Technology Commentary

Your patch windows and testing process is going to get your hacked. It's time to move from reactive vulnerability management to proactive software curation.

Although modern cameras can, with skill and good conditions, produce photographs nearly indistinguishable from the original scene, this fidelity relies on the limitations of human vision. According…

Making stuff cool and keeping it that way has been a pretty essential part of human civilization for thousands of years, with only in the past few hundred years man-made methods having become avail…

Why our discomfort with AI-generated code reveals exactly what we haven't built yet, and what the compiler analogy teaches us about trusting coding agents.

The answer touches probability theory, distributed systems constraints and fifteen years of industry migration. Let's actually dig in.

Walking through the implementation of three different WebAssembly runtimes from scratch

In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as "the Camel Book" — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris: If we’re going to talk about good software design, we have to talk about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, the basis of good software design. We’ve all fallen into the trap of using cut-and-paste when we should have defined a higher-level abstraction, if only just a loop or subroutine. To be sure, some folks have gone to the opposite extreme of defining ever-growing mounds of higher level abstractions when they should have used cut-and-paste. Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less.

From querySelector to Temporal — a look at how userland libraries shaped the native APIs we use every day.

Custom peripheral projects are among the most rewarding. Especially if you’re like me and you sit at the computer eight hours per day, anything that you can use on a daily basis is super satisfying…

Why autonomous AI systems drift and what it reveals about the limits of observability

Takeaways from Cat Wu’s fireside chat with Addy Osmani

Velocity is table stakes. Code is a commodity. Understanding is the edge.

Shipping faster can weaken systems when DevOps teams chase velocity over reliability, feedback loops and technical debt reduction.

It’s a phrase we use a lot in our community, “Drink the Kool-Aid”, meaning becoming unreasonably infatuated with a dubious idea, technology, or company. It has its origins in 1960…

An unprivileged Android app can leak the user's real IP past Always-On VPN + lockdown by handing system_server a UDP payload to fire on its behalf.

I had that written on my office whiteboard for a while last year. I had just finished working with a client for over a year where the whole team pair-programmed full-time (we also did a lot of mobbing). I was then starting work with a new client, and I wanted to remind myself to push for pair-programming as much as possible because it is a cheat code for developers AND for businesses. Here are some of

Last week, Elizabeth Lopatto published an insightful article in The Verge. It boasted an intriguing title: ​“Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want.”​ “Within ... Read more

Genies give you code that’s a degraded facsimile of the mediocre code it trained on.

How do you fund work people don't want to pay for?

People love your work because of its impact, not how it works.

How travel has become an act of collection

The dashboard is green. The system is fragile. Taylor 1911, Goodhart 1975, Strathern 1997, Jeffries 2019: we were warned by name and kept the stopwatch under a procession of new names.

No.400 — Extrapolated futures archive ⊗ The dissonance is expanding ⊗ South Korea to spur a renewables revolution ⊗ Eye contact with a humpback whale

A meditation

No.399 — The term “AGI” is almost useless at this point ⊗ Frugal AI ⊗ Design futures in infrastructure ⊗ The AI revolution in math has arrived ⊗ First Indigenous Group to ban data centers from its land ⊗ A macro array of colorful slime molds

Are you frustrated with how the internet works? Me too. Today I’m going to think out loud about why. I’ve been writing for decades about what I’ve been calling “conversation…

Have you noticed all the folks bragging about the cool new tools they’ve hacked up using AI? In the last month or so, I’ve read newsletters from half a dozen or so people detailing vibe…

Friendster was the first social network. It has a long history, but the website friendster.com went dead in 2015 and the company officially…

One of the most important pieces of AI commentary: "software brain" is important to understand if we want to get through this era with our humanity intact.