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On privacy and control
I have 15+ years of software engineering experience across different parts of the tech stack including networking libraries, congestion control, performance improvements, Backend, and Android development.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 666 posts.
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AI employees don't pay taxes
Principal software engineer with deep experience in full-stack TypeScript, custom web browsers and real-time, media-focused systems.
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Google is dead. Where do we go now?
It’s anecdotal, I know, but my main entertainment business revenue is down 50% over the past 3 months. Our main paid source of leads was Google Ads, which have served us well over the past 10 years or so – I think I know what I am doing in adwords by now. Once per month … Continue reading "Google is dead. Where do we…
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LLMs Are Not Fun
I got into programming because it let me turn thought into reality. If I could reason precisely, then a computer could carry out my thoughts unerringly. I could step away from tiring, ambiguous human interaction for a while.
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Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
A Christmas Eve journey. Deutsche Bahn. 35 kilometers.
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Self-hosting is being enshittified
Self-hosting got harder in 2025. Here's what changed.
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How we lost communication to entertainment
How We Lost Communication to Entertainment par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment
When the world's richest man can simply 'correct' an AI to reflect his own values, what does that tell us about the entire alignment discourse?
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Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness"
Rob Pike (that Rob Pike) is furious. Here’s a Bluesky link for if you have an account there and a link to it in my thread viewer if you don’t. …
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A Proclamation Regarding the Restoration of the Dash
WHEREAS , the em-dash (—) has long served as the elegant scaffolding of the English sentence, providing the necessary breadth for parenthetical thought, sudden turns of phrase, and rhythmic pause;
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How I Left YouTube
What was the road like when I left?
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My 2026 Open Social Web Predictions
Predictions for 2026 include growth forecasts for various social media platforms, advancements in federated technologies, and anticipated shifts in how …
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Don't Become the Machine
I was recently recommended a YouTube video with the following title: Only a slave quantifies its existence through productivity '''''',,,,,,,,,,,'''''....
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Paperbacks and TikTok
In 1939, Simon & Schuster revolutionized the American publishing industry with the launch of Pocket Books, a line of diminutive volumes (measuring 4 by 6 ... Read more
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A year of vibes
A personal recap of 2025 and a year of a new style of engineering.
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I announced my divorce on Instagram and then AI impersonated me
After maintaining a total stance of public silence for months, I recently publicly announced my unexpected divorce on Instagram. I shared a picture of the divorce cake that my friends got for me, and shared a brief essay I had drafted the day before about the news. I had to edit it down slightly from my original draft…
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I wish people were more public
On sharing more of yourself.
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The gift card accountability sink
The gaps scammers exploit in gift cards are the result of deliberate policy tradeoffs.
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Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): An incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy
Gather round the fire, everyone, and let me tell you a story. It has everything you could want in a Christmas blockbuster: superheroes and villains, a car crash, children singing, a mystery to solv…
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Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?
I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic. My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a geotagged photo of a bench's plaque…
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Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
This week's bankruptcy of iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum, is about more than a robot cleaner. It's about monopolies, Wall Street, and economists leading America on a path of destruction.
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Prepare for That Stupid World
Prepare for That Stupid World par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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AI vending machine was tricked into giving away everything
Anthropic installed an AI-powered vending machine in the WSJ office. The LLM, named Claudius, was responsible for autonomously purchasing inventory from wholesa
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Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to prevent immoral activities.” No additional explanation was given. The timing…
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Slowness is a virtue
... at least when you're doing research, not development
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AI's real superpower: consuming, not creating
Everyone's using AI wrong. Its superpower isn't writing for you. It's reading everything you've ever written and finding patterns you missed.
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This is not the future
I thought about this when reading a mastodon post which commented on a news where a project adopted a "use Generative AI but disclose it" policy, because it is "the future" and "people are going to use it anyway".