Technology Commentary

You have to be a pretty big aviation nerd to know about [Willard Ray Custer] and his channel wing concept, but if you are, you’ll be giddy to hear about the semicircular profile of the HopFly…

Yesterday Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published a fascinating essay that reads as both a rebuke to frontier AI model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as a call to arms to the entire bus…

In this short post I explain how the "failsafe" production auth mechanism is designed for resources served in a CAP context.

How I lost patience with ‘AI’ agents

On designing finger-friendly interactions

How American Express uses cell-based architecture to deliver resilient, low-latency payments at global scale.

Once I wrote users.select { |u| u.admin? }.map(&:email) and realized I’d written Lisp.

An introduction into the memory-layout compatible data types in iceoryx2

PDF and SVG both support embedded scripting, and can respond to clicks, keystrokes, etc. Almost nobody uses it (at least for PDF), and many viewers skip it entirely.

When local-first beats cloud-first for SaaS: the sync problem, CRDT trade-offs, why Notion's offline mode disappointed, and a practical decision framework.

Eight long held and common beliefs about the network have been shown, time after time, to be false. What are they, and what do they mean?

I’ve been telling people for the last 25 years that Jane Street as an organization was just not interested in formal methods.

Developers share how they handle deadlines, pressure, and the small lies that keep teams moving.

You know the meeting. The board wants an AI agent strategy by end of quarter. Someone on the leadership team has read a McKinsey report. You've been voluntold

The Missing Optimization Layer in Agent Systems

AI-generated code copyright explained for builders.

BERTopic creator and Google DeepMind developer relations engineer Maarten Grootendorst has spent years helping practitioners build intuition for how AI systems actually work—not just how to prompt them. Maarten joined Ben Lorica to cover the enduring relevance of embeddings and topic models in an LLM-dominated world, his hot take that agents are essentially just an …

[drop_cap]A[/drop_cap]dobe isn’t exactly a beloved company these days. People begrudgingly use their stuff, because the Creative Suite is an industry standard (read: monopoly) or there are simply no worthwhile alternatives, not because anyone is genuinely excited about these tools. I’m happy to report that I (mostly) make do without Adobeware these days (shoutout to Photopea), […]

Hallucination isn't a bug in LLMs — it's the mechanism. The real problem is misallocating non-determinism, and why "SKILLS.md is enough" is exactly backwards.

AI Debt Bubble and the Post-Productive Economy

It’s an interesting new obsession of ours. Don’t get me wrong, disregarding context for a second, I think generative AI is potentially revolutionary technology, I just don’t believe you. I’m not trying to be mean, I’m trying to be helpful, and that means I have to be critical. I don’t like rhetorical questions either, nor do I think you’re helped by me beating the living daylights out of a strawman of my making, so let’s honestly grapple with this. I can’t promise it’s all going to be comfortabl...

The aspects engineering leaders should weigh before betting on on-device AI - and the one phrase it all hinges on.

We’ve talked before about number stations — mysterious shortwave transmitters repeating numbers, presumably for clandestine purposes. But, of course, the mere fact that they are unusual…

If you are an American of a certain age, you know the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, beating the United States to orbit. You might even remember ham radio operators tuning into…

My guess is that most software development teams in the world are at a point where we are drawing the two circles. Those are all the teams where developers use LLMs daily. But then you hear about teams that might be getting closer to building software factories. And that's the

I profiled the API surface of 219 of the world's top-ranked universities — the QS 2025 set — and found 634 APIs across 40 countries. The headline isn't the c...

Do note that this is a slightly sarcastic post, there is alot of sarcasm on the internet at the moment. Take a moment to reflect if you want to expose yourself to more sarcasm. There are plenty of …