Technology Commentary

The scalability of Linus Torvalds was a recurring theme during Linux's early years; these days maintainer struggles are a recognized problem within open-source communities in general. It is thus not surprising that Sean Christopherson gave a talk at Open Source Summit Europe (and KVM Forum) with the title "Scaling KVM and its community". The talk mostly focused on KVM for the x86 architecture—the largest and most mature KVM architecture—which Christopherson co-maintains. But it was not a technical talk: most of the content can be applied to other KVM architectures, or even other Linux subsystems, so that they can avoid making the same kinds of mistakes.

The most valuable part of AI is its ability to take in huge amounts of data and calculate every possible outcome, then make recommendations based on a variety of parameters.

This post was co-written by Katie Haun and Fred Wilson The events surrounding FTX have shaken the confidence of many. How did one of the largest crypto exchanges collapse so quickly? Why do meltdowns like this seem to keep happening? At times like this, it helps to have a long-term view of web3 as a […]

The Internet Archive has recently set up its own Mastodon server– a federated/decentralized open source social media package– that has garnered lots of attention lately. We use it in ways that we use twitter now (we are not leaving twitter):• @[email protected] for events, announcements, and fun things• Staff accounts (e.g. my account @[email protected]) for, well, […]

Now that Twitter is dying, what can replace it?

In terms of sheer impact, the like button was one of the most successful pieces of code ever shipped. But when you examine the quality of that impact, its flaws become glaring.

It's all too easy to believe in the illusion of neverending data storage and streaming. But it's destroying the natural world.

The data about your community will never stop changing, and that's to be expected. It's important to keep asking questions, iterate, and take action.

What does it mean to use data in a healthy way?

It’s been a week since Elon Musk, funded by a distasteful assortment of backers, bought Twitter. In no particular order, some thoughts on what it means for various groups. Employees Predictably, sw…

I’ve spent a lot of time lately contemplating how I feel about Elon Musk taking over Twitter, and specifically about how I feel about the exodus to Mastodon that I see happening. As with many things happening online today I notice the emotionally charged nature of what is going on, which immediately leaves me wanting to slow down when it comes to making any decisions. I have spent countless hours thinking about the tools that I use, what my overall digital footprint is, and choosing to abandon or introduce services into my is always weighed against my bigger picture. I am very interested in using Mastodon, and supporting the open source specifications, standards, and code it is built on, but I want to make sure it fits into my overall digital stack in a sensible way.

Every time I post something that gets lots of engagement, I essentially end up carrying out a denial of service attack on myself. What does this say about the design of Mastodon and ActivityPub and the future of the fediverse?

When I worked at Yahoo!, our team needed another engineering manager. We didn’t run a hiring process, or even do interviews. Instead, our Director brought on a colleague he’d worked with before. That new manager soon decided he needed a tech lead on his team. We didn’t run a hiring process, do interviews, or consider candidates on the existing team. Instead, our new manager brought over one of his previous colleagues.

What Elon Musk got wrong about Twitter, journalists and VCs got wrong about FTX, and Peter Thiel got wrong about crypto and AI — and why I made many of the same mistakes along the way.

The CHAOSS community has defined more than 70 metrics and maintains software to get the insights you need. Here are the five focus areas you should pay attention to.

This will take ‘you wrote it, you own it’ to a new level and will require wider skills associated with operational aspects of code than just programming.

If you only pay attention to how things work, you’ll be screwed when they fail.

If what happened to Freenode (admittedly to a significantly smaller scale) is anything to go by, once the first signs of mismanagement appear, users leave real fast, and the thing can die in a couple weeks. On Twitter, the exodus has begun, and so, I will have to follow. 1/

Why Are Bots Taking Over The Internet? Almost everyone reading this article must have done a captcha test at some point. The phrase CAPTCHA,

Following Twitter's recent downturn, many people are looking for alternatives. Can the IndieWeb step up? How can we build better social media for people without technical knowledge?

One insider says the company’s current staffing isn’t able to sustain the platform.

The more I read about Mastodon promoters' opinions on how it should work, the more I think, "How could you possibly think that is how it is going to go?" One group of people want a Federated Feed Reader: They want to read the clever updates and memes from their friends and favorite celebrities. They want to post a GIF and have their friends validate them by hitting "like" on it. They want to ...

Posted on 2022-11-13