Technology Commentary

Posted on Wednesday 20 Mar 2024. 2,867 words, 12 links. By Matt Webb.

Is it a lifestyle?

Neatnik Notes

With the performance of modern CPU cores plateauing recently, the main performance gains are with multiple cores and multithreaded applications. Typically, a fast GPU is only so mind-bogglingly qui…

Many hackers have familiar sayings in their heads, such as “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and KISS (Keep it simple, stupid). Those of us who have been in the field for so…

Am feeling three distinct types of model emerge as I model the domain of bookings and appointments. The first two are well established, the third a pleasant surprise Business Logic Model: This mode...

Hardware hackers come from a variety of backgrounds, but among us there remains a significant number whose taste for making things was forged through growing up in a farm environment. If that&#8217…

[sdz] of Vogons forum brings us an unexpected device for the 21st century – a 3dfx Voodoo 4 card in MXM format, equipped with 64MB of RAM. This isn’t just a showpiece – this card …

The left hand, right hand, and jazz hands of the AI gods

Thoughts on the misadventure of udm14, or what I hope to gain from successfully reviving the single-serving site for a couple of weeks.

Yes, there's a PID 0! An explanation of what it is, and a quick walk through linux early boot code.

How do we build mass-market products that change the world around a technology that gets things ‘wrong’? What does wrong mean, and how is that useful?

Ada Lovelace’s wisdom about the first general-purpose computer can be found buried in the appendix of another paper

It turns out that the Spotify Car Thing is already open source, but you can't use it for anything else for a different reason.

If you were around when the IBM PC rolled out, two things probably caught you by surprise. One is that the company that made the Selectric put that ridiculous keyboard on it. The other was that it …

It was the dawn of the personal computer age, a time when Apple IIs, Tandy TRS-80s, Commodore PETs, the Atari 400 and 800, and others had made significant inroads into schools and people’s ho…

Don Estridge broke all of Big Blue's rules to create the home computer. The company would never forgive him for it.

We’ve read a number of histories of the IBM PC and lived through that time, too. But we enjoyed [Gareth Edwards’] perspective in a post entitled The Misfit who Built the IBM PC. The tit…

Four ginever glasses sit on a mirrored table at Distilleerderij’t Nieuwe Diep in Fevopark, Amsterdam. Only one manufacturer makes these glasses, and it’s closing. The distillery stockpi…

We use Req, but the internet speaks curl. CurlReq is the go-between.

GraphQL is an incredible piece of technology that has captured a lot of mindshare since I first started slinging it in production in 2018. You won’t have to ...

Dogpile is a metasearch engine for information on the World Wide Web that fetches results from Google, Yahoo!, Yandex, Bing, and other popular search engines, including those from audio and video content providers such as Yahoo!.

A multi engine semi-parallel search interface automatically searching 20+ search engines 3 at a time. Allows for continued searching options and Boolean/proximity operators.

Writing code without having some way to easily organize sets of variables or data would be a real bother. Even if in the end you could totally do all of the shuffling of bits and allocating in memo…

I don’t like HDMI. Despite it being a pretty popular interface, I find crucial parts of it to be alien to what hackers stand for. The way I see it, it manages to be proprietary while bringing…

A dozen years ago (how can it be so long? How can he have been so prescient?) Anil Dash wrote “the Web We Lost“. This isn’t our web today. We’ve lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we’ve abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To […]

The latest artificial intelligence use cases appear to be built specifically for managers and executives, and literally nobody else. That’s a problem.

How to navigate the "half-life of knowledge" and create a fulfilling career through focusing on fundamentals and building a personal vision.