Technology Commentary

What research papers don’t teach you about consistent hashing, gossip protocols, and surviving node failures at 2am

Kicking off a little side project for automatically discovering content through blog post feeds and syncing to atproto and standard.site.

When Kubernetes first came onto the scene, it was a major turning point, a revision of the infrastructure and operations space that transformed the way

By now we’re all used to single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi Zero, but it’s likely we’ve all been frustrated at times by the number of support components required to u…

We’ve been talking a bunch of home automation on the Podcast lately, and this week, in the Mailbag segment, a reader asked us about our setups. Neither Kristina nor I are poster children for the ho…

About 3 weeks ago, Leo Laporte and I recorded the first episode of what will be a new monthly show on the TWiT network. Naming things is hard, and we almost voted on the name, like we did for Stack Overflow, but we quickly landed on Off By One with

Exploring how compilers lower ordinary loops into explicit data-parallel kernels.

npm, Yarn, pnpm, Bun, and Deno are not interchangeable install tools. They encode different assumptions about dependency layout, compatibility, reproducibility, and developer speed.

CISA and FBI warn against memory-unsafe languages

Most “risks in software development” lists are project-manager checklists. The real risk is knowing the blast radius of each change, and letting it set how

Naming in software goes way beyond any aesthetics. Good naming minimizes reconstruction work. Here is the style and habits that I've picked up.

Applying Alexis King's parse-don't-validate principle in TypeScript, where the type system fights back just enough to be annoying.

The early web was clunky, magical, and personal

A popular way to explain how current LLMs work is to say that “all” they do is predict the next most likely word in a sentence. From one perspective, this is correct. Trained on all human language, the LLMs distilled … Continue reading →

Perhaps sometimes we really should just phone it in

By Christos G. Bampis, Zhi Li, Kyle Swanson, Nil Fons Miret and Pavan Madhusudanarao

Mozilla is trying to innovate and bring new features to Firefox, but the browser continues to lose users. Despite these concerning market trends, the company is actively...

You have to be a pretty big aviation nerd to know about [Willard Ray Custer] and his channel wing concept, but if you are, you’ll be giddy to hear about the semicircular profile of the HopFly…

Yesterday Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published a fascinating essay that reads as both a rebuke to frontier AI model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as a call to arms to the entire bus…

In this short post I explain how the "failsafe" production auth mechanism is designed for resources served in a CAP context.

How I lost patience with ‘AI’ agents

On designing finger-friendly interactions

How American Express uses cell-based architecture to deliver resilient, low-latency payments at global scale.

Once I wrote users.select { |u| u.admin? }.map(&:email) and realized I’d written Lisp.

An introduction into the memory-layout compatible data types in iceoryx2

PDF and SVG both support embedded scripting, and can respond to clicks, keystrokes, etc. Almost nobody uses it (at least for PDF), and many viewers skip it entirely.