It's 1998, the middle of the dot-com boom. Portals are advertising on TV, web developers are fighting browser companies, Microsoft and Amazon are gaining power, and Netscape is going open source. By | July 15, 2025 | Tags: Dot-com, Yearly Reviews, 1998 Do you Yahoo!?; a 1998 TV advert. For web…

For most of the 2010s, I was a religious user of Yelp, an app for finding and reviewing restaurants and other local businesses. The red-and-white interface became a trusted source of recommendations when at home in New York or abroad. In Berlin, Kyoto and Reykjavík, I searched for coffee shops, and…

Last week I released Protocollie. Built in 4 days with languages I don’t know, without even directly touching the code. People keep asking “how?” but I’m not entirely sure it’ll work the same way twice. We’re all making this up as we go. The Great Experiment Nobody's Running the Same Way There's…

Tl;dr: After five years of using Matrix.org/Element as my primary communication platform, and rooting for it, and promoting it, and enduring its many quirks, I’ve decided to move on (or rather back). Despite promising ideals and growing institutional adoption, the network remains slow, unreliable,…

I started to code more in Python around 6 months ago. Why? Because of AI, obviously. It’s clear (to me) that big money opportunities are all over AI these days. And guess what’s the de facto programming language for AI? Yep, that sneaky one. I had used Python before, but only for small scripts. For…

It’s as if the smell of burnt plastic from a dollar store has permeated the world. Things are worse: chipboard furniture, T-shirts unrecognizable after a second wash, packaged foods with more preservatives than ingredients. Airplane seats turned into backrests. Automatic restroom lights that turn…

Jul 20, 2025 2 min read Write for InfoQ Feed your curiosity. Help 550k+ global senior developers each month stay ahead. Get in touch Listen to this article - 0:00 Audio ready to play 0:00 0:00 Reading list A recent study challenges the widespread belief that AI tools accelerate software development.…

I feel like the ground is shifting beneath my feet. Several times in the last few weeks I’ve seen people I respect talk about how they use a generative AI assistant when coding, or criticize those that are critical of generative AI. People who were, themselves, critical of generative AI in recent…

NEW YORK (AP) — The lights are on at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau across the street from the White House, and employees still get paid. But, in practice, the bureau has been mostly inoperable for nearly six months. CFPB employees say they essentially spend the workday sitting on their…

I left OpenAI three weeks ago. I had joined the company back in May 2024. I wanted to share my reflections because there's a lot of smoke and noise around what OpenAI is doing, but not a lot of first-hand accounts of what the culture of working there actually feels like. Nabeel Quereshi has an…

13th July 2025 Today is the 20th anniversary of the first commit to the public Django repository! Ten years ago we threw a multi-day 10th birthday party for Django back in its birthtown of Lawrence, Kansas. As a personal celebration of the 20th, I’m revisiting the talk I gave at that event and…

DuckDB is portable, easy to use, and ducking fast! We at MotherDuck put our money where our beaks are and embarked on a journey to build a new type of serverless data warehouse based on DuckDB. This means extending DuckDB beyond its design as an embedded, local, single-player analytics database, and…

Medium’s recap, financial turnaround, and difficult path back to health. Tony Stubblebine 18 min read·4 hours ago -- I’m gonna write the wonky post of Medium’s turnaround. I’m not sure if a company is allowed to be this blunt about how bad things were. But it’s very much of the Medium ethos that if…

Few places are as comfortable with architectural variety as New York, a city that has always reinvented itself, but never thrown away its past. As a result, it boasts one of the liveliest mixes of structures in the world, many of which are marquee examples of their eras. Here are 15 of the Big…

“This is such a race for being the science powerhouse that you never fully recover,” says Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences. “You might accelerate back up to 60, but you can’t make up for those years when you were at a standstill while the competition was racing ahead.”…

Table of Contents Table of Contents Why Warren Buffett Says Jack Bogle Probably Did More for American Investors Than Anyone Else By Daniel Liberto Daniel Liberto is a journalist with over 10 years of experience working with publications such as the Financial Times, The Independent, and Investors…

Speaking to AI podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Anthropic’s Sholto Douglas said he predicted there would be a “drop in white-collar workers” over the next two to five years, even if current AI progress stalls. “There is this whole spectrum of crazy futures. But the one that I feel we’re almost guaranteed…

