Since my last post on alienation and social media, I’ve been thinking more about how I experience technology and a couple more paradigms from things I’ve read occurred to me. One of them is again from Marx, this time from another unpublished manuscript from around 1857, the Grundrisse. In these…

I have been aware of tarsnap for a long time, but only recently did I actually get around to using it for anything, as a result of my big personal digital resiliency audit for 2025. For those of you not in the know, tarsnap is “online backups for the truly paranoid”, and tarsnap the command-line…

(You can find my Nix config over on Github) I'm a disorganised person. My workflow is to bounce around a codebase for days/weeks at a time and when I come up for air I'll usually have left a slew of configs, tools, scripts, repos scattered around my computer like the socks near the bed, or the pile…

NGINX and Let's Encrypt share a common vision of an open and secure web. Now, with built-in support for ACME, the world's most popular web server, reverse proxy and ingress controller for Kubernetes can simplify certificate management for everyone. From the home lab to scaled-out, mission-critical…

11 Sep 2025 — shared on Lobsters, Reddit, Twitter, and Bluesky Semlib is a Python library for building data processing and data analysis pipelines that leverage the power of large language models (LLMs). No, this is not pseudocode. Yes, it runs. Semlib provides, as building blocks, familiar…

Virtualization Learn how to run Archil inside of a Firecracker microVM Firecracker is a lightweight virtualization technology from Amazon that allows you to run Linux-based applications in a secure and isolated environment. Archil can be run inside of a Firecracker microVM, giving these user-created…

Learning Elixir’s official documentation includes a Getting Started guide to learn more about Elixir’s foundations. Later on, it explores how to build projects with Mix and OTP. Elixir also includes extensive API documentation. The Elixir Community has also produced plenty of resources to learn the…

Source: Worry about stagflation, a flashback to 1970s, begins to grow (The Herald Star) It looks like we're entering a new age of stagflation—that toxic combination of stagnant economic growth, high unemployment, and persistent inflation that shattered economic theory in the 1970s. But the current…

I ran into an investor friend who was summering in California. He ordered a glass of Santa Barbara pinot and told me: “I didn’t drink for a year. Then on New Year’s I woke up and realized how boring my life had become. So I had a few drinks that day, and suddenly life had color again.” When I asked…

The systems that enable modern life share a common origin. The water supply, the internet, the international supply chains bringing us cheap goods: each began life as a simple, working system. The first electric grid was no more than a handful of electric lamps hooked up to a water wheel in…

In my last post I talked about how I spent a week heads down using AI to work on a greenfield engineering metrics tool. As I built it, I’d often navigate the web app and spot things that needed to be fleshed out. Sometimes it was a small typo; other times it was a bigger feature that was still TODO.…

Credits James O’Sullivan lectures in the School of English and Digital Humanities at University College Cork, where his work explores the intersection of technology and culture. At first glance, the feed looks familiar, a seamless carousel of “For You” updates gliding beneath your thumb. But déjà‑vu…

This is the first part of my series; the other parts are Java 25’s new CPU-Time Profiler: The Implementation (2) Java 25’s new CPU-Time Profiler: Queue Sizing (3) Java 25’s new CPU-Time Profiler: Removing Redundant Synchronization (4) Back to the blog post: More than three years in the making, with…

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash If you're like me, you probably also have many scripts lying around which look like this: Collecting massive amounts of data from various sources across your company's ecosystem. Sources such as Jira, GitHub, Google Drive, and Confluence. This allows you to have…

The Mob, 1935, by Carl Hoeckner 1. Introduction The philosopher Dan Williams recently published two pieces on social media— “Scapegoating the Algorithm” at Asterisk Magazine, and “The Case Against Social Media is Weaker Than You Think” at his Substack. As their titles attest to, both argue that the…

Imagine trying to build wealth in the United States in 1950. If you were a man, you got a job, bought a house, and went from there. This was an era where you could walk into a company’s offices, ask the CEO for a position, and actually get it. This is how Warren Buffett met Lorimer Davidson, a GEICO…

Imagine tomorrow that 100 random people woke up with an additional $10 million in their bank account. What would happen next? Do you think the majority would blow the money within a few years? Or would they have enough self-control to make it last? Despite what you may have heard, the research…

