The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others. For example, it earns the achievement, coveted in OS dev circles, of being self-hosted. 1 TempleOS…
A recent U.S. college degree long meant lower unemployment than the average worker. That edge flipped in 2019, and the gap is now the widest on record.
I like HackerNews, but I don't love that so much of it has turned into discussion of a single topic: AI. This is a version of HackerNews, filtered to remove any article focusing on __AI__. Refreshes about every ten minutes.
A magic trick is a trick. It misrepresents reality. What the Cloudflare CEO published as bot traffic increasing, is a trick. He misrepresents reality.
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Stella is the companion app for Meta's smart glasses. Inspecting version 273.0.0.21 of the Android build (com.facebook.stella), I found the entire computational and storage stack for on-device facial recognition: three face models, a local database schema, a cosine-similarity vector index dimensioned to
An S-1 full of fantasies, insiders who will pocket millions, index companies that have changed the rules: it's all a recipe for regular people to have their pockets picked.
I gave up blogging a long time ago (apart from an occasional thing about ArduPilot), I tend to just write code and hope people find it…
A brief explanation of my pessimism about efforts to radically improve education.
The three companies (along with Mozilla, which is on one of their “ad features in the browser” kicks again) are drawing up a built-in advertising measurement system, called Attribution Level 1 , as a standard feature of web browsers. The system is intended to measure the effectiveness of advertising by enabling…
Paul McGowan makes stereos. To paraphrase his insight: The musicality isn’t a feature you add to an amplifier. It’s what’s left when you stop ruining it. To expand: Customer delig…
An investigation into collapse of Github and how the decay of our tech infrastructure is a crime against software. Detailed comparisons of Github, Gitlab, Codeberg, and more from a distributed systems and software performance expert.
Yesterday, a slew of Instagram accounts, including some high profile ones like the Obama White House account, seemingly got hacked.
The "Stop Killing Games" movement is making progress with the advancement of California AB 1921, a bill designed to stop developers from permanently bricking games when they shut down their servers. If you're a gamer who has watched a $70 purchase turn into a useless desktop icon overnight, you're entirely justified…
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I know the technology, I understand what it's doing and I know the impact, so I am vehemently anti-AI. I do not believe any positive out...
Across hundreds of Reddit threads and a small body of clinical literature, AI-driven displacement is producing an emotional category that most closely resembles grief, and the institutions causing it have no language for it.
We can laugh at them but we have to take this seriously
AI took the last of the wind out of my Open Source sails. I wish you all the best!
Be sure to use AI when making
Junior engineers are expensive, both in salary and seniors engineers’ time. This cost was partially recouped through code contributions, but today, it’s more effective to directly maximize the output of your senior engineers. The hiring market reflects this trend: senior engineers have an easy time finding jobs, while…
It can be hard running a small business. If you want to sell to a large organisation like the UK Government, there are forms to fill in, checks to comply with, tenders to bid on, and a hundred other things. Luckily, there's the RM6237 Low Value Purchase System to make everything better. If a department wants to buy…
Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem.
I wrote recently about what Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple are doing to your email: how four providers stopped being transport layers and turned into active intermediaries between brands and their customers, parsing, ranking, summarising, and increasingly answering on the recipient's behalf.
There is a moment in every investigation where the thing you have been looking for finds you instead.
Finger from 1971, Gopher from 1991, and Gemini from 2019. These protocols offer decentralized, terminal-based alternatives to the modern web. The small web…
TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired MediaWiki’s most influential developer and disbanded the team whose entire job…
What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard.
