Technology Commentary

Why do we keep building visual programming environments? Why do we never use them? What should we do instead?

Computer scientist Lance Fortnow writes that by embracing the computations that surround us, we can begin to understand and tame our seemingly random world.

Now that our 1987 Canon Cat is refurbished and ready to go another nine innings or so, it's time to get into the operating system and pull ...

If you are of a certain vintage, this image is burned indelibly somewhere in your posterior parietal complex: Oh, my old friend. How it’s been a long time. Cultural Significance For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moiré Error from Doom? Well, no. You are looking at (part of) the boot up screen for the X Window System, specifically the pattern it uses as the background of the root window.

It can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong

A physical directory for exploring the vast poetic web

This article outlines exactly how autonomous agents transform the process of adding, configuring, and managing API endpoints.

Programming book reviews, programming tutorials,programming news, C#, Ruby, Python,C, C++, PHP, Visual Basic, Computer book reviews, computer history, programming history, joomla, theory, spreadsheets and more.

A super silly idea

Julian Chokkattu writing for Wired: Nothing’s CMF Devices Prove Yet Again Cheap Doesn't Have to Mean Boring What's most remarkable about these devices is the price. I have tested cheap and flagship smartphones for nearly a decade, and after setting up the CMF Phone 1, I was pretty surprised

“Be even more suspicious […] of all those who employ the term ‘we’ or ‘us’ without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that ‘we’ are all agreed on ‘our’ interests and identity. […] Always ask who this ‘we’ is” – Christopher Hitchens in Letters to a Young Contrarian. It is so easy to write “Europe must invest more in AI”, but it is a red flag that reveals sloppy thinking on two levels.

Are you using AI as a crutch?

How to convert strings and quoted identifiers in MySQL queries into their Postgres equivalents

Skribr is a tool to help you write better task descriptions.

Kyle (Aphyr) is the creator of Jepsen

Konrad Zuse was a pioneer in the creation of computing technology, a man whose destiny seemed to obstruct progress but couldn't prevent him from creating the first high-level programming language, one of the first computers, and the first book on digital physics.

Before I read The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, I only knew about John von Neumann in two contexts: that computers use the von Neumann architecture, and that he appeared in a story ab…

Iteration is a fundamental concept in computer programming and software development. It refers to the process of repeating a set of instructions or a block of

Posted on Friday 5 Jul 2024. 372 words, 7 links. By Matt Webb.

The pandemic made a lot of things obvious, not the least of which is that humans need social interaction to maintain good mental health. Sadly, many of us spend our lives physically separated from our loved ones by great distances or inopportune circumstances. That’s why a team of researchers decided to explore remote co-presence design […]

This isn't an exciting idea, but since I know a lot of puts debuggerers who are probably accustomed to printing plain text into a sea of log noise, I thought…

Greening the company also applies to networks, and it could soon be linked to network manager compensation.

When I started my career as an engineer in the early noughties, I was very keen on developer experience (devex). So when I joined a company whose chosen language was TCL (no, really), I d…

Thoughts on a new phone keyboard from an organization that is making a convincing case we need to rethink our discussion around FOSS and self-hosting.