Optimization culture has gone too far. What started as a movement to save time or improve health has morphed into a never-ending quest to maximize everything. We track our sleep. We count our steps. We chase credit card rewards. We obsess over our allocations. And much more. While improving yourself…

Financial independence. It’s the ultimate goal in personal finance. But is it all it’s cracked up to be? Though financial independence is clearly better than financial dependence, many people race toward it without thinking through the possible consequences. As a result, they can end up creating a…

Table of Contents Remove ads Python is making history, and headlines. The much-anticipated Python: The Documentary premiered last month, capturing 34 years of programming history. But Python isn’t just looking back, it’s also moving forward at breakneck speed. The recent developer surveys revealed…

Last month, the Trump administration and Nvidia worked out what some have called an unusual and surprising deal for the latter to export its defeatured AI chips. That is, President Trump reversed a decision made by his own administration to decategorize Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s chips as a national…

Follow @popovicu94 I recently implemented a minimal proof of concept time-sharing operating system kernel on RISC-V. In this post, I’ll share the details of how this prototype works. The target audience is anyone looking to understand low-level system software, drivers, system calls, etc., and I…

Say you’re a senior member of your team at work. You’re 12 minutes late to the weekly staff Zoom. Once you’ve “joined audio,” the first thing you hear is your old friend’s voice. “There you are! So glad you could fit us in.” You laugh and explain the disastrous traffic, difficult drop-off at your…

Trains still hold a powerful grip on the American imagination. Last week, that fascination was split into two starkly different realities. In Charlotte a homeless guy murdered a 23 year old Ukrainian refugee on a train which the President even commented on. Meanwhile, Amtrak unveiled its NextGen…

When buying and selling homes, there is no national record of who owns a property, who has a title to it. The Planet Money team has the story of a new kind of villain trying to exploit that system. Sponsor Message STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Homebuyers have to ask, does the person selling the house…

Arundhati Roy’s latest book, Mother Mary Comes to Me, is the first memoir she has written — the book is, therefore, deeply personal to her and gives the reader an intimate account of who Roy is as a person. (There was a small controversy recently on Twitter/X on that word “intimate” in relation to…

Clint Bentley’s magnificent “Train Dreams” is a film of echoes. In its generation-spanning drama, life & death intertwine in the duality of the symbol of the train, something that represents both progress and destruction. The railroad tracks that expanded their way across the United States in the…

What happens when you put four of the Trump right’s leading intellectuals together in a room? You see what it looks like when a political movement gets high on its own supply. The conversation in question is a recently published two-hour video roundtable hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies…

SHARE  New research: Eight popular, commercial VPN apps operate deceptively and put more than 700 million users at risk of authoritarian surveillance. Tue, 2025-09-02 13:40 New research from ICFP Fellow Benjamin Mixon-Baca finds that eight providers of popular, commercial VPN applications appear to…

Director Kathryn Bigelow wants her new movie, “A House of Dynamite,” to sound the alarm on the dangers of nuclear weapons. The tense political thriller, which premieres on Tuesday at Venice Film Festival and stars Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson, follows White House officials who scramble to deal…

September 2, 2025 A few years ago, I wrote a paper on embeddings. At the time, I wrote that 200-300 dimension embeddings were fairly common in industry, and that adding more dimensions during training would create diminishing returns for the effectiveness of your downstream tasks (classification,…

I deal with a lot of servers at work, and one thing everyone wants to know about their servers is how close they are to being at max utilization. It should be easy, right? Just pull up top or another system monitor tool, look at network, memory and CPU utilization, and whichever one is the highest…

tl;dr: For years, we've been reading the Bitter Lesson backwards. It wasn't about compute — it was about data. Here's the part of Scaling Laws no one talks about: \(C \sim D^2\) Translation: Double your GPUs? You need 40% more data or you're just lighting cash on fire. But there's no 2nd Internet…

Review of Alyssa Battistoni, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton, 2025). Marxist philosophy is perennial in part because it ever blooms in new ways. This has been especially true of work in Marxist ecology and environmental philosophy. For a long time the operative view was…