-time operating system

TRON was an ambitious project to say the least, and after a good start, it suddenly came to a screeching halt.

Dealing with AI coding and swinging from feeling on top of the world building things faster to crashing and feeling like everything is pointless

It's time to stop drawing user interfaces with punctuation characters. Native UI is a completely solved problem.

You’ve almost certainly encountered Conventional Commits before. It may have reared its ugly head in the changelog of an open source project you’ve used. It may have been the enforced commit format for an open source project you contributed to. A lot of people swear by it. I swear at it. Even though it is used by a large number of popular open source projects, Conventional Commits is an actively bad standard which encourages focus on the wrong things and fails to deliver on its promises.

When everyone is empowered with the same magic, is there any magic to be had? That’s one of the biggest wquestins you must ask yourself today – and it’s what I wrote into the Foreword of my latest book. Two weeks ago I retired a ten-year streak of Daily Inspiration posts. This week I want […]

“Data is the new oil.” It’s the metaphor that won’t die, though for the next little bit, I’ll do my part to advance its expiration date. Yesterday came news that Googl…

A quick note about future of computing and indieweb. It's about a 2 minute read.

The nation's second-largest library system just got a colossus of a book sorter, with conveyor belts and robot arms toiling away to bring you the item you want.

Some projects seem too good to be true until you dig into it and find the secret magic that makes it all work. Take Paper Tunes by [Makestreame], a project which purports to store a song on a singl…

A friend from my old hackerspace was in grad school for electrical engineering. He had a professor who would ask, when something went wrong with a student project, “Have you fully characterized the…

There are plenty of stories about inventors who see a problem and decide they can do better. But Van Phillips had a little more motivation than most. The problem was his own leg. In 1976, Phillips …

When we think about security threats, we generally imagine them coming from far away across the wider internet. But what if the connection between you and your ISP was the target? [Rithwik Jayasimh…

One of the great things of Linux as an ecosystem is that there is so much choice. Yet this is also its greatest weakness, as unlike on MacOS and Windows this means that simple questions often do no…