Technology Commentary

So the “Future of Life Institute” just published an open letter arguing for the “AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4“. That letter has (at the point of me writing this) 1123 signatures, some of them by very respected and knowledgable people. Which […]

Making big public statements is always fun and people who think themselves to be important love doing it as a way of trying to influence public opinion and/or politics. They are a way for institutions and individuals to organize and try to shine some light onto important issues. We’ve seen many such things in the […]

I recently became a parent for the first time, as my wife and I welcomed a beautiful baby boy into our lives in January of this year.

A first-principles guide to process-based concurrency — what makes BEAM different, how OTP encodes resilience, and why everyone keeps reinventing it.

Lessons learned from 14 years of engineering at Google, focusing on what truly matters beyond just writing great code.

Two years ago, I wrote about managing twenty microservices at Qantas with a small team. The problem was keeping services in sync, coordinating changes across system boundaries, fighting the entropy of a codebase that grew faster than our ability to reason about it. Many years before my time, someone had

Authors: Harshad Sane, Andrew Halaney

Example of using bash shell parameter expansions. A little script that compiles a LaTeX file to an SVG file.

We locate web content using special addresses called URLs. We are all familiar with addresses like https://google.com. Sometimes, URLs can get long and they can become difficult to read. Thus, we might be tempted to format them like so in HTML using newline and tab characters, like so: a href="https://lemire.me/blog/2026/02/21/ how-fast-do-browsers-correct-utf-16-strings/"my blog post/a It will … Continue reading You can use newline characters in URLs

Discover how physical AI foundation models are moving beyond chatbots to power autonomous robotics in the real world. Explore LBM, VLA, and edge computing.

This post is an expanded version of a presentation I gave at the recent WebAssembly CG meeting in Munich. WebAssembly has come a long way since its first release in 2017. The 1.0 version of WebAssembly was already a great fit for low-level languages like C and C++, and immediately enabled many new kinds of applications to efficiently target the web.

News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.

What does a 99.9% SLA really mean? Learn how to read the fine print of availability commitments, with real-world examples from AWS, Google Cloud, and Mailjet.

A group of well-known open source programmers and a VC have launched the Open Source Endowment. They hope this new method will provide funding for good.

How OPA transformed go/no-go releases from subjective meetings into automated, auditable, policy-driven decisions in the CI/CD pipeline.

Politicians fixate on the global race for technological supremacy between US and China. They debate geopolitical implications of chip exports, latest model releases from each country, and military applications of AI. Someday, they believe, we might see advancements in AI tip the scales in a superpower conflict. But the most important arms race of the 21st century is already happening elsewhere and, while AI is definitely the weapon of choice, combatants are distributed across dozens of domains. Academic journals are flooded with AI-generated papers, and are turning to AI to help review submissions. Brazil’s ...

An introduction to the Human web, and how one can be a part of it.

It's not my favorite language

I spent most of my twenties trying to eliminate uncertainty from my life. Does that make it ironic that I am now promoting systems thinking in network automation? At first, network engineering was perfect for smothering myself in certainty. Protocols are deterministic. Standards are concrete. BGP does what BGP does, every time, according to rules that

It was only once I read Andrew Yang's "The End of the Office" post the other day that I realized how few political leaders are seriously grappling…

The first time I visited GitHub's HQ2 in 2012, they had a TV showing off their first animations of Mona and were using it to push their new tagline: Social…

The USB-C port has become a defacto connectivity standard for modern devices, largely supplanting the ugly mess of barrel jacks and micro USB connectors that once cursed us. While their reliability…

In theory having a single device that combines the features of multiple dedicated devices is a great idea, saving a lot of space, time and money. However, in reality it mostly means that these feat…