Technology Commentary

An institutional notice regarding the application of Amazon Web Services and the Society's findings. –

An observation on the parallels between the American resistance to the metric system and the American resistance to IPv6. –

Both sides are grappling with a real existential threat, and both sides feel like they are screaming into the void. Here's how to close the gap and get everyone pulling in the same direction.

Safari and Firefox change how big sites render based on the domain. TikTok, Netflix, Instagram… even SeatGuru. Chrome doesn’t. Why is that?

Mystery of GPS interference across Europe raises questions about Russian motives.

Six years ago, I nearly got my ISP to upgrade our fibre connection to 1Gbps. As I said at the time: This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years. What's the point of Gigabit broadband? Well, it's a few years later and Virgin Media have just given me their Gig1 package for £30 per month. Nice! With all the inflation related price rises, it's great to …

IT Philosophy, the first of three on European software sovereignty. A great deal of procurement language at the moment treats open source as a sovereignty answer; the reasoning runs that proprietary cloud providers are foreign-jurisdiction firms, open source is by contrast open, therefore open source is sovereign. The conclusion is louder than the premises warrant. Open and owned are not the same word; they overlap in places, they diverge in others, and where they diverge tends to be precisely where procurement assumes they do not. The question is being asked across multiple jurisdictions: France's Interministerial Digital Directorate (DINUM) announced in April 2026 a migration of its own workstations from Windows to Linux, with a directive to all ministries to formalise plans for eliminating extra-European dependencies by autumn; Huawei launched its HarmonyOS PC line in May 2025 after the company's Windows licence was withdrawn under US sanctions; India has produced BharOS through IIT Madras and government sponsorship; China's procurement directives now favour domestic ISA work at the chip layer. A licence is not a deed of ownership, it is a statement of conditions. The licence landscape needs three shelves rather than two. Permissive licences (BSD 2-Clause, BSD 3-Clause, MIT, Apache 2.0) let anyone build on the code, fork it, ship it, sell it and combine it with other code under any licence at all; original authors retain attribution. Copyleft licences (GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPL) let anyone receive and modify the code but require that any distribution of the modified version arrives under the same licence; the receiver does not own what they build with it in the unrestricted sense, they hold it under the conditions the original author set, in perpetuity. Network copyleft licences (AGPLv3) extend copyleft to the case where the modified version runs as a service rather than being distributed as a binary; Section 13 closes what is sometimes called the SaaS loophole of classical GPL. The Server Side Public Licence (SSPL), introduced by MongoDB in 2018 and adopted by Elastic in 2021, extends AGPL's network clause to require open-sourcing of the entire surrounding management stack; the Open Source Initiative declines to recognise SSPL as open source, citing field-of-use discrimination, so SSPL is a fourth shelf that does not behave like the other three. The European Union Public Licence (EUPL-1.2) sits in the copyleft family and is OSI-approved; it exists in part because the EU wanted a Union-grounded licence with cross-Member-State legal certainty in twenty-three languages. GPL keeps the code open, it does not return it to the receiver: every downstream version remains under GPL, the original author's licensing choice propagates indefinitely, and a European entity that needs to take a piece of GPL code and integrate it with proprietary or commercially-sensitive surrounding code finds that GPL has decided the licensing of the surrounding code as well, because the licence absorbs. A useful demonstration is FreeBSD's compiler migration: FreeBSD 10.0 (January 2014) moved its base system from GCC to Clang; the technical case existed but was not decisive, the decisive factor was that GCC had moved to GPLv3 and a coherent permissive base could not host a copyleft compiler whose conditions would leak outwards. AGPL is the honest middle: if you modify this code and use it to serve users over a network, the users have a right to your modifications; it does not require you to share user data, internal management software, or anything outside the modified program itself, which is exactly what tipped SSPL out of the OSI classification. The xz incident reminds us that open is not audited: in March 2024 a Microsoft engineer named Andres Freund was profiling SSH connections, noticed unusual CPU time inside liblzma, and discovered a backdoor (CVE-2024-3094, CVSS 10.0) inserted by a maintainer operating under the name Jia Tan after a multi-year social-engineering campaign that began in 2021; the backdoor was discovered by one person's curiosity, not by the audit infrastructure of the open-source ecosystem, because permissive licensing makes audit possible, it does not make audit happen. In October 2024 the Linux kernel project removed approximately eleven maintainers from a particular jurisdiction subject to expanded US sanctions; the change appeared on the kernel mailing list as compliance requirements, Linus Torvalds confirmed it shortly afterwards and declined to reverse it; the specific jurisdiction is not the point, the point is that the Linux Foundation is registered in the United States and US sanctions reach the operations of US-registered organisations, so whichever jurisdiction comes under expanded US legal pressure next has the same exposure to the same mechanism. The CLOUD Act (March 2018) permits US law enforcement to compel US-based service providers to hand over data regardless of where that data is stored; Schrems II (Court of Justice of the European Union, Case C-311/18, July 2020) held that US surveillance law under FISA Section 702 and Executive Order 12333 does not meet the proportionality standard required by EU law and invalidated the EU-US Privacy Shield. These create a strong reason for European public services to prefer software stacks they can host, modify and audit locally; the same reasoning runs in Beijing, in New Delhi, in Moscow, in Brasilia, with the relevant counterpart jurisdiction differing in each case. A licence is a permission slip; sovereignty is the practice of using the permission, which consists of reproducible local build, audit and signing, and continuous re-receipt. A receiver who owns the licence but does not own the build infrastructure does not own the result; a receiver who owns the build infrastructure but runs it on someone else's silicon has only moved the question down a layer. This piece sets the question; the architectural layer is next Sunday, the silicon layer the Sunday after.

