Technology Commentary

This is how I remember the crazy journey that web development has gone through in the past few years. Or rather this is *my* journey being a web developer. So I will omit events. I may mess up the timeline. This whole article may not be of any use to you. But for me, putting all the history I know into writing helped me appreciate how much things stay the same no matter how much they change.

Intelligence, of a sort, is going to be all around us

At Reason, Christian Britschgi (“Do Not Under Any Circumstances Nationalize Greyhound”) celebrates America’s “extensive network of private, for-profit (and profitable) intercity bus services primarily serving lower-income people” as “a great example of how the free market can provide an essential service without public subsidies.” There are a lot of questionable, or outright ahistorical, assumptions implicit...

How digital wallets work, and how payment costs drive a lot of product decisions inside and around them.

AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a "kind of useful" tool justifies the harm.

A year ago in Feed Overload I wrote: 99% of all microblog (and chat) content is ephemeral by design, meant for a specific moment in ti...

It's been a year since I wrote about Weird web pages as a prospective catalyst for the reclamation of my digital identity. There's been s...

The popular YouTuber’s scathing review of the AI gadget should be a warning to Apple ahead of its iOS 18 release next month.

An ugly clock radio from the 1960s is re-imagined using a Raspberry Pi. By Alan Boris.

We always can use more tools for FPGA debugging, and the Manta project by [Fischer Moseley] delivers without a shadow of a doubt. Manta lets you add a debug and data transfer channel between your c…

Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

The Great Untangling: Postamble – An incomplete map of the Commune and Weird-aligned web of makers. There are already many awesome proje...

I plan to write the Commune version of what I already wrote for a former employer: https://blog.meilisearch.com/meilisearch-open-business...

The Great Untangling: Part 3 – Materializing the web from first principles. Right now I use GitHub as my go-to profile page: github.com/...

The Great Untangling: Part 2 – Paving a path to the new frontier. I've been feeling a growing sense of anxiety related to account lockou...

The Great Untangling: Part 1 – Shaping the foundations. To sufficiently express my identity as a netizen I require: global group messag...

This post is the preamble of a 5-part series called The Great Untangling. The following four posts have already been published and are li...

I've previously written about the multi-app platform of my dreams as a community professional: The Community OS stack. While undeniably ...

By Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Content moderation is at the heart of operating a social media platform—removing, promoting, demoting, and labeling content factors significantly into users’ experiences. It’s inevitably controversial, difficult to do accurately and safely, and a focal point for external pressure. A young man in Manila, Philippines, explains his work as a […]

Infrastructure teams will benefit hugely from increases in standardization and automation — and no more ticket ops.

There’s an article in the Register this week about Bruce Perens’ “Post-Open Zero Cost Licence”. In brief, Perens is aiming to try to fix one problem that some people have wi…

The problem that’s bugging me about the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin dunk-fests: A seeming discouragement of hardware innovation.

If you ever wondered just what it takes to build a modern device like a phone, you should have come to last year’s Supercon and talked with [Jose Angel Torres]. He’s an engineer whose p…

The energy sector is undergoing a monumental shift as the power grid struggles to accommodate growing demand and the complexity of modern energy systems.

Software doyen hopes to achieve a third impossible thing

If we shift our observability focus to the left, we can address issues in CI/CD before they escalate, as described by two Grafana engineers.