I recently helped a company recover their data from the Akira ransomware without paying the ransom. I'm sharing how I did it, along with the full source code. Update: since this article was written, a new version of Akira ransomware has appeared that can't be decrypted with this method The c
A special appeal to support Res Obscura on its Crystal Anniversary
Pure scaling in shambles
Plus: My interview with Oscar co-founder Mario Schlosser
I want less Big Tech in my life. After years of dismissing Helix as too fringe and complicated, I've tried (and loved) it.
Some (well-known) consequences of AI automating work
How dare you!
HTML and CSS
This last decade has seen an inundation of new JavaScript runtimes (and engines in equal measure), enabling us to run JavaScript in all manner of contexts...
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
And a plea to think seriously about climate change without getting distracted
For the past 7+ years, I've been conducting a programming interview that has been a true personal favorite of mine. It was passed down to me from good friends (Jeremy Kaplan and Carl Sverre, and it was the latter whom I believe invented it). This interview has probably been
There are 35% fewer software developer job listings on Indeed today, than five years ago. Compared to other industries, job listings for software engineers grew much more in 2021-2022, but have declined much faster since. A look into possible reasons for this, and what could come next.
Yahoo let two future trillion-dollar companies get away. One of them twice.
GraphQL solves a real problem, but in many enterprise setups that problem is already handled by BFFs. After years using Apollo in production, I think the tradeoffs often outweigh the win.
Unleashing Film Grain Synthesis on Netflix and Enhancing Visuals for Millions
Axon Enterprise’s Draft One — a generative artificial intelligence product that writes police reports based on audio from officers’ body-worn cameras — seems deliberately designed to avoid audits that could provide any accountability to the public, an EFF investigation has found.Our review of...
# TLDR Datastar is a new hypermedia framework that makes building real-time web applications simpler and more efficient. It prioritizes server-side logic, uses “signals” for automatic UI updates, and leverages Server-Sent Events for lightning-fast performance. If you’re looking for a streamlined alternative to…
How the Elixir community can survive — and thrive — in an age of LLMs.
This post is written by a human being (me).
How 'lurking weasel' phrases skewed Cold War intelligence
100x More Efficient than Arm?
Documenting the evolution of macOS system icons over the past several decades.
There is a pattern I am very fond of - “one database per tenant” in web applications with multiple, isolated users. Recently, I needed to fix an application I had for a long time where this database-per-tenant multitenancy utterly broke down, because I was doing connection management wrong. Which begat the question…
CedarDB is a database system that delivers unmatched performance for transactions and analytics, from small writes to handling billions of rows. Built on cutting-edge research to power today’s tools and tomorrow’s challenges.
The last few days I spent some time digging into the recently announced KIP-1150 ("Diskless Kafka"), as well AutoMQ’s Kafka fork, tightly integrating Apache Kafka and object storage, such as S3. …
So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers. Maybe eventually someone will succeed and there will be 2…
