Technology Commentary

Once upon a time, at the dawn of the web, browsers and websites were simple ... Then slowly, step by step, more and more interactivity was added.

Against the backdrop of mass layoffs, LLMs, site-builders and vibe coding what does it mean to conscientiously build for the web, and where do we go from here?

A new book shows how to turn a crisis into the change you've been waiting for

A look at the fascinating history behind the one programming language with magical powers.

The EEF needs your support for a major security grant, Hex.pm completes its first security audit, José Valim drops a massive Tidewave update, and we discuss the ClickFix supply chain attack that hit Axios, and more!

As technology has developed in the last twenty years, it has brought with it a sense of enablement. Over time, access to nearly everything has become simpler, and as such, the message from Silicon Valley and its offshoots was that you can do it all.  I have worked in the music industry since the late […]

Long ago, in the aftermath of the UNIX wars, three kernels emerged from the rubble: BSD, Linux, and Hurd. BSD, being UNIX, was held back by legal wrangling in the aftermath of the wars, and that al…

2,624 lines of C. One file. One socket. No config. The private key never leaves the process. Born from impatience, designed with discipline.

ICR is not a convenience feature. It is a structural change in how the cost of an interaction scales with the size of the underlying data.

Weeknotes 384 - Thoughts on repetitiveness as a signal for losing or learning in an intelligence world, new strategies for care. And the latest news captures on physical AI.

Meet Hubert, our self-writing meeting machine, inspired by the legendary OSS 117. Like Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, it navigates chaos with effortless charm, turning audio into structured notes. No buttons, no fuss. Just results, delivered with the panache of Jean Dujardin’s iconic wink.

I was supposed to give a 20-minute presentation this morning, but alas, it is 2026 and our household, once again, has COVID. So I’m skipping the part where I read this piece of writing aloud to a Zoom audience, even though there’d be no chance of infecting them

How open protocols and agentic development could lead to a whole new generation of social applications.

How I went from zero documentation to a visual component catalog, and why the demo app I built wasn’t the answer.

40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won't, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it.

Why scalar types give us a false sense of safety, and how wrapping primitives in domain types catches bugs the compiler never could.

This story appeared in the April 2019 issue of Linux Journal. It’s still there, but with no photos (which seem to have vanished from much of the magazine’s archives).* I think both the …

It seems like everybody takes their turn doing an ESP32-based weather display, and why not? They’re cheap, they’re easy, and you need to start somewhere. With the Cheap Yellow Display (…

Cognitive processes are not something that we generally pay much attention to until something goes wrong, but they cover the entire scope of us ingesting sensory information, the processing and rec…

J. B. Crawford writes on the Computers Are Bad newsletter about the IrDA infrared data standard used in older devices to communicate. In 1993, Hewlett-Packard hosted an industry meeting that kicked…

A crew lives on a station in a hostile environment. Leaving that environment requires oxygen tanks and specialized gear to deal with pressure differentials. A space station? Nah. A base built on th…

One of my gifts/curses is an endless fixation with how processes can be optimized. For a brief moment early in my career, that was focused on improving how humans collaborate, but that quickly switched to figuring out how we can minimize human involvement, and eliminate human-to-human handoffs as much as possible. Lately, every time I perform a recurring task–or see someone else perform one–I think about how we might eliminate the human’s involvement entirely by introducing agents. This both has worked well, but also worked poorly, and I wanted to highlight the pattern I’ve found useful.

Opinion: Linux Foundation Europe boss predicts EU will run as fast as it can from US tech companies

In case you’re unaware, I’m not a developer. I’m actually an autistic catgirl annoyed by suboptimal use of computing power, and fixing that happens to involve programming. Crucially, it also includes discussing foundational technology with people behind the scenes, and apparently that makes me more aware of social aspects of this sphere. So, I have opinions about criticism of crates.io for supply-chain attacks. After a dozen similar articles, I have some select words to voice about why it’s off the mark.

Three years ago I published a high fantasy map of technical writing. The world has moved quite a bit since then. AI happened, and with it a darkness has crept in from the north, one that feeds on the daily pessimism of writers that feel cornered. I felt like an update was long overdue, so I sat down, fired up an editor and created a new version. It’s a map of contested territory, and we’re still on it, waiting for someone to check the advance of natural stupidity. Can you find yourself in it?

The UTR is a small, portable router that you can take anywhere with you. It fits in your pocket. It supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands and can