Technology Commentary

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

Just because A.I. is revolutionizing coding, doesn’t mean it will automatically revolutionize our apps.

If enough AI datacenters irreversibly stopped working tomorrow, you or I might be fine, but a gargantuan number of software shops would be incapacitated.

and hurt people hurt people

Counterprogramming premature ontological closure in conceptualizing AI

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So I came across another blog post shitting on YAML again. “The Norway Problem”, the author proudly repeats while posting falsehoods. So I looked into it myself, and here’s what I found.