Statements and Expressions
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
A brief history of web development. And why your framework doesn't matter.
This is how I remember the crazy journey that web development has gone through in the past few years. Or rather this is *my* journey being a web developer. So I will omit events. I may mess up the timeline. This whole article may not be of any use to you. But for me, putting all the history I know into writing helped me appreciate how much things stay the same no matter how much they change.
Freeing the chatbot
Intelligence, of a sort, is going to be all around us
Christian Britschgi’s Lack of Object Permanence
At Reason, Christian Britschgi (“Do Not Under Any Circumstances Nationalize Greyhound”) celebrates America’s “extensive network of private, for-profit (and profitable) intercity bus services primarily serving lower-income people” as “a great example of how the free market can provide an essential service without public subsidies.” There are a lot of questionable, or outright ahistorical, assumptions implicit...
The business of wallets
How digital wallets work, and how payment costs drive a lot of product decisions inside and around them.
AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?
AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a "kind of useful" tool justifies the harm.
Evergreen content gardens — Open Indie
A year ago in Feed Overload I wrote: 99% of all microblog (and chat) content is ephemeral by design, meant for a specific moment in ti...
Weird netizens — Open Indie
It's been a year since I wrote about Weird web pages as a prospective catalyst for the reclamation of my digital identity. There's been s...
Marques Brownlee just eviscerated the Rabbit R1. Here's why Apple should pay attention
The popular YouTuber’s scathing review of the AI gadget should be a warning to Apple ahead of its iOS 18 release next month.
1960s Clock Radio Pi Makeover
An ugly clock radio from the 1960s is re-imagined using a Raspberry Pi. By Alan Boris.
Manta Documentation
Manta: An Open On-FPGA Debug Interface
We always can use more tools for FPGA debugging, and the Manta project by [Fischer Moseley] delivers without a shadow of a doubt. Manta lets you add a debug and data transfer channel between your c…
We can have a different web
Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.
Friends — Open Indie
The Great Untangling: Postamble – An incomplete map of the Commune and Weird-aligned web of makers. There are already many awesome proje...
Commune Inc. — Open Indie
I plan to write the Commune version of what I already wrote for a former employer: https://blog.meilisearch.com/meilisearch-open-business...
Weird web pages — Open Indie
The Great Untangling: Part 3 – Materializing the web from first principles. Right now I use GitHub as my go-to profile page: github.com/...
Emancipatory migrations — Open Indie
The Great Untangling: Part 2 – Paving a path to the new frontier. I've been feeling a growing sense of anxiety related to account lockou...
Community OS stack — Open Indie
The Great Untangling: Part 1 – Shaping the foundations. To sufficiently express my identity as a netizen I require: global group messag...
Reclaiming my digital identity — Open Indie
This post is the preamble of a 5-part series called The Great Untangling. The following four posts have already been published and are li...
Assembling Community OS — Open Indie
I've previously written about the multi-app platform of my dreams as a community professional: The Community OS stack. While undeniably ...
Content Moderation - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
By Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Content moderation is at the heart of operating a social media platform—removing, promoting, demoting, and labeling content factors significantly into users’ experiences. It’s inevitably controversial, difficult to do accurately and safely, and a focal point for external pressure. A young man in Manila, Philippines, explains his work as a […]
This Is Why Infra Teams Should Care About Platform Engineering
Infrastructure teams will benefit hugely from increases in standardization and automation — and no more ticket ops.
Design organisations not licences
There’s an article in the Register this week about Bruce Perens’ “Post-Open Zero Cost Licence”. In brief, Perens is aiming to try to fix one problem that some people have wi…
Post-Rabbit R1, Should Everything “Just Be An App”?
The problem that’s bugging me about the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin dunk-fests: A seeming discouragement of hardware innovation.
Supercon 2023: Jose Angel Torres On Building A Junkyard Secure Phone
If you ever wondered just what it takes to build a modern device like a phone, you should have come to last year’s Supercon and talked with [Jose Angel Torres]. He’s an engineer whose p…
Building The Power Grid Of Tomorrow
The energy sector is undergoing a monumental shift as the power grid struggles to accommodate growing demand and the complexity of modern energy systems.
Bruce Perens proposes draft Post-Open Zero Cost License
Software doyen hopes to achieve a third impossible thing
Why SQLite Uses Bytecode
Bytecode VMs in surprising places
autoconf makes me think we stopped evolving too soon