Taking over a Dead IoT Company
5 years after NYCTrainSign collapsed, I investigate why the company failed and end up writing an exploit to take over their fleet.
Why GraphQL Will Reign King
DevOps teams can use GraphQL's unmatched ability to provide an efficient, powerful and flexible API for data fetching and manipulation.
Lessons from the Last AI Cycle
Old Man Yells at Cloud
The common trait amongst all these examples is its not actually the evolution of technology that has made things worse -- its the application of that technology that has ruined everything.
How a single developer dropped AWS costs by 90%, then disappeared.
NB: source (https://twitter.com/xanf_ua/status/1608121311078776832)
ISP Column - January 2023
Six OpenAI Rivals Google and Microsoft Are Watching
Microsoft’s big bet on OpenAI, whose ChatGPT software can understand and generate conversational text, is starting to look like a stroke of genius. Microsoft plans to use OpenAI’s tech to improve results in Bing searches and help Word and Outlook customers automatically generate documents and ...
China, a Pioneer in Regulating Algorithms, Turns Its Focus to Deepfakes
Beijing is among the first governments to regulate hyper-realistic, AI-generated media with new rules set to take effect Jan. 10.
Why did the US abandon a lead in reactor design?
xhtml:span xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"A questionable reshaping of reactor research 45 years ago has had long-term consequences./xhtml:span
Rate of scientific breakthroughs slowing over time: Study
The rate of ground-breaking scientific discoveries and technological innovation is slowing down despite an ever-growing amount of knowledge, according to an analysis released Wednesday of millions of research papers and patents.
Apex: The Ultimate Project Scaffolding Tool
Generate code, docs, and more from a single source
Be The Code You Want to See in the World
After 25 years doing this for a living, much of that devoted to mentoring teams in the developer arts, I've learned two important lessons:
Untangle: Solving problems with fuzzy constraints
How to sketch, and satisfy, logic problems
The Slow Death of Surveillance Capitalism Has Begun
A European Union ruling against Meta marks the beginning of the end of targeted ads.
Logging practices I follow
No matter what kind of software you’re developing, you most definitely leverage logging to some extent, probably every single day.You write a lot of logs, you read tons of them too, it is the most bas
There Is No Software Maintenance
Every time I hear about software maintenance as a distinct activity, I cringe. That’s because it is based on the outdated notion that first software is developed, then it is maintained. But t…
This is your brain. This is your brain on code
Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) found that the Multiple Demand and Language brain systems encode specific code properties and uniquely align with machine-learned representations of code.
This is your brain. This is your brain on code
MIT researchers are evaluating the neurological effects of coding. (While MIT News editors are calling back to a simpler time – the late 90s, where theatrical anti-drug campaign ads ran rough…
John Battelle's Search Blog Out, Damn Internet.
I’ve an ambitious goal for 2023: Write more out loud. I write (by hand) every day in a journal, but that’s more of a personal practice, a meditation. This year I want to get back to wri…
AI and the Big Five
Given the success of existing companies with new epochs, the most obvious place to start when thinking about the impact of AI is with the big five: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
No-Code Automated Software Solves a Host of Problems
Organizations can meet the growing demand for digital solutions by using no-code solutions to revamp the way they test software.
Beyond Git: The other version control systems developers use
Our developer survey found 93% of developers use Git. But what are the other 7% using?
CYBER: The Trans Dataset Built Without Permission and Stored Improperly
Federated Convergence With Mastodon, Enterprise API Governance, and Government Regulation
I’ve mentioned lately on social media that there was a federated convergence occurring right now. Not just across the Mastodon explosion that has happened recently, but also enterprise customers I am talking with in my work at Postman, and regulation I see emerging from governments. While at different levels, and possessing very different motivations behind these movements, they share a lot of common patterns I think we need to pay attention to.
Looking Through a Federated Lens Across Mastodon, FHIR, and PSD2/3
I am immersed in the federated Mastodon universe the last month, and I’ve been immersed in the federated universes of FHIR, PSD2/PSD3, and UK Open Banking for a number of years. It is unlikely that anyone involved in the Mastodon universe right now would consider what is happening could be related to the financial and healthcare sectors, but those in the financial and healthcare space would also not see the expansion of the Mastodon universe as having anything to do with their worlds. Mastodon is about social networking, but PSD2 is about banking, and FHIR about healthcare, while all three are about defining one dimension of our personal and professional lives that is being shaped by open source federated APIs.
Don't just do it
Understanding the need behind a change is important to build better software. Here’s why.
White Space
Retiring Pinafore
Five years ago, I started a journey to build a better Mastodon client – one focused on performance and simplicity. And I did! Pinafore is the main Mastodon client I’ve used myself since I fir…
Fake it until you automate it
A pragmatic way for you to start automating deployments of a Legacy system.
Generative AI trade-offs
People have been having fun with generative AI lately. Enter a prompt and get a believable body of text, or enter descriptive text and get a photorealistic image. But as with all things that are fu…