We get it. We’re living in confusing times. Reality manipulation and fake news are rampant. And at times you might be so discombobulated that the only way you can express your nebulous sense of disorientation is with a screencap of a male anime character pointing confusedly to a butterfly,…

The zoom range of 24-105mm is perhaps one of the most versatile options available. Typically, lenses within this range maintain a constant f/4 aperture throughout. While this is adequate, having an aperture one stop larger would be ideal. Now we have the Canon RF 24-105mm f/2.8L IS USM. When faced…

Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis became friends in the late 1990s, having bonded over their shared interests in power, society and the stories we tell about ourselves. Curtis, 66, is a Bafta-winning documentary film-maker whose credits include The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear and…

Introduction At the AI Action Summit in Paris this week, Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a broadly optimistic message on AI. He chastised the European Union for moving too quickly with preemptive regulations and indicated that the Trump Administration would not be following in the EU’s lead. I…

It’s a new year, and I’ve decided it’s a good time to replace myself as the CEO of Signal. I have now been working on Signal for almost a decade. It has always been my goal for Signal to grow and sustain beyond my involvement, but four years ago that would still not have been possible. I was writing…

At Terrateam, we are big fans of Fly.io. The service is hosted there and it’s served us well. Just deploy your TOML file, get your infrastructure, do something else with the rest of your day. One of the interesting sides of Fly is that they invest heavily in server-side SQLite. They’ve written a…

Image by Annie Ruygt We’re building a public cloud, on hardware we own. We raised money to do that, and to place some bets; one of them: GPU-enabling our customers. A progress report: GPUs aren’t going anywhere, but: GPUs aren’t going anywhere. A couple years back, we put a bunch of chips down on…

As the Trump administration and its cadre of Silicon Valley machine-learning evangelists attempt to restructure the administrative state, the IRS is preparing to purchase advanced artificial intelligence hardware, according to procurement materials reviewed by The Intercept. With Elon Musk’s…

FOSDEM 2025 Getting involved with open source projects is a great way to build experience in development, documentation, internationalization, and more – but it's not as easy as it should be. Last year, our own Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote that the graying open source community needs fresh blood.…

The Panic over the Imaginary Threat to the Canon 6 min read· Jul 21, 2020 -- Headless Statue of Hadrian, Villa Ariadne, Knossos, Greece (Source: Wikipedia) Agnes Callard’s “Should We Cancel Aristotle?” appears to be a brave defense of keeping Aristotle in the canon. But who is for kicking him out?…

There’s a lot of chatter in the media that software developers will soon lose their jobs to AI. I don’t buy it. It is not the end of programming. It is the end of programming as we know it today. That is not new. The first programmers connected physical circuits to perform each calculation. They…

Contents Johann Hari says in Stolen Focus that rats and pigeons can be manipulated as we want. Just give them food whenever they do what you want them to. And shortly after, they will repeat that over and over again. This made me think. In times when Instagram and other apps give us likes, hearts,…

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What happens when a dedicated life of the mind confronts the messiness of earthly desires? The Chicago University philosophy professor Agnes Callard, who in some moods believes herself to be channelling Socrates, was forced to ask herself that question one afternoon in 2011 when she was discussing…

By MARK HOLMBERG As the U.S. trade deficit soars along at an annual rate of a half-trillion dollars and the world starts digesting the implications of the titanic Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, consider this guy. ... For 30 years, Noel Dempsey has been picking at the bones of our…

I’m bored; you’re bored; we’re all bored. By our books and movies and television shows, the endless blandness of the Netflix queue, by our music and theater and art. Culture now is strenuously cautious, nervously polite, earnestly worthy, ploddingly obvious, and above all, dismally predictable. It…

For some time now, I have believed that when future historians look back at politics at the turn of the 21st century, they will place the blame for the collapse of Western civilization on the shoulders of one man, Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Though Berlusconi is out of power…

Matthew Strother (courtesy of Berta Willisch). This article is part of a new Persuasion series on the future of universities. Universities are in crisis—losing public support, shaken by internal divisions, facing angry donors and alumni, and increasingly straying from their core mission of…

In 2017, I stepped back from the tech industry. I’d worked in tech my entire adult life, but I started to feel ethically conflicted as major companies were revealed to be undermining democracy, forging a tech oligarchy that benefited only a few at the cost of the many. Then my Vision of Love First…

Boost Your Git DX second update out now 2025-01-28Today I have released the second update to Boost Your Git DX, my book of developer experience (DX) recommendations for using Git. Since the last update (2024-04-04), it has grown again by 28 pages, for a new total of 391 pages! Changes include:…

Elasticsearch just turned 15-years-old. It all started back in February 2010 with the announcement blog post (featuring the iconic “You Know, for Search” tagline), first public commit, and the first release, which happened to be 0.4.0. Let’s take a look back at the last 15 years of indexing and…

February 12, 2025 Why are scalable systems locally-inefficent, and locally-efficient systems unscalable? Plus, new book release! Sorry for missing the newsletter last week! I started writing on Monday as normal, and by Wednesday the piece (about the hierarchy of controls ) was 2000 words and not…

Chips Ahoy OpenAI’s secret weapon against Nvidia dependence takes shape Chatbot maker partners with TSMC to manufacture custom AI chip, with plans for future iterations. Benj Edwards – Feb 10, 2025 4:00 pm | 80 Credit: OsakaWayne Studios via GettyImages Credit: OsakaWayne Studios via GettyImages…

We’re huge fans of Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST) at TigerBeetle, which enables us to perfectly reproduce complex failures of a distributed system on a single laptop. But that’s not today’s story! We’ve added an intentionally non-deterministic testing harness, the Vörtex! TigerBeetle applies…

tl;dr In this article, we use Pulumi to spin up a cloud-based development environment that emulates GitHub Codespaces. We define the environment using the devcontainer.json spec and establish a secure tunnel to mount your local file system on a remote server. This setup runs on Hetzner Cloud, starts…

February 10th, 2025: Greetings from Oaxaca. What a beautiful place. We took some fun pictures. and oh, and I turned 40. I decided to riff on thoughts racing through my head over the past week. I don’t have a good reflection on what it’s like to be 40 yet as I’m only a few days into this thing. For…

Previously: Mid 2024 The landscape of AI tooling continues to shift, even in the past half year. This is not unexpected. This post is an updated snapshot of the “state of things I use”. Tools Work This feels roughly 85% as effective as Cursor, but the ability to incorporate enterprise code context…

And the Tragedy of Bidenomics Jason Furman March/April 2025 Published on February 10, 2025 U.S. President Joe Biden at a manufacturing plant in West Columbia, South Carolina, July 2023 Jonathan Ernst / Reuters JASON FURMAN is Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard University.…

Kenneth Harry Olsen was born on the 20th of February in 1926 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and he grew up in nearby Stratford. In the 1930s and 1940s when Olsen was a teenager, the electronics industry for the average person was essentially the radio industry. For Olsen, his window into that world was…