Technology Commentary

Most “risks in software development” lists are project-manager checklists. The real risk is knowing the blast radius of each change, and letting it set how

Naming in software goes way beyond any aesthetics. Good naming minimizes reconstruction work. Here is the style and habits that I've picked up.

Applying Alexis King's parse-don't-validate principle in TypeScript, where the type system fights back just enough to be annoying.

The early web was clunky, magical, and personal

A popular way to explain how current LLMs work is to say that “all” they do is predict the next most likely word in a sentence. From one perspective, this is correct. Trained on all human language, the LLMs distilled … Continue reading →

Perhaps sometimes we really should just phone it in

By Christos G. Bampis, Zhi Li, Kyle Swanson, Nil Fons Miret and Pavan Madhusudanarao

Mozilla is trying to innovate and bring new features to Firefox, but the browser continues to lose users. Despite these concerning market trends, the company is actively...

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 …