Thinking again about new concepts of agency in a genAI reality. And notions from last week’s news.

Jason Kottke: Walmart Is Switching to Electronic Price Tags Walmart is switching to electronic price tags that “allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds”. No one wants this!! No one wants surge pricing on ice cream and price increases on items already in your cart. The

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash Earlier this morning while reading The Wall Street Journal, I learned that Bruce Bastian, co-creator of WordPerfect, the word-processing software, had died at 76. …

There is a 1895 French short film called L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station in English) where a stationary camera was set up on a tripod and filmed a train, well, coming into the station. The story goes that

Apple’s App Intents slide from WWDC 2024. It’s going to be years before we can really see the impact of Apple embracing systemwide AI features via Apple Intelligence. Many of the featur…

Jason Snell on Six Colors: Preparing for the Era of Orchestrated Apps When everything is orchestrated properly, all the capabilities of all your apps are put into a big soup, and the AI system at the heart of your device can choose the right capabilities to do what you need

This blog exists on the public web, and that means you as a user have a lot of control over both how you consume my work and what you can do with it. I publish to the web, so I suppose the canonical way of reading my work is to

This post was originally triggered – and I choose that word carefully – by a recent experience on a cloud cost-optimisation project. These experiences prompted me to consider how things…

Eleventh in the News Commons series. all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in U…

—is not this: By now we take it for granted. To live your digital life on the Internet, you need accounts. Lots of them. You need one for every website that provides a service, plus your Mac or Win…

Last month, I had the unadulterated pleasure of presenting “No Observability Without Theory” at Monitorama 2024. If you’ve never been to Monitorama, I can’t recommend it eno…

On My Mind On the eve of our Independence Day, I can’t help but think of our current political challenges. It doesn’t matter which side of the political aisle you walk. After all, the reality of ou…

Small improvements can lead to big changes

Open your eyes and see the truth. The Eizo FlexScan EV2730Q is about to change everything you know about monitors.

X11R1 on Sun Techfury90 CC0 I apologize that this post is a little late. On 19 th June the X Window System celebrated its 40th birthday. W...

Serverless was a big deal for a hot minute, but now it seems old-fashioned, even though its basic elements, agility and scalability, are still relevant.

Fueled by vibes and with stars in their eyes, enterprises are not taking the time to understand generative AI’s limitations and to create their own rules-based approach.

AI-powered NPCs that don’t need a script could make games—and other worlds—deeply immersive.

Unlike many tools for building generative AI apps, the Podman AI Lab was built specifically for developers, rather than data scientists.

Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web. Those are different ...

For a long time there were only two essential things that I carried everywhere: keys and wallet. Two was a manageable number of objects that I had to remember to put into pockets, and two was a man…

One Ruby thing I never noticed before

For a long time I've wanted to spend some time writing down my recollections of what I did on the TA graphics engine.  It was a weird time, ...

At WWDC24, Apple announced Private Cloud Compute. Relying heavily on crytographic attestation, it raises the bar on cloud privacy and security.

The tech is new, and people are still unfamiliar.

Scaling will run out. The question is when.