Technology Commentary

Open source is more than just the code.

Fun fact: In Alaska, the permafrost makes laying underground cables impractical. It's also not cost-effective to build overhead lines suspended from anchored poles. So to get broadband internet to rural interior communities, they use underwater fiber-optic lines laid in rivers. Also mind-blowing is to see how much of the

Apple’s VP of camera software engineering Jon McCormack gave Nilay Patel a quote about how Apple views photography in our modern age. Here's what he said: Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened. Whether [...]

A few weeks ago, several hundred academics, students, and professionals gathered at the University of Pennsylvania for the 10th International Conference on Computational Social Science: two-and-a-half days packed with presentations and posters. This post attempts to highlight some of the work I found most exciting and briefly summarizes the presentations Kevin Zheng and I gave […]

They can invite to join the party, but you are still going to need those nasty capitalists to fill your cup

AI needs a lot of electricity and water to stay cool in data centers. We break down the toll prompt-by-prompt to show the scale of AI’s environmental needs.

Diagram of the OpenAPI Specification tooling ecosystem, focusing on how tasks relate to the specification

Net-zero emission goals went out the window with AI.

Artificial-intelligence models are typically used online, but a host of openly available tools is changing that. Here’s how to get started with local AIs.

The language Go hails from an era when programmers had smaller egos and fewer commercial ambitions. My generation of strivers has a lot to learn.

Matt Mullenweg unleashed a no-holds-barred tirade at WP Engine, which has been commercializing WordPress since 2010.

Don’t buy what Zuckerberg is selling.

Most of us have some form of an on-the-go toolkit, but how much thought have we put into its contents? \there’s a community of people who put a lot of thought into this, and EMF Camp have put…

Considering the legacy of rear-projection televisions, the most efficient route to a big-screen TV in the pre-LCD era.

“Welcome aboard to BigCo!” “Thanks! I’m excited to be here. This is my first tech job, even if it is just an internship.” “We’re going to start you off wit…

Back in August, Murat Derimbas published a blog post about the paper by Herlihy and Wing that first introduced the concept of linearizability. When we move from sequential programs to concurrent on…

A while back we got an anonymous complaint that Hackaday was “elitist”, and that got me thinking. We do write up the hacks that we find the coolest, and that could lead to a preponderance of gonzo …

There are various situations that warrant additional keyboards on your desk, and inputting a second language is definitely a good one. That’s the idea behind KanaChord, which generates Unicod…

Radio Shack had a long history of buying things overseas, having their name slapped on them, and selling them in the United States. That was the case with the Tandy Pocket Computers, which were in …

(This was originally posted on a social media site; I’ve revised and updated it for my blog.) The other day a friend asked me a pretty …

If you are a retrocomputer person, at least in North America and Europe, you probably only have a hazy idea of what computers were in the Japanese market at the time we were all buying MSDOS-based …

Swallowing the spatio-temporal vortex of high volume transactions in the 21st century

Although Linux runs almost every supercomputer, most of the web, the majority of smart phones, and a few writers’ ancient Macbooks, there’s one major weak point in the Linux world that …

Raw network sockets are a curious beasts, as unless you have a strong urge to implement your own low-level network protocol, it’s a topic that is probably best left to the (well-paid) experts…

Fixing problems that shouldn't exist

Can you take the lead in your interactions with businesses instead of just accepting terms? That's not just possible but necessary. Join us as Doc, a driving force behind Project VRM, shares his insights on reshaping digital landscapes to empower individuals and foster genuine customer-business re

The rumor mill is picking up steam that Intel might become the target of a takeover by Qualcomm. That feels game-changing and dramatic, doesn’t it?

The original Kodak camera changed photography forever.