Three HTTP versions later, forms are still a mess
Why Concatenative Programming Matters
Introduction There doesn’t seem to be a good tutorial out there for concatenative programming, so I figured I’d write one, inspired by t...
Why OpenSearch 3.0 Is Your Must-Have Upgrade Right Now
For teams invested in open source observability and search, OpenSearch v3 is a clear opportunity to take a big step forward.
How Solid Protocol Restores Digital Agency - Schneier on Security
The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you’ve never heard of. These entities collect, store, and trade your data, often without your knowledge or consent. It’s both redundant and inconsistent. You have hundreds, maybe thousands, of fragmented digital profiles that often contain contradictory or logically impossible information. Each serves its own purpose, yet there is no central override and control to serve you—as the identity owner...
How CMPs Can Make Hay With Real VRM – ProjectVRM
By now you've seen one of these: Note the small print in the lower right: "VRM by Admiral." By "VRM," Admiral means this: What we're looking at here is the $.5 billion Consent Management Platform business, currently dominated worldwide by OneTrust, with a 40% market share. In the US, Admiral is the leading provider to publishers, giving…
When Italy had the Technological Edge over the United States: Olivetti Elea - Planet Mainframe
2021 marked the 60th anniversary of the death of Mario Tchou, the Olivetti engineer who designed the Elea 9003, the first Italian computer, who died in a car crash at […]
Gaming metrics
When I suggest that people will game whatever metrics we put in place, I’m often met with shocked indignation. We would never game the numbers! And yet we do.
Fixing Engineering’s Biggest Time Suck: Finding Information
Developers’ workflows are fragmented, knowledge is siloed and coordination work is eating away at the time saved by AI.
A Blueprint for Implementing RAG at Scale
To support complex RAG workloads at scale, an AI search platform must do far more than basic keyword or vector matching.
GitLab Launches Its AI Agent Platform in Public Beta
GitLab launches its AI Agent Platform in public beta for DevSecOps teams, including multi-agent workflows and IDE integrations.
Why Startups Are Betting Everything on Apache DataFusion
Discover why startups like Flarion, LakeSail, and major companies are betting on Apache DataFusion — the Rust-based query engine that's reshaping data analytics.
The Epochalypse: It’s Y2K, But 38 Years Later
Picture this: it’s January 19th, 2038, at exactly 03:14:07 UTC. Somewhere in a data center, a Unix system quietly ticks over its internal clock counter one more time. But instead of moving fo…
Power Grid Stability: From Generators To Reactive Power
It hasn’t been that long since humans figured out how to create power grids that integrated multiple generators and consumers. Ever since AC won the battle of the currents, grid operators hav…
Coleco Adam: A Commodore 64 Competitor, Almost
For a brief, buzzing moment in 1983, the Coleco Adam looked like it might out-64 the Commodore 64. Announced with lots of ambition, this 8-bit marvel promised a complete computing package: a keyboa…
A Friendly Introduction to SVG #ArtTuesday
Cool trick demonstrating the illusion of an SVG drawing itself, ironically displayed here as a .gif Dive into the wonderful world of Scalable Vector Graphics with this introduction from Josh W. Com…
Some thoughts on NixOS [splitbrain.org]
July 22, 2025: barely hanging on to the world wide web
More from the annals of disappearing knowledge. Chris Lysy offers an incredibly detailed analysis of how evaluation resources on the web have become impossible to find. (He also has a solution for …
Justin Searls @searls
The first draft of my "Full-breadth Developers" post included a throwaway line like "Forget 10x developers; think 100x" but then I came to my senses and deleted it. https://www.businessinsider.com/surge-ceo-ai-100x-engineers-2025-7
Scripting News: Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.
What makes SQL special
A step-by-step guide to building your own database server. Learn about SQL and improve your programming skills.
Why Lexing and Parsing Should Be Separate
Oils is our upgrade path from bash to a better language and runtime. It's also for Python and JavaScript users who avoid shell! - oils-for-unix/oils
If I ran NPR and PBS
Building community-driven public media for the post-federal funding era.
Why Apple Dumped 2,700 Computers In A Landfill In 1989
In 1983, the Lisa was supposed to be a barnburner. Apple’s brand-new computer had a cutting edge GUI, a mouse, and power far beyond the 8-bit machines that came before. It looked like nothing…
Components for Web Apps
XMLUI brings a fresh, declarative approach to building web interfaces using native, composable components—no heavy frameworks required. It's a promising path toward giving Picos the ability to serve their own UIs again, natively and autonomously.
Remembering Chiptunes, The Demoscene And The Illegal Music Of Keygens
We loved keygens back in the day. Our lawyers advise us to clarify that that’s all because of the demo-scene style music embedded in them, not because we used them for piracy. must feel the s…
Nobody Knows How To Build With AI Yet
The future of software development might just be jazz. Everyone improvising. Nobody following the sheet music.
message threading
The Human Experience in an Information Age
A Journey Through Complexity Toward Hope Beneath the Chaos
What Is Code? If You Don't Know, You Need to Read This
The world belongs to people who code. Those who don’t understand will be left behind.
Re-reading Technopoly
Technopoly by Neil Postman, published in 1993 “Can language models be too big? asked the researchers Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell in their famous…