Technology Commentary

"There is a fixed amount of scarce attention to go around, and too many people want it. The metagame becomes: secure attention by any means necessary."

One in 10 parking fines issued as a result of scans made by cars using automatic number plate recognition systems is unjustified, privacy watchdog Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP) has calculated. The cars are equipped with special cameras which can check parked cars more efficiently than inspectors on foot, making them an attractive alternative for local councils. The cars tot up between 250 million and 375 million scans a year, resulting in three to five million fines. In 500,000, or 10%, of...

An appreciation post for something so simple, yet so wonderful to use

For all the noise around developer tools, API tooling has not really changed that much in the last ten years. Most of it still follows the same basic pattern...

In 1972, IBM separated values with commas. No specification. No committee. Fifty-three years later, 60% of enterprises still use it.

Celebrating 50 years of Apple: a look back at innovation, the rise of the iPhone, and the engineers behind the magic.

I don't feel that these performative actions have resulted in any real productivity gains. I realize now, that this is because I was focusing on the wrong thing.

What 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract says about throttling

In the 1990s, CS taught foundations. In 2026, it teaches frameworks. Alan Kay warned us. MIT proved him right.

What is Digital Garage and why this place exists This cyber corner was inspired by my grandfathers both of whom were capable of building things from scrat...

A friend recently told me, “(Her) Blog feels like home.” I couldn’t agree more. That led me to think of analogies for social platforms and websites in terms of how much power and freedom they actually give you over your content. If we think of what you put out on the internet in terms of physical places, this is what they are like.

What does it actually mean to build a better web, and what do we owe each other in doing so? A response to the 32-bit Café thread about trust, onboarding, and the distance between knowing something is wrong and doing something about it.

By Ben Sykes

Aria Networks launches "Network that Thinks" initiative to optimize AI cluster performance through Model Flop Utilization, SONiC, telemetry, and AI agents.

I spend a lot of time engaged in the craft of writing – I’ve penned more than 1.5 million words on Searchblog alone. Writing anchors nearly all my projects, from teaching at univ…

In 1999, the word "community" took on a new meaning on the web. One that would have a lasting impact for years to come.

The open web is under pressure from AI companies and large platforms, but its troubles did not start with AI. We also chose convenience over control, and we will have to change that if we want a better web.

Thinking about Anil Dash's "Endgame for the Open Web," and what we can do to prepare.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI is rapidly transforming the landscape of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) workflows, offering unprecedented efficiency and power. I wanted to see if I could get the Terraform MCP server working with my local Terraform Enterprise (TFE) instance.

Terraform scales beautifully — until it doesn't. Explore the real challenges engineering teams face with Terraform at scale and the AI-assisted solutions reshaping IaC management.

Mike Hall is a web developer and Doctor Who fan, but not in that order. He has been building for the web since 1998, and in that time has been a frontend lead, a backend lead, a CTO, a devops engineer, a full-stack developer, a PHP guy, a JavaScript guy, a TypeScript guy, a CSS guy, and a pain in the neck. He is currently Lead Engineer at a Manchester-based startup named Zaptic, creating software for frontline workers in the manufacturing sector. In his spare time, he is active in the fields of science communication and scientific skepticism, advocating for evidence-based thinking and reason. He produces and presents a weekly podcast called Skeptics with a K, is on the board of directors for The Skeptic magazine, and is co-founder of the Merseyside Skeptics Society. In his other spare time he likes to rest, but there isn’t much of that to go around.

People are moving away from corporate controlled tech, and making their own. How the designs of cyberdecks are being driven by women. And how medieval guilds, Luddites, and the Arts and Crafts movement are all connected to our current moment.

This was an idea I had back in the days of Naptster. At the turn of the century, it was common to listen to an "acquired" music file only to find it was missing a few seconds at the end due to a prematurely stopped download. Some video formats would refuse to play at all if the moov atom at the end of the file was missing. I wondered if it would be possible to make a file format which was…

Apple turns 50 years old tomorrow. I’ve been using its products for 48 of those years. 48 years. Over those five decades, my relationship with Apple has shifted as dramatically as its market …

What is AI? I’ve been struggling with this rather basic question for several years now, so today I figured I’d write out loud about it, and see if anything coherent surfaces. First, let…

Before there was pressure-treated wood, before modern paints, there was pine tar. Everything from tool handles to wagons to ships were made of wood preserved with pine tar, once upon a time, and [w…

For some reason, Markdown has not just become the format of choice for giving READMEs in GitHub repositories some flair, but also for writing entire websites and documents. In a recent rant, [Burak…