This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare. One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the…
I accidentally clicked a shady YouTube ad that mimics an iOS “Storage Full” alert, reported it (twice), and Google still said it was fine. Meanwhile, Gemini flags it in seconds for deceptive design...
After I mentioned a Jurassic Park anecdote the other day , I watched the movie again. I must have seen it at least ten times now. This time, I researched every computer/software I spotted.
For this year's "I love Free Software Day" I would like to thank the maintainers of Free Software documentation, and here especially the maintainers of the ArchWiki. Maintainers in general, and maintainers of documentation most of the time get way too little recognition for their contributions to...
When I was going through YC, I didn’t mention my seven month old daughter to anyone. Now a few years later I have two kids, a dog and a very packed schedule. My kids are the best thing in my life. For years, my work was my life. Now my life competes with my work.
For eight years, I’ve wanted a high-quality set of devtools for working with SQLite. Given how important SQLite is to the industry1, I’ve long been puzzled that no one has invested in building a …
One of eMudhra's certificate authority private keys is the number 4. Not a number that starts with 4, or the number 4 followed by a few hundred random digits, just, 4... Another one is 56, and another is 115. I know, because I recovered all of them from their
A deep dive into the asset creation pipeline for Catlantean 3D.
You don’t have to shop on Amazon to pay Amazon's high prices.
An accessible deep dive into the science (⏱️ 30 min read)
I shouldn't have to be doing any of this, but at least it's fun.
The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet:
For fuck's sake
A from-the-ground-up walkthrough of how modern LLMs work, from tokens to transformer blocks to the next-token loop
The software development profession is in the midst of upheaval. Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is c...
A flickering fireplace, a softly lit garden, and a smart home the whole family finally enjoys.
Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.
An independent, non-commercial educational visualization of PostgreSQL internals. Not affiliated with Electronic Arts.
As someone who prefers using services via their websites, I’ve gotten terribly jaded lately. Almost everyone wants me, and by extension, you, to use their darn apps to consume content and off their web versions.
In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it: Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid software engineering organization. In April
For the last decade, fast-to-ship beat fast-to-run. Not anymore.
Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust ) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying
Adobe isn’t exactly a beloved company these days. People begrudgingly use their stuff, because the Creative Suite is an industry standard (read: monopoly) or there are simply no worthwhile alternatives,...
What happens when you responsibly disclose a critical vulnerability exposing personal data - including that of minors - and the organization responds with legal threats instead of a thank you?
For various reasons, I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection. I don’t want to go into the first point any further for…
I spent ages 14-16 in a maximum-security juvenile prison, became a felon at 19, lost almost everything to addiction, and later rebuilt my life through software, open source, and a few people who took a chance on me. This is the condensed story, written for anyone wondering whether they have a future.
The internal logic of the world’s strangest corporations
On Wednesday, NASA will attempt to send four astronauts around the moon on a mission called Artemis II. This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and the first time the 20-year-old Orion capsule flies with people on board.
I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.
As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis. People are literally token-maxxing themselves into hospital beds, scrambling to capture some of that market value before everything is automated away. I can’t blame them. Models keep getting better, programmers are being laid off left and right…
