A few months ago I was thinking again about Pavel Panchenka’s (LLM-assisted) “We’d be Better Off with 9-bit Bytes”, which posits that standardizing on nine-bit bytes would have saved us from a number…

Another reason for the disappearance from memory of the Bishopsgate Goods Yard disaster may be the disturbingly anti-Semitic content of the contemporary press accounts. These almost uniformly…

I've built a 'hive mind' of AI agents over dozens of repositories to surface organisational and tacit knowledge without gathering a room full of engineers.

EverQuest Legends disabled /follow to combat botting while permitting TrueBox and offering little evidence that legitimate players should bear the cost. Three weeks into EQL, the handling of the…

How marginalized voices, Indonesian cultural concepts like Gotong Royong, and the psychological magic of 'Bleed' can rescue your tabletop campaigns from repetitive storytelling.

It’s the same old mantra: vaccines are “safe and effective”. Neither is true but they keep chanting it till they believe it (like a religion) and they attack and are vengeful with any who oppose…

Atomic Canyon Launches Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant  Atomic Canyon, in collaboration with major industry groups, officially launched NIVA (Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant), a…

Software was never as predictable as we told ourselves. AI didn't break the promise. It exposed that the promise was always fiction.

On-call was calibrated to the cost of waking up a human. That cost just went to zero. Self-operating software is coming, and your rotation is the last thing standing in its way.

Tech debt has rules. You cut a corner to ship on time, you write a comment that says TODO fix this, and six months later someone pays it down. It is annoying but it is bounded. A senior engineer can…

ESPN built the largest consented voice-cloning operation in media and nobody is angry. The AI content that draws fury is the extracted kind. The line was never AI vs. no-AI.

This post is about a technique I developed that bypasses Anthropic’s Constitutional Classifier safeguards layer. It works by changing Claude’s internal state to avoid the usual activation…

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love assimilation.

A field guide to building a software factory that still has an owner.

On 6 August, GitHub Actions was degraded for nine hours. At peak, 71% of workflow runs failed outright on infrastructure errors, and three quarters of the ones that survived were delayed by more than…

20 August 2026 by Phillip JohnstonI have been thinking about this quote from Patterns in the Machine: Software is complex, challenging, and time consuming and requires skilled professionals—no matter…

I have just sent an open letter to the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the umbrella organisation for Wikipedia (and a number of other projects), expressing my support for Wiki Workers United and…

You might remember that I co-edited a book, Beautiful Solutions, that tells stories of solidarity economies around the world. Well, now it is A FREE, ONLINE TOOLBOX, thanks to the good folks at…

Todays big story, from Time, “Promising Results for mRNA Cancer Vaccine from Moderna and Merck:” In a release, the two companies report that people with melanoma who received intismeran,…

AI transparency should identify the machine, not give its provider a claim over human-led work. Imagine spending a substantial amount of time building a successful software company. You identify the…

These screenshots come from a YouTube video titled "10 Antique Typewriters in Your Attic Worth a Fortune! (Most People Don't Know What They Have)." The whole thing is AI-generated. It doesn't pretend…

2026-08-20 For reasons that are beyond me, corporations have decided to use a four-pointed star as the symbol of machine learning. Every time I see it, it triggers a Pavlovian fight-or-flight…

"We, collectively, need to do better about antisemitism and call that shit out when we see it."

“We can have billionaires or we can have democracy. We cannot have both,” says Gil Durán.

authored by Premmi Secret Tip From a Venture Capitalist The first rule of becoming a billionaire is scale. Fraud, it turns out, has economies of scale too. Steal a billion dollars from one person and…

This Atlantic article on "Why I Quit the Tenure Track: The insufferable hypocrisy of elite academia" is quite a ride. (Paywall workaround here.) This black professor, Tyler Austin Harper, gets hired…

In the last post, I argued that AI maturity is not about tool count. The real question is whether AI is changing how the company works. That leads to the next question: if AI is becoming a company…

Amazon would rather make your order emails useless than let you track packages without opening their app.

Ever since I first read "Burstiness and Memory in Complex Systems" by Kwang-Il Goh, I have been obsessed with the two formulas showcased in the paper. Burstiness (B), and its just-as-important…

One thing I’ve learned, as Atlanta has expanded its bike path network, is that the paths need maintenance. They need more frequent maintenance than the roads, and a different kind of maintenance. I’m…

A rainy-week rant sparked by a POTA comment thread: ham radio was never obligated to entertain anyone, and pretending otherwise is cheapening the hobby.

I don't want to read your agent wall of text (or any, really). I want to read what you, a fellow human, have written. I don't want to listen to your agent's music. I don't want to view your agent's…

I noticed something a few moments ago as I was having a cheese omelet on a stale onion roll for lunch. (Since there are virtually no bakeries left in amerikkka, just about all of the bread you can…

When a former colleague, who was almost always against what seemed like knee-jerk tooling suggestions and who constantly advocated for thoughtfulness and long-term planning, left to focus on an…

Ooloi's interface now speaks twenty languages (with two national variations), with varying degrees of confidence. I've added a Translator's Guide for the native-speaking musicians who can tell it…

Metrics can provide deep insights into our open source projects, but they can also be overwhelming, and because every open source project and every situation is a bit different, metrics require…

Every day, startling new accomplishments of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are announced, new records are broken and new problems solved. Things that were lately considered impossible are now…

I’ve been quietly seething for months now about the dumb emails I get from people wailing about my podcast’s invisibility on YouTube. Increasingly urgent, promises that this is the last time, more in…

Recently I ran into a strange problem with my Bluetooth headphones. They support multipoint Bluetooth audio, so they can be connected to my PC and phone at the same time. Normally the PC takes…

There are a few concerning media stories of empty offices and schools in New Zealand due to respiratory illnesses – coughs and colds and “the flu”. So is #NZflu2026 in Read More ...

Masking decides what you can see. Data movement policies decide what you can take.

Co-authored by Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath How much should urban land cost? Generally we can think of the price being determined by the agglomeration effects of the city…

I worked from home full time long before that global pandemic, before zoom even existed. I loved being in my home, in my community every day. But within a few years the isolation of the work got too…

1 min read As both public institutions and the physical landscape decline, spending on vehicles shifts from status to defensive consumption, driving people to build luxury ‘sensory bunkers’ that…

The place where I currently work is on camera all the time. It's not a great feeling.

Some stats from a contributor here. A quarter of Hong Kong’s population is over 65. It’s amazing things are still ticking over. Joel Chan at Numberwang goes into detail… Looking back in time, the…

Notes from a visit to Knox Makers in Knoxville, TN: how a 460-member makerspace handles governance, money, rules, and shop organization, and which ideas are worth stealing.

S3 launched twenty years ago as a simple object store with eventual consistency. Strong consistency, conditional writes, and Express One Zone turned it into the durable source of truth for…

I started Transformer Lab because I wanted to dedicate my career to the work that could have the largest possible impact on the world. I would like to take some time to walk through why I believe…