Hypercard Hype 30-plus years of HyperCard, the missing link to the Web From the archives: Before the World Wide Web did anything, HyperCard did everything. Matthew Lasar – May 25, 2019 9:56 am | 230 The Computer Lab's Beyond Cyberpunk Hypercard stack Credit: Beyond Cyberpunk! The Computer Lab's…

Every week a new thread emerges on Reddit asking about the difference between MCP and API. I've tried summarizing everything that's been said about MCP vs API in a single post (and a single table). AspectTraditional APIs (REST/GraphQL)Model Context Protocol (MCP)What it isInterface styles (REST,…

Bernie Sanders says it over and over again: 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. But Matt Darling, formerly of the Niskanen Center, swears it’s not true, and Dylan Matthews of Vox calls it a damned lie. Even Matt Yglesias is apparently on the case, but I’m blocked from seeing his posts. Who’s…

6th June 2025 I presented an invited keynote at the AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco this week. This is my third time speaking at the event—here are my talks from October 2023 and June 2024. My topic this time was “The last six months in LLMs”—originally planned as the last year, but so…

Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa, in the 1890s Let’s start with one of those insights that are as obvious as they are easy to forget: if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field. If you want to learn writing, read great writers, etc. But this is not…

I decided to write down some thoughts on agentic coding and why it’s a very hyped wrong turn. Let me start with some background on my LLM experience. I adopted LLMs into my work in Aug 2020. I was sold when I saw that GPT-3 could generate usable SQL statements. Something that used to take 4-8 hours…

Startup Equity 101 I am writing this essay because I believe that money is both useful and worth thinking as little as possible about. No one I know joins a startup to learn acronyms about equity and stock options. But some of those acronyms might have serious impacts on your life (or, at least,…

written on Wednesday, June 4, 2025 At the moment I'm working on a new project. Even over the last two months, the way I do this has changed profoundly. Where I used to spend most of my time in Cursor, I now mostly use Claude Code, almost entirely hands-off. Do I program any faster? Not really. But…

Parenthood has made me an easy (or at least easier) mark for stories about how social media and other novel attention-farming technologies are frying our childrens’ brains. And so I read James D. Walsh’s recent piece about higher education’s epidemic of AI-powered cheating with a sense of alarm that…

My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst…

LLM agents make bad pairs because they code faster than humans think. I'll admit, I've had a lot of fun using GitHub Copilot's agent mode in VS Code this month. It's invigorating to watch it effortlessly write a working method on the first try. It's a relief when the agent unblocks me by reaching…

Today, the Guardian launches a unique new tool for protecting journalistic sources. Secure Messaging is an important new technological innovation that will make it easier for people to share confidential information with us. Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing has always taken bravery. As threats to…

In this post I’ll expose my current theory of agentic programming: people are amazing at adapting the tools they’re given and totally underestimate the extent to which they do it, and the amount of skill we build doing that is an incidental consequence of how badly the tools are designed. I’ll first…

intel outside Apple details the end of Intel Mac support and a phaseout for Rosetta 2 Rosetta app translation features for Intel apps won't stay around indefinitely. Andrew Cunningham – Jun 9, 2025 6:37 pm | 14 Credit: Aurich Lawson Credit: Aurich Lawson Story text Size Width * Links * Subscribers…

Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET Once upon a time, free access to AI chatbots was the standard. However, OpenAI launched its ChatGPT Plus plan, and it was met with high demand; other companies followed suit. Anthropic's counterpart, Claude Pro, just got an upgrade, making it even more robust an offer.…

The Thunderbolt and broader USB-C hub space is crowded with options from budget to premium, offering a dizzying array of ports. ProGrade, makers of excellent high-performance storage, are diving into this space with their first hub: a Thunderbolt 4–based hub designed around their card reader…

the original Mac artist Bill Atkinson, architect of the Mac’s graphical soul, dies at 74 Creator of MacPaint, HyperCard, and pull-down menus shaped modern computing. Benj Edwards – Jun 9, 2025 8:30 AM | 69 Bill Atkinson in 1987. Credit: Michel BARET via Getty Images Bill Atkinson in 1987. Credit:…

Key takeaways Amazon plans to invest at least $20 billion in Pennsylvania to expand its AI infrastructure, creating 1,250 new high-skilled jobs and supporting thousands more in the AWS data center supply chain.Since 2010, Amazon has invested $26 billion in Pennsylvania, contributing more than $26…