Technology Commentary

Posted on Friday 18 Feb 2022. 808 words, 6 links. By Matt Webb.

In 1984 a new magazine hit the racks in W. H Smiths: INPUT. It offered to help you to “Learn programming for fun and the future” via a weekly course in programming and computing. It ran…

Drivers of certain vehicles in Seattle and other parts of Western Washington are shouting at their car radios this week. Not because of any particular song or news item that's being broadcast…

Anders Hejlsberg, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and creator of wildly popular programming languages including Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and TypeScript, has helped launch or extend the careers of millions of programmers.

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful…

Unix pioneer Brian Kernighan discusses the early days of Unix.

Hundreds of millions of users. No algorithm. No ads. Courage in the face of autocracy. Sound like a dream? Careful what you wish for.

A key lesson about AI development: Systems are only as good as their training.

Along with the release of sponsors-only repositories, here’s a look at what’s new and what’s next for Sponsors.

But AMP doesn’t trust us.

2022 was once unimaginable to some web folks.

On January 13th 2022, Firefox became unusable for close to two hours for users worldwide. This post highlights the complex series of events and circumstances that, together, triggered a bug deep in the networking code of Firefox.

One of the reasons it is hard to predict what the future looks like is because much of the future is movable. The thing we are trying to forecast is changed by our attempts to make it real. Many hundreds

The spate of recent acquisitions in the gaming space — Take-Two and Zynga, Microsoft and Activision, and Sony and Bungie — make sense in the context of the Smiling Curve.

It seems everyone is rushing to get their software on the cloud. The rapid growth of cloud computing has empowered hyperscaler cloud providers to market various technologies to feed the growing demand. Hyperscalers are now providing full-stack capabilities to increase their footprint and further lock-in customers, making the cloud seem more like a threat than an open communal space.  What does the cloud actually offer? Quite a lot, based on reports from the field:

Brian Kernighan shares his inspiration and research behind the latest edition of his book, Understanding the Digital World.

Code like you are writing a story

The road to color e-paper took two decades

After pissing off half the internet with our list on faded graphics formats, we’re doing the same thing with outdated audio formats. We’re fearing the worst.

Imagine a personal heating system that works indoors as well as outdoors, can be taken anywhere, requires little energy, and is independent of any infrastructure. It exists – and is hundreds of years old. The hot water bottle could save a great deal of energy and money without sacrificing thermal comfort. Hot water bottles work both indoors and outdoors. Illustration: Marie Verdeil. A hot water bottle is a sealable container filled with hot water, often enclosed in a textile cover, which is directly placed against a part of the body for thermal comfort. The hot water bottle is still a common household item in some places – such as the UK and Japan – but it is largely forgotten or...

pFor an upcoming zine project, I‘ve been buried deep under articles and papers on the phenomenon of “hype”. (If you‘re interested you can follow the project along here). A topic that has been haunting me throughout my years working at the innovation team of the Süddeutsche Zeitung where I…/p

That’s the UI for  the Brother HL-L2305w laser printer, which you can get for $140 right now at OfficeMax (or Office Depot, same thing). It’s a good deal. It also took me a whole day to…

Security is a process, not a product

The bright colors tell you whether you got 'em or not

We welcomed the opportunity to participate in the White House Open Source Software Security Summit today.