Technology Commentary

News, tips, and tricks from the team at Fly.

Why are SLOs so important for site reliability engineering practitioners? What are some good SLO practices?

The through line between the telegraph and the computer is more direct than you might realize. Its influence can be seen in common technologies, like the modem.

Salt Security had deployed OpenTelemetry, but found it insufficient. So the company engineers evaluated Helios, which visualizes distributed tracing for fast troubleshooting.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash An interesting Twitter thread offers a sobering counter-narrative to the hype around “AI” applications. It is sobering because the media headlines are …

Posted on Thursday 8 Jul 2021. 577 words, 4 links. By Matt Webb.

Posted on Wednesday 28 Jun 2023. 926 words, 8 links. By Matt Webb.

SEO: The amount of data collected and made available to the average DevOps team is incredible. But it's not all being used.

The current mania over recent advances in artificial intelligence will eventually end in disillusionment, mature regret—and new monsters

Bruce Sterling is a cyberpunk fiction and nonfiction pioneer who wrote such classics as Schismatrix, The Difference Engine, The Hacker Crackdown, and was a frequent contributor to Wired, Mondo 2000…

You might boot laptops straight into a cloud OS in the future

Email is an open system, right? Anyone can send a message to anyone... unless they are on Gmail! School Interviews uses two email servers t...

Okay, campers, rise and shine...

Protecting the interest of our customers and ensuring the stability of the service have been key principles for IVPN since starting our operations more than ten years ago. To keep delivering on these promises, we have made the decision to gradually phase out the port forwarding feature from the IVPN Pro plan.

Google Reader was supposed to be much more than a tool for nerds. But it never got the chance.

Once upon a time, telco was a showstopper. Today, its a commodity.

After a successful twenty-year run, we are decommissioning the blogs.harvard.edu platform effective June 30, 2023 in order to pivot to new challenges at the Berkman Klein Center in a time when blog…

The term “censorship resistant” is used a lot in the decentralized computing/web3/crypto space to talk about a core feature of these systems. I don’t love the term censorship resistant because it is a wonky term. Software that is encoded in smart contracts (and other ways) on fully decentralized blockchains can’t be shut down or turned […]

A look at the basics of how to get going, and then a dive into some advanced use cases to show what you can do from there.

Innocent early design decision that led to a disaster years later

The FTC’s Amazon complaint raises some fair points in isolation, but misses the bigger picture, both in terms of Amazon specifically and the Internet generally.

Some people on Mastodon are really upset that Instagram seems primed to join “the fediverse” by integrating to some extent into ActivityPub. I’ve stated my opinion on this matter already, but I wanted to add to this to say I’m more invested in ActivityPub than I am in