Every system exhibits biases, and tendencies toward some states. Water flowing through a pipe, the vibrations of a machine, the relationships in a meadow, your lymph nodes, are all systems. Over time, all things being equal, a system tends to … Continue reading →

“Hey Google, how are the Giants doing this year?”  I was standing at my bathroom sink, finishing up my daily ablutions, when a random thought popped into my head. It’s been a minu…

DJ Patil on why the hardest part of AI adoption is organizational, not technical

An AI lab just endorsed a predictive model for defense.

Building a VSCode extension with AI and OpenSpec

The most interesting piece of news this morning comes from Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who made a very public point of chastising his own team for saying the quiet part out loud. That quiet pa…

The employee said that when AI works well, they feel redundant, but when it doesn't, they don't know how to fix it.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says he didn't expect this milestone until 2027.

Elixir and Phoenix tips, courses, and more.

A linter ruined half of them.

People love configurable software.

New research says the cognitive costs of AI may be higher than we realize

We’ve always found strace useful but somewhat hard to work with. Its output is often inscrutable, it’s hard to follow subprocesses or threads, and if you wan...

An investigation into collapse of Github and how the decay of our tech infrastructure is a crime against software. Detailed comparisons of Github, Gitlab, Codeberg, and more from a distributed systems and software performance expert.

Webflow mangles code blocks, so I made a little Go + Elm tool that renders them as SVG instead. The fun part: there's no database -- your code lives, compressed, inside the image URL.

Wes McKinney, creator of pandas and co-creator of Apache Arrow, shares how he works with AI coding agents: spec-driven workflows with superpowers, continuous AI code review with Roborev, token economics, and why vibe coding is dangerous but agentic engineering isn't. | Reading time: 15 min read

Also: how pitch a book to an AI!

Netscape time's influence has gone far beyond Netscape itself, and tis a legacy that we still wrestle with on the web. We probably always will.

With the rise of agents, many people have been proclaiming that the age of software as a service (SaaS) is over. Who needs to subscribe to a service when you

Yes I know about that one talk from Rob Pike.