It is the first of May, Labour Day. A holiday explicitly about work, which makes it a good day to ask whether the work that gets counted is the work that actually matters. Earlier this week I posted…

A Ritz-Carlton hotel in California closed an entrance after a hummingbird made a nest on a door handle and, amidst all the daily ambient horror of simply being a person with a phone in 2026, it is…

J.D. Vance and the rising pro-natalist right have an explanation for collapsing American birth rates: a values crisis . People are too selfish, too secular, too career-focused, too disconnected from…

lingthusiasm:What do you do when the only records that remain of a language were made by someone who had absolutely horrendous views of the people who spoke it?In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne…

The ethical, legal, environmental and societal concerns around LLMs have been well covered. In this piece, I’d like to instead focus on a couple of specific issues that I have encountered which…

twitter is dead

A talk with Jay Hasbrouck on organizational imagination, speculative prototyping, and how organizations can recognize unfamiliar possibilities before they fit the roadmap, the metrics, or the…

Retraction Watch reports on the mass resignation of the editorial board of Elsevier’s Journal of Approximation Theory (\(\mathbb{M}\)). This follows in close succession from the mass resignation from…

This article presents an untested idea for countering audio evesdropping of a conversation between two people. The idea is to use a flexible plastic pipe that leads directly from the speaker's mouth…

on building free public infrastructure for enjoyment

I wrote about Justin and Cerina Fairfax for Vanity Fair. I wrestled with this one for a while and it was hard to write for reasons you'll see in the column, but I hope it makes people think…

Benedetta Lobina * and Esther Martínez ** * re:constitution fellow and lecturer at the UCD Sutherland School of Law ** Co-founder and director of RECLAIM , a human rights NGO that campaigned for…

Last August, thanks to a column by Linda Greenhouse, I anticipated the voting rights decision that the Supreme Court just handed down, and said that I thought that it would in fact do some good--a…

My friend and I have a game where we talk about what we'd do if we were rich. Not rich like 'paid off the mortgage' rich. Rich like a man who owns a submarine he's never been…

Trigger warning: this is a report about how Debianism prefers abusers to those who consistently and compassionately helped victims of abuse.

I spent last week in Sicily, Italy for a perfectly organized Checkout Summit. A conference fully dedicated to WooCommerce, organized by Rodolfo Melogli. James Kemp and Katie Keith from the Do the Woo…

I Swear was a great movie experience for me. Highly recommended. As someone who has Tourette’s Syndrome, it was a tremendously rare and emotional experience to see someone like me portrayed…

Usually exploits like CopyFail tend to have PoCs or exploits that are architecture-specific. Not this one. Patches should be coming real soon now. Exploit tested using this deobfuscated version . %…

I wanted a general sense of how air quality looked in the American heartland. There were more sophisticated (and time-consuming) ways to obtain that. But within my time budget and my limited…

My timeline is full of discussion about AI, and agentic coding. It makes me sad how culture-wars a lot of it is. Very strident. Very “you’re either with us, or you’re against us!”. For what it’s…

Musings on uncertainty and the virtues of control, transparency, and small communities.

And now, here’s this year’s final (optional) prompt. In his poem, “Angels,” Russell Edson speaks of these spiritual warrior-messenger-guardians as if they were a type of endangered animal. Brief as…

Our paper on learning lessons from past REDD+ over-crediting came out in Nature Communications today, led by Thomas Swinfield , and is the culmination of years of work in 4C . It's a comprehensive…

Two weeks ago, the NPM endpoint that yarn audit from Yarn v1 uses, decided to stop working:

What a month! GitHub went down six million times, eleven thousand Vercel security holes have been unveiled, Copilot doesn’t accept new signups due to a super unsustainable business model (finally…

I read a piece this week that gave language to something I had been circling for a while. Nilay Patel’s The People Do Not Yearn for Automation makes the case that the tech industry has what he…

The urgency gap Over the last few months, I’ve sat across from product leaders and engineers in different companies and they all told me the same story: a frustration from product managers and the…

I A/B tested /ultrareview against my own pr-review skill. The ultra features add a verification step. That's it. The opacity is the product, not the skill.

A new thought post about my reflections on good and bad critisism on the internet.

If you go and look at TEAMS.md#accessibility in Forgejo’s governance repo today you’ll find my name there in the list. I’m very proud of this!

Yesterday, I deleted one of my Instagram accounts. I had two, actually. The first one was used when I was in high school and college, and that was where I followed classmates and friends. The only…