Technology Commentary

As language models evolve to become more versatile and powerful, it seems that going small may be the best way to go.

Port numbers are the numerical identifiers that allow computers to communicate over the internet. They are assigned to different applications and protocols, such as web browsing, email, file transfer, and so on. But how did these port numbers come to be? Who decided which port number belongs to which service?

The lessons of yesteryear's OS are getting lost in translation

What the **** does that mean?

Read this article and find out what webhooks are and how they actually work. Also, explore the difference between the webhooks and APIs.

" As I recall, those two chips were fairly large. And fairly late -- to the marketplace. We had lots of issues with them. [...] Sometimes th...

Here’s the story of the lessons we learned on a journey to overcome DevOps challenges and set up ourselves for scalable growth.

by Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Traditionally, field guides focus on the natural world, offering descriptions of different species or families that help readers identify them. As this field guide is focused on social media, we will need a different locus than species or families for our taxonomy. We’ve settled on “logics.” We use “logic,” […]

We’ve still got time to make it better before it does

When working on Airbnb’s infra team, I struggled to grow from an L4 engineer to a senior/L5 eng. I came early, stayed late, and said yes to working on anything that needed help - I was as eager as a new grad could be.

Regular Expressions power many modern systems. But they are also very complex.

As unscrupulous AI companies crawl for more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.

I’ve known Larry Lessig for more than 25 years, and throughout that time, I’ve looked to him for wisdom – and a bit of pique – when it comes to understanding the complex int…

It’s now been 20 years of fighting with it sporadically and I still can’t figure out how to use launchctl to successfully automate tasks reliably on macOS. Such a frustrating piece of software.

On February 14th, it feels appropriate to express some love and appreciation for the many packaging efforts for our projects.

Don MacVittie explains we're in the 'dream world' of data - where the cloud-native stack realizes the dream of portable programming.

The vibe around generative AI is still one of a land rush since OpenAI unleased ChatGPT into the public sphere in late November 2022, with investors

I was inspired, after reading the excellent blog post Let Futures Be Futures, by the author's thought experiment of a language in which all functions are coroutines and this is used to express asynchr…

No, Never Do isn't a new loop type though it can be what happens when you ASS-U-ME a default value for a loop variable. These are some . . .

Unmitigated API growth can bring negative consequences that could exacerbate insecure coding practices.

DoorDash introduces a fractional factorial design framework for business policy experiments that have demonstrated improvements in experimentation velocity.

Thoughts about the outcome of the NYT versus OpenAI copyright lawsuit

The SSH port is 22. This is the story of how it got that port number. And practical configuration instructions.

The biggest source of waste is not low performers or having too many employees. The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists. The number of skilled pragmatists in any given company is much larger than people realize and, therefore, represents a HUGE opportunity. But almost by definition, they are less visible.

Assortment of technology startup infrastructure recommendations

If you handed me the iPhone 16 Pro today and told me that I needed to have a written review of it done by tomorrow that helped people understand if it was a phone worth upgrading to, I could do it no problem. I’d have to leave out battery