Technology Commentary

For the final episode of our Good Web series, artist, designer, and educator Laurel Schwulst joins Mike to talk through her proposal for a PBS of the Internet. She describes how a PBS-like body that intentionally crafts the spaces, software, and information for a public good could crucial for creating an environment that rewards curisoity […]

Using a disk drive today is trivial. But back “in the day,” it was fairly complex both because the drives were simple and the CPUs were not powerful by today’s standards. [Thomas]…

Xe returns while on vacation where they built a new PC, made a SaaS to check web server headers, and re-evaluated how they think about complexity.

In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman says each of us is born with as much of a destiny, calling, mission, or fate, as an acorn has within it an oak tree. He also says “Reading life backwar…

Mastering the art of creating pull requests takes years, this article contains some tips and tricks that can help you supercharge your Pull Requests.

Allison Johnson for The Verge: Google’s AI tool helped us add disasters and corpses to our photos In our week of testing, we added car wrecks, smoking bombs in public places, sheets that appear to cover bloody corpses, and drug paraphernalia to images. That seems bad. As a reminder,

A look at why going multicloud is so vital for the stability, reliability and accessibility of your data.

In a modern car, your speedometer might look analog, but it is almost certainly digital and driven by the computer that has to monitor all sorts of things anyway. But how did they work before your …

For decades, the magnetic stripe has been ubiquitous on everything from credit cards to tickets to ID badges. But the BBC reports — unsurprisingly — that the mag stripe’s days are…

If you’re like us, you’ve studied the mathematician [Euler], but all you really remember is that you pronounce his name like “oiler” and not much else. [Welch Labs], on the …

Serena OS is not just another operating system—it’s a playground for hackers, tinkerers, and Amiga enthusiasts pushing vintage hardware to new limits. Born from modern design principles and f…

Although Ethernet is generally considered to be a settled matter, its history was anything but peaceful, with its standardization process (under Project 802) leaving its traces to this very day. Th…

To preserve the benefits of open source, consider nuanced licensing approaches that balance openness with sustainability and security.

An overview of options to deploy mTLS on Kubernetes

Many as a service software that needs to deal with taxes, paychecks have their own way to receive and send files. Usually you upload them via some sort of forms, and then you can download paychecks them from some webpage.

Research report on Fediverse microblogging server governance: risks and mitigations, moderation, server leadership, federated diplomacy, and governance tooling.

A software license towards a world beyond capitalism.

Honestly, it is a bit ridiculous to compare Postgres and ClickHouse. The two database solutions are as similar as grapes and grapefruit. ClickHouse…

Alex Russell is a self-confessed [Cassandra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra) - doomed to speak truth that the wider Web industry stubbornly ignores. With this latest series of posts he is _spitting fire_. The series …

It’s Mastodon, it’s Threads, it’s the future, and it’s extremely confusing

In 2007, a small team at Yahoo! briefly changed how we program the internet. This is their story.

Why is AWS deprecating a bunch of services all of a sudden, and what does it mean for you?

One of the things that happens when you spend decades (!?) dealing with complex application servers is that you kind of lose touch with what the state of the art is in fast web servers. The last time I remember really paying attention was in 2007 or so, when I remember someone going to great lengths to get 10,000 requests per second out of a single web server. I was impressed – that felt like a huge amount of traffic for a single machine to handle. I’m starting a new side project that will need a bit of static file serving performance, and I realized that I had no idea how fast the state of the art is in HTTP serving, so I decided to do a bit of measurement. After doing a bit of testing, it turns out that 10,000 requests per second is far from the state of the art today.

No.319 — Moving from naive to authentic progress ⊗ MUTEK Forum ⊗ Zero-carbon cement ⊗ How Sci-Fi movies have changed since the 50s

A quarter century after ‘don't be evil’ a judge has found that Google is abusing its monopoly in search. But no-one knows what happens next, and whether this ruling will change anything. Will Apple build a search engine? Will ChatGPT change search? Does it matter?

Overcomplicating simple problems and implementing overly elaborate solutions for show off

While high-voltage transmission lines are probably the most visible components of the electrical grid, they’re certainly among the least appreciated. They go largely unnoticed by the general …