Technology Commentary

Plex sends a message to the self-hosting community with a massive upcharge targeted at the very people who hate monthly fees.

For over a century, both the prestige and budget of a corporate department have been measured by a single crude metric: headcount. If you manage 500 people,

API gateways help enterprises control GenAI costs, improve observability and secure large-scale AI infrastructure in production.

We overestimate what AI can remember and underestimate what it can orchestrate.

The hardware store’s customers aren’t just customers. They aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. They are its neighbors.

On Second Thought Episode 08. The reflex is universal: every new service ships in its own container. The container is now the unit of thought, not merely a deployment artefact. Three currents converged. Isolation: Poul-Henning Kamp's FreeBSD Jails (1999, FreeBSD 4.0 in March 2000) provided kernel-native isolation with no daemon, one coherent abstraction; Solaris Zones (2004), Linux namespaces and cgroups (2006 to 2008, eight separate namespaces), LXC (2008), Docker (2013) reproduced the technique with progressively less coherence and more advertising. Org-shape: Scrum codified between 1995 and 2001 split organisations into sprint-shaped teams; Melvin Conway's 1968 paper had explained in advance that software mirrors its organisation's communication structure; the container became the natural envelope. Runtime: Node.js (Ryan Dahl, 2009) was single-threaded by design and multi-core hardware required multi-container deployment. The cost arrives in four layers: image bloat (node:22 over a gigabyte for a 50 MB application), supply chain (the May 2026 npm wave reached 172 packages, 403 versions, ~518 million cumulative downloads), daemon overhead (dockerd above 5 GB at 183 containers), and network tax (a function call ~1 microsecond, a network call between services ~1-5 milliseconds). The retreat is documented: Amazon Prime Video returned video monitoring to a monolith for ~90 per cent cost reduction; Segment consolidated 140 services into one; Istio quietly merged its own control plane back into a single binary; 37signals left AWS and recouped hardware inside year one. The alternatives have been quietly working: FreeBSD Jails, Capsicum, OpenBSD pledge and unveil, Go and Rust finding their own cores. The honest question is whether isolation, runtime split and team split were ever the same question.

After Netscape, the speed of software sped up beyond what anyone could have imagined. Thanks to a documentary crew and a ghost writer, we have a full view of the whole thing.

Your compliance standards are not carved in stone, your competitors are not waiting for your next change board meeting, and your security team has 18 months to pick a side. A 2026 field report from a conversation that should never have happened.

Technical Beauty Episode 35. tcpdump (Van Jacobson, Craig Leres, Steven McCanne at LBL, 1988) is a thin command-line filter on top of libpcap, on top of BPF. McCanne and Jacobson's 1992 paper 'The BSD Packet Filter' (USENIX Winter 1993, Best Student Paper) replaced Sun's NIT stack-based filter with a register-based in-kernel pseudo-machine; measured up to 20x faster than its predecessor and up to 100x faster than NIT on the same hardware. libpcap, factored out around 1995, is the capture library every serious network tool uses: Wireshark, tshark, dumpcap, Zeek, snort, suricata, nmap, ngrep, dsniff. eBPF (Alexei Starovoitov, Linux 3.18, December 2014) extended the same architecture with a wider register file and a verifier; it is what powers most contemporary Linux observability. The technical beauty is the layering, not the tool.

How (not) to turn your startup into the next FAANG

Bazel only rebuilds what changed. Terraform replans the world. Here's how the build-system playbook maps onto HCL.

Freecoding improves broader programming proficiency

Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce traffic to publishers across the web.

Every time I think about the miserable state of the software industry, it always comes back to one thing: the Smalltalk programming language...

What I think is going on with AI is that what software managers really want is to be able to turn a dial marked "Quality" down and see a gauge marked "Speed" go up. AI agents seem like they could give managers that dial, so they've gotten very excited.

August 2026 arrives fast. Infobip's engineering lead explains why AI Act compliance must start in system design, not legal review.

As time goes on, fewer games than ever are unplayable on Linux

Traditional operational observability focuses on errors and saturation. Migration observability needs a different category: Semantic drift.

Composable architectures help enterprises replace rigid platforms with modular systems that improve agility, scalability and resilience.

Mostly not very long

A collection of articles about inventions that seem to have come along much later than they were possible. Why weren't they invented earlier?

We are all familiar with ideas said to be ahead of their time, Babbage’s analytical engine and da Vinci’s helicopter are classic examples.  We are also familiar with ideas “of their time,” ideas that were “in the air” and thus were often simultaneously discovered such as the telephone, calculus, evolution, and color photography.  What is […]

東京大学などの研究チームは、コンピューターなどに使う半導体チップの情報処理速度を1000倍速くする素子を開発した。熱が生じにくく、消費電力の低減につながる。2030年までに実用的な試作チップの開発を目指す。この技術を応用すれば「例えばダウンロードに1時間かかっていたデータが1秒で処理できる可能性がある」（東大の中辻知教授）という。研究成果は米科学誌「サイエンス」に掲載された。コンピューターは

What the PNR locator on your boarding pass actually contains, and why the fare calculation line on your e-ticket is written in a currency that does not exist.

This week, we discuss how security gets sold to execs, where agentic coding and security collide, and Cloudflare vs. Datadog's diverging paths. Plus, Coté weighs in on sugar cookies.

Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland