DVD shop owner vows to be 'last man standing' 5 days ago Rachael McMenemyBBC News, Suffolk Rachael McMenemy/BBC Steve Webber has been behind the desk at Northgate Video for 43 years Perched on the end of a row of terraces in a small town is one of the last DVD rental shops in the UK. In 2022, there…

Image Credits:Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services AI AWS says it’ll invest ‘at least’ $11B to expand data center infrastructure in Georgia Kyle Wiggers 1:40 PM PST · January 7, 2025 On Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, said that it plans to invest…

Platform teams are very common these days, and the approach has been widely adopted. When implemented successfully, platform teams become huge force multipliers, delivering a tremendous amount of value. But as with any engineering approach, there are common anti-patterns, let’s call them "sins",…

Altadena, California. (Photo: Getty) The phrase “women and children first” may sound unforgivably patriarchal today, but the rule expressed a noble purpose when it was coined. Namely, “In a disaster situation, we will not let the strong save themselves at the expense of everyone else.” When the ship…

The 2024 “winners” of the annual Shkreli awards, given each year to perpetrators of the most egregious examples of profiteering and dysfunction within the healthcare industry, have been released from the Lown Institute, an independent healthcare thinktank. The recipients are chosen by a panel made…

Google Home hubs get a big upgrade. Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge One of the key changes Matter is bringing to the smart home is a standardized way to enable local control of smart devices. This means your light bulb doesn’t have to talk to the cloud when you ask your voice assistant to turn it…

Jan 2025 Contents Intro I recently needed to learn Python concurrency. I always thought I’d get to that topic someday. That someday arrived. The best resource I’ve found is David Beazley’s Python Concurrency From the Ground Up: LIVE!. Not only does he do live coding without mistakes, but he explains…

2024 has come and gone, and it’s time for my annual post. What a year for startups—like squeezing five regular years into one. Do you remember the Apple Vision Pro, the DMA regulation, founder mode, or the o1 launch? All of that happened in just the last twelve months. It’s also been wild at…

The web’s caching model served us well for over two decades. Recently, in the name of privacy, it’s undergone a fundamental shift that challenges many of our performance optimization assumptions. This is called Double-keyed Caching or cache-partitioning more generally. Here’s what changed, why it…

As software engineers and technologists its common to have access to some powerful devices and super fast bandwidths. It’s highly likely that you will be developing/testing on a high end Mac (or similar) or pulling out an expensive mobile device such as an iPhone from your pocket. But we need to be…

ISC-licensed terminal multiplexer. tmux is geared for developers and admins who interact regularly with CLI (text-only interfaces) In the world of computers, there are 2 realms: The text realm The graphical realm tmux resides in the text realm. This is about fixed-width fonts and that old fashioned…

Hannah Arendt on the Human Condition: Productivity Will Replace Meaning 60 years ago, Hannah Arendt provided a haunting critique of modernity. Society will become stuck in accelerating cycles of labor and consumption, she argued. Free human action will be replaced by instrumentalization, and meaning…

Unlike the rest of the FreakTakes ARPA series, today’s piece does not have the usual narrative structure. It is, instead, a set of personal notes cleaned up and re-structured as a post. While the post is atypical, the ARPA series would be incomplete if I did not outline the factors that mark key…

Fixing America's elevators is becoming a heavy lift. Why it matters: The U.S. has about 1 million elevators, with Americans traveling about 2.55 billion miles a year altogether on elevators and escala

Twenty-five years ago, Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld Expo in San Francisco and unveiled Mac OS X, ushering in a new era for the Mac and the world of desktop computing at large. That sounds lik

Opinion The resurfacing of a 1995 Usenet post earlier this month prompted The Reg FOSS desk to re-examine a pivotal operating system flop … and its long-term consequences. A 1995 Usenet post from Gord

The first essay in Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood is called “Heart Museum,” and it opens with a long description of an iPhone emoji: There’s an emoji on my phone that I’ve never used, of a shell-pink tower-block building with blue windows. Smaller than an apple seed, crumb-sized—if…

Credits Henry Wismayer is a writer based in London. Photography by Lucas Foglia for Noema Magazine. We were halfway down the Point Reyes peninsula when Dacher Keltner wandered off-trail. He stopped at an outcrop of granite boulders, where the ground fell away toward Driftwood Beach and the wide,…

Entertainment The Future Of Blu-Ray Is Looking Bleak (And That's A Bad Thing For Everyone) By Jan. 5, 2025 6:15 am EST Sakchai Vongsasiripat/Getty Images With over 18 years of history, Blu-ray technol

(Image credit: Shutterstock / Blackboard) Gartner forecasts an acceleration of growth in 2025 with a 21.4% increase Cloud Application services will account for about $300 billion worth of businessIn c

Matthew Rocklin 2025-01-02 12 min read Hello Users, Teammates, and General Well-Wishers! It’s that time of year where companies issue year-end summaries, looking back on the past twelve months, acclaiming success, and forecasting incredible growth for the next year. I thought I’d do something…

The following is an excerpt from a private exchange. I am sharing it with permission, without disclosing the personal details of my correspondent. The idea is to share thoughts that others may have as well. The quoted/indented parts are from my correspondent. Living in isolation and having sincere…

The prolonged fight for net neutrality in America has shifted once again, with the FCC's resurrected regulations struck down by a panel of appeals court judges today. The decision from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, filed today, formally killed the FCC's April order that once again classified…

Continued from Part 1 where we explored Jonze’s allegory on the consequences of capitalism, society’s struggle to move away from self-interest, and the potential for boundless progress once freed from economic pressures Leftist Ideology & Public Transportation Favoring a free public transportation…

The politics in Spike Jonze’s Her are not the primary focus of the film. In fact, there is no specific mention of any notion of sociopolitical landscape throughout the film. Rather, eagle-eyed viewers may notice various breadcrumbs throughout Her that allude to Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) and…

Illustration by Erik Carter “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam,” author Frederik Pohl once wrote. AI has been the subject of sci-fi for so long it’s nearly cliche. Decades before anything resembling large language models arrived, creative…

In November 2023, after OpenAI added the ability for ChatGPT to generate images from DALL-E 3 within the ChatGPT web interface, there was a short-lived meme where users gave the LLM a base image and kept asking the model to “make it more X”, where X can be anything. A regular guy becomes more “bro”…

If you are a coffee-lover, you understand the welcoming feeling coffee provides when you’re trying to wake up. For those who love the taste, a cup of coffee can be enjoyed at any point throughout the day and is often used as a comfort, or for the pick-me-up the caffeine inside provides when you’re…

Photos by Laurence von der Weid. Remove Ads One thing is clear from the get-go: Werner Herzog, the enigmatic German icon of all things Art, likes for things to be precise. He makes sure I know this wi

Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, we cover topics related to Big Tech and startups through the lens of software engineers and engineering lea