Technology Commentary

Stacks of wisdom from a great essayist Life Skills Is It Worth Being Wise? A wise person knows what to do in most situations, while a smart person knows what to do in situations where few others...

C: The Boring (and Probably Correct) Choice

She might have done her PhD thesis about Artificial Intelligence under the supervision of John McCarthy, or have a programming principle…

Posted on 2022-05-23

Warner Bros. Discovery is a company that makes a lot of sense, both because of its content and also its strategy, which treats streaming as an additional channel, not a reason-for-being.

“Shadow automation” isn’t yet as big of a phenomenon as shadow IT. But siloed, one-off automation workarounds can easily derail an organization’s overall automation efforts.

Two directions at once.

Posted on Friday 20 May 2022. 1,814 words, 13 links. By Matt Webb.

Maybe more people are writing about the real and potential problems of technology today than ever before. That is mostly a good thing. The…

A timeline of some of the greatest hits in cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and other web3 projects since the beginning of 2021

When I was a wee lad, 28, 29, 30, I knew the C Windows API by heart. I had, in my bathroom, both the technical docs and a copy of Petzold, and I knew it cold, stone cold. Every one of the ~500 calls, all of the arguments, and for most of them, the order of the arguments. I was a good programmer ...

Despite what you’ve heard, the word “imagineering” is not unique to Disney. In fact, it’s a phrase that was first used in World War II corporate propaganda.

Software — noun 1. A collection of instructions that tell a computer how to work.

Once you grok Emacs, you realize that it's a thermonuclear toaster that can also serve as the engine for... well, just about anything you want to do with text. When you think about how much your compu

Posted on Wednesday 18 May 2022. 774 words, 4 links. By Matt Webb.

Posted on 2022-05-15

The iPod is leaving the market, which means that now’s as good a time as any to consider the many audio players it vanquished along the way.

Cheap Tickets, one of the first big digital travel companies, has a hell of a corporate history—one with nothing to do with the internet.

Blogging pioneer Noah Grey on the march of technology, the old internet, and the social media landscape of today.

Chemistry is a good metaphor for how teams work—especially when times get tough, such as in the playoffs happening in the NBA right now. Think about it. Every element has a melting point: a tempera…

Web3 claims to be the only way to save us from commercial entities defining what we can see and what not. Yet, it does exactly this: It results in commercialized entities defining what we can see and what not. More on blockchain in the simple, humorous, yet thorough article «Hitchhiker's Guid

Ben and Cassidy chat with Ian Tien, CEO and cofounder, and Corey Hulen, CTO and cofounder of Mattermost, an open-source platform for developer collaboration.

Stephen Wolfram shares the behind-the-scenes process of his NKS book. From years of research to working with publishers, book design, getting the right photos and images, and printing and promotion.

Considering the tension between disposability and interchangeable parts, and how right to repair opponents are trying to have it both ways.

Posted on Thursday 12 May 2022. 1,383 words, 19 links. By Matt Webb.

We asked 9,500 creators which platforms they're on, how many followers they have, and their best tips to monetize their content!

For decades, the country's tech triumphs have disguised its seized-up digital systems.

A look at the Atlassian outage of April 2022, and what it stands to teach Site Reliability Engineers. A lot to unpack here.

I joined Google in early 2015 to work on the V8 team as one of the first authors of the WebAssembly specification. This is a partial story…