Technology Commentary

What the PNR locator on your boarding pass actually contains, and why the fare calculation line on your e-ticket is written in a currency that does not exist.

This week, we discuss how security gets sold to execs, where agentic coding and security collide, and Cloudflare vs. Datadog's diverging paths. Plus, Coté weighs in on sugar cookies.

Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

Until recently, across a half-century perhaps fewer than a dozen people had ever had the opportunity to read Dennis Ritchie’s dissertation—the intellectual and biographical fork-in-the-road separating an academic career in computer science from the one at Bell Labs leading to C and Unix. Why?

yes, as in singular one. Back in April 2026 Anthropic caused a lot of media noise when they concluded that their new AI model Mythos is dangerously good at finding security flaws in source code. Apparently Mythos was so good at this that Anthropic would not release this model to the public yet but instead … Continue reading Mythos finds a curl vulnerability →

Small gotchas and learnings from crawling technical documentation. Saving documentation locally is helpful in your software engineering projects - for example, for local AI to offer your coding agents to use the documentation of software you use, or just to do further processing on it.

The more I look at how we actually build systems now, the more it looks like Terraform is dead. Not “declining.” Not “evolving.” Dead. What’s left is just inertia. What Terraform Actually Solved Terraform solved a very specific problem: how do we make infrastructure deterministic, reviewable, and repeatable? The answer was a DSL, a plan step, and a state file. It worked, and it still works. But it also forced an awkward compromise. Humans ended up describing intent in a language that was never designed to express it, and HCL is not how anyone actually thinks about systems.

"People are tired of AI slop and misinformation," writes Hank Green. "The social contract of our digital age is broken."

For the last decade, fast-to-ship beat fast-to-run. Not anymore.

When most people think about vacuum tubes, they picture big glass bottles glowing inside antique radios or early computers. History often treats tubes as a dead-end technology that was suddenly swe…

on building free public infrastructure for enjoyment

"If there were a dictator of the internet who intentionally set out to destroy your ability to get accurate information, the result would look a lot like what’s already on your screen. But why?"

I'm a blabby nerd that lives in the high desert...

The most widely adopted computer language in history, COBOL is now causing a host of problems. It's also dangerously difficult to remove.

A full 3D game -- renderer, physics engine, scripting runtime -- exported to WebAssembly is 35MB. The default Node.js Docker image is hundreds of MB, pulled 19 million times last week.

The AI boom that keeps on giving.

Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a few faces turning around toward us, rolling their eyes ever so slightly before returning to their previous conversation. Yes, this question again.

Posted on Friday 8 May 2026. 417 words, 2 links. By Matt Webb.

Software can sometimes experience unusual malfunctions and cease working. The code runs perfectly. Every feature works. Nothing breaks. But Monday morning you log in and half your users vanished. Next month, half of what's left. Six months later? Ghost town. The Psychology Behind Product Abandonment People get itchy. That app you couldn't live without last

You’ve probably heard it’s futile, but that hasn’t stopped plenty from trying to reinvent the wheel—some successfully, shockingly.

Ted Turner died just as GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen made an audacious eBay bid. Turner invented the playbook that Cohen’s currently exploiting way back in the ’80s.

Be wary of the cool new AI tools Anthropic and OpenAI are throwing—because you may get stuck with the bill. (BTW, did you know there are cheaper options?)

Everyone is adopting AI coding tools. Engineers are writing code faster than ever. But are organizations actually delivering value faster? That’s not

The most honest test of any model is whether you'd actually use it yourself

Every data leader has a version of this story. A regulatory audit surfaces a metric that doesn't match across systems. A board member catches conflicting

My friend and I have a game where we talk about what we'd do if we were rich. Not rich like 'paid off the mortgage' rich. Rich like a man who owns a submarine he's never been inside. Rich like a man whose third wife has a skincare line. Tech-titan