A follow-up to Donut Lab: a study in deception in venture-backed technology, published 25 March 2026. If you haven’t read it already, go and have a look (please do, it’ll make what’s below make a lot more sense) then come back here. There is a German company called CT Coatings whose patent portfolio covers screen-printed […]

The 747 shaped how I understood distance, family, and wonder. As it disappears from the skies, I'm trying to figure out what to hand my son instead.

The way we write code is changing. How do we retain control over the integrity of the things we build?

This is something that I’ve been thinking about for awhile. How do you think of the Internet? Is it social for you? A source of information? A simple tool? A burden? A toxic place filled with assholes? All of the above? For me, I have a hard time narrowing down what the Internet even is. Oh, I know the technologies behind it, the hardware and software that are actually “The Internet”, but like many things that have spawned from the human condition, The Internet has taken on a much more transcendent place in our world. It is less abuot the technology, and how you experience the technology.

One of the first commands I learned to use on a PC was the tree command in DOS. This was a command that let me see what files and subdirectories were present in a particular directory in a structured, visual way. The tree-like nature coming from the way folders were represented as branches and files as leaves on that branch. At the time, it was just a fun and useful way to visualise the files on the PC. However, I still find myself wanting to represent file and folder structures in documentation that I write and information that I provide to others. Sometimes this isn’t even on a PC, but rather on my Mac. Fortunately, there’s a way to reproduce this functionality, and furthermore, I can have it right at my fingertips thanks to the power of Keyboard Maestro.

My small space on the internet where I share some local happenings, my projects, some of my photography, perhaps some commentary on the absurdity of the world...

Most people, when asked why they do what they do, lie. This isn’t because they’re malicious but it’s because the honest justification for a career is rarely noble. It’s usually a combination of a decent paycheck, tolerable hours, and whatever neurosis you were nursing at that

My twenty-five-year-old Intel Play QX3 microscope had no software that would run on a modern Mac, so I used Claude to write one in a morning. When an app takes a morning instead of two weeks, software can stop being a product and start being personal.

My own photo. Not AI. Everything is real, including the ?. I posted what follows more than twenty-six years ago on Searls.com, which now brings up a danger warning because it’s still http and…

A crude visual representation of what Jefferson called “the combustive power” of an idea, explained below. Until Linux Journal hired me in 1996, no publication—tech or otherwise—would e…

Routers for the Internet of Stuff We now have an internet of stuff, at the heart of which are the distribution and fulfillment centers that have been replacing farmland and former broadcast transmi…

Elemental differences Look up graphite, graphite company, or graphite the company, and you’ll mostly get geological and industrial answers. (Unless, of course, your search history suggests th…

Newsletters turned into daily newspapers chasing recency. Magazines, with editors, themes and a slower cadence, are better products.

The AI brain worms have been spreading and I don't have a solution, I just want to get off this ride.

Although everyone has their own reasons for exploring a new hobby, one of the driving factors behind the popularity of Meshtastic and MeshCore has been the incredible accessibility offered by off-g…

My guest on this past week’s Live with Tim O’Reilly was Emmanuel Ameisen, a researcher on Anthropic’s AI interpretability team. I’d heard him give a short talk

The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission.A software factory harnesses

AI's moderate middle between vaporware and jobless future; an antidote to learned helplessness; and policy solutions for human obsolescence

Using tools properly takes skill, and this goes for software tools as well as hardware. You don’t just buy a paintbrush and on day one paint the Mona Lisa. Similarly, you can’t just open up a CAD p…

The history of science — and of progress — is a series of benefits that are direct results of new tools. A large part of our current longevity is due to the invention of the microscope. This new way of … Continue reading →

I made some notes on the nature of the training of LLMs, and about whether we as a society should consider the material used to train them as a fair use of that material. I believe it would be best … Continue reading →

an adventure in image processing and taking very wide photographs (blog post; 4,600 words)

We gave Strix a domain. In 25 minutes, it found a live token with admin access to Baseten's product, deployment, and CLI repos in a public Docker image.

git worktrees are no longer a niche tool, but they still come with some gotchas — like the fact that, in a worktree, .git is a file, not a directory.

TIN is a fast, full-featured, full-text search index for Postgres

You’ve noticed it, but maybe you’ve not thought too hard about it. Over the past few months, your Google search habits have changed. What was once mostly call and response –  quer…

a short post