Something funny happened a little while ago: I read about FreshRSS, and it sounded nice, so I installed it on a server and started using it . That would not have happened a year ago, but then again, a year ago I didn’t have any NixOS servers.
One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to riff on a passage from Robin Sloan (below). This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday ; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re…
Two pieces crossed my feed recently, both about Sal Khan and the AI tutoring revolution that wasn’t. The first was Matt Barnum’s reported piece in Chalkbeat, where Khan himself acknowledged that…
Git only tracks files, not directories. It will only create a directory if it contains a tracked file. But sometimes you need to “track” a directory, to ensure it exists for fresh clones of a repository. For example, you might need an output directory called build.
Buy an RTX 5090, the fastest consumer GPU money can buy, and you get 104.8 TFLOPS of FP32 compute. Ask it to do double-precision math and you get 1.64 TFLOPS. That 64:1 gap is not a technology limitation. For fifteen years, the FP64:FP32 ratio has been slowly getting wider on consumer GPUs, widening the divide between…
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.
It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. – Yogi Berra
If childhood is half of our subjective life, how should that change how we live?
How AI has changed the way I prototype, plan, and ship; and what I'm doing to keep my hands dirty.
Next week in Manhattan, the sunset will align perfectly with the east-west streets of the city grid. It’s beautiful, and people know it. Twice a year, crowds gather to see the brief moment when the sun sits perfectly on the horizon, framed by skyscrapers on either side. It’s called Manhattanhenge , after Stonehenge.
A look inside Copilot’s network traffic, harness, memory, and how context is becoming the product.
My little corner of the internet.
What if we dutifully communicate the risks and trade-offs to our organizational leadership and they still want to take those risks
What the accidental Claude Code source code leak tells us about the real value of code, product market fit, and why integration is what actually makes software great.
Last year, my wife and I went on a 5,025 Km Interrail adventure. We got the month-long unlimited pass and saw 10 Countries in 30 Days. That was a bit too intense. So this year we got the 15 travel days in 2 months package. We grabbed the 1st class tickets when they went on sale in December. Here's how our journey…
Essay I of Upstream of Everything
After a few weeks away from AI, I see my usage wasn't always productive or healthy.
In 2012, the creator of the xkcd cartoon Randall Munroe unveiled Up Goer Five — a detailed diagram of the Saturn V rocket, annotated using only the most common 1,000 (sorry, “ten hundred”) words in…
Lessons learned from piloting in the third dimension
After my first son arrived in 2018, I didn’t have much time to work on the time-intensive Mount Fuji pixel art series any more (again, I hope to get back to this somehow soon).
In Digital Media Lost the Newsstand. Micropayments Are the Obvious Way Back , Rick Bruner makes the case for giving micropayments another try.
3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. The problem is, the same dudes (and it was nearly always dudes) who…
Maybe it's because I'm writing this at 2:00 AM, which is about the only time I let myself experience sadness for a prolonged period of time, but every time I see a post on Twitter or LinkedIn about a new development in AI, I feel a sense of hopelessness.
It's possible to just connect two computers together with Ethernet and do a bit of IP configuration:
One of the most painful arguments I keep having with fellow techies is the question of whether you can distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text.
Justin Cormack, who worked on MirageOS back in the day, called me at the pub to talk about why unikernels are coming back. The friction that made them hard is gone, the operating system is design debt, and if you care about security you should seriously consider them.
