Here’s a little secret: I’m terrible at swimming. As a kid, I took swimming lessons up to AquaQuest 3 (which seems to be equivalent to Red Cross 1), but I stopped because I was never comfortable with
Recently, I took David Beazley’s Rafting trip, an intensive course on distributed systems. It was a surprisingly wonderful time, and I want to organize my thoughts about it on paper since it might cha
decoupling yourself building a resilient identity system Here’s my theory. Hobbies are microservices for people. Without a hobby, you could become too dependent on your job. Without a hobby, your self
Jeff Bezos is tired of people judging him solely by his ranking among the world's billionaires. The Amazon founder argues there’s an “overfocus” in American society on where he sits in relation to oth
This is the seventh post in the Fastmail Advent 2024 series. The previous post was Dec 6: Twoskip and more. The next post is Dec 8: Guiding principles. There are many specifications that form the curr
This is the first post in the Fastmail Advent 2024 series. The next post is Dec 2: Thowback: security — confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Mission statements have a bad reputation. For good
This is the eighth post in the Fastmail Advent 2024 series. The previous post was Dec 7: Revision of the Core Email Specifications. The next post is Dec 9: Building a blog. When it’s a week before Dec
Are you planning a party night in, say, Ibiza in the near future? You can get there for around £270, round trip, in a little over two hours with BA. But why risk all the hassle when you can rent a pri
College enrollment is dropping at a “concerning” rate, according to new data. Data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows enrollment of 18-year-old freshmen has dropped by 5% th
Ready to give LWN a try? With a subscription to LWN, you can stay current with what is happening in the Linux and free-software community and take advantage of subscriber-only site features. We are pl
If you were secretly hoping Microsoft would lower the system requirements for Windows 11 so you could upgrade your or your family’s Windows 10 machines to Windows 11, you’re going to be in for some ba
During the First World War, a six-year-old Simone Weil learned that soldiers on the Western Front were not rationed sugar, so she refused to eat it until conditions improved. But whereas most leave su
In 1986, my quiet life as a doctoral student in philosophy was punctuated by a trip to Brno in Czechoslovakia (as it then was), where I found myself in a high-speed, chicken-scattering taxi, chasing a
Series: Uncovered: How the Insurance Industry Denies Coverage to Patients More in this series ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stori
7th December 2024 I’ve been putting the new o1 model from OpenAI through its paces, in particular for code. I’m very impressed—it feels like it’s giving me a similar code quality to Claude 3.5 Sonnet,
Former President Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2024 Obama Democracy Forum on Thursday night in Chicago. This year’s theme was “pluralism.” In classic Obama style, he illustrated th
We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound by the seductive illusion of the self, every single one of our atoms traceable to some d
Prefect has been a remote company since day 15. For the first 14 days, our small team worked side by side in DC, building what I envisioned as the city’s next great tech company. Then, when our CTO Ch
14 min read· Nov 1, 2024 The third law of photodynamics: For every piece of loudly-spoken advice, there is a piece of equal and opposite counter-advice. It’s natural for humans to consider the first w
People commute to work in Tokyo, Japan, on Monday, Aug. 21, 2023. Shoko Takayasu/Bloomberg/Getty Images Tokyo CNN — The Japanese capital is set to introduce a four-day workweek for government employee
The Library of Babel is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. It describes a library made up of an “indefinite, perhaps infinite” number hexagonal of rooms, each lined on four sides by a bookshelf of fi
The United States has one of the most expensive health systems in the world, hampering the country’s fiscal and economic well-being. In 2021, U.S. healthcare spending totaled $4.3 trillion, which aver
Share You have three days left, if you got suckered in by those omnipresent ads for Medicare Advantage and left regular Medicare for the siren song of cheaper coverage, “free” vision, hearing, or dent
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. Before getting on to the usual business I wanted to note that a few days ago I was more than a little surprised to discover
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter exploring the relationship between technology, culture, and the moral life. This post about LLMs, the labor of articulation, and memory began as what I t
I finally sat down and learned about it. Published inData Engineer Things · 10 min read· Aug 24, 2024 -- Image created by the author. This was originally published at https://vutr.substack.com. Intro
21 min read· Nov 6, 2017 -- I’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhe
No matter how hard we all wish it were otherwise, the sad fact is that there aren’t really individual solutions to systemic problems. For example: your personal diligence in recycling will have no mea
On Tuesday night, my daughter and her friends went down to Claremont, New Hampshire to see Donald Trump in action. She and her chums range from the not terribly political to those with the usual enthu
Last year I read a book titled “The Nature of Technology” by one W. Brian Arthur. After finishing it, it was one of those books that I wish everyone read. Especially if you’re interested in technology
Image Credits:Sean Gallup / Getty Images Startups Key leaders behind Google’s viral NotebookLM are leaving to create their own startup Charles Rollet 12:39 PM PST · December 4, 2024 Three members of G
I'm crazy about all of the Philips Hue smart lights I use in my home. I'm not so crazy about several of the ways I have to control them: from my smartphone, smart speaker or display. If you really wan
Developers writing enough unit tests? Sure, and my code never has bugs on a Friday afternoon. Whether you’re an early-career developer or a seasoned professional, writing tests—or writing enough tests
The shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was met by many people online with a morbid sense of inevitability. The often callous nature of the US health care system has long been a point of w
This is an interview I did with Professor Martha Nussbaum back in 2009, for The Stoic Registry (a web magazine for Stoics. No, really!) Professor Nussbaum, who is the Ernst Freund distinguished profes
You have joined a new startup. You are a multi-talented mega-being. You can work 60, 70, 80 hours per week to get the job done. You are a top-notch coder and designer. You won’t fall into the traps th
People shelter under umbrellas from the wind and rain as they cross a road near Shinjuku train station on October 12, 2019 in Tokyo, Japan ahead of Typhoon Hagibis’ expected landfal later in the eveni
When the lights went out on the BCS East-West Interlink fiber optic cable connecting Lithuania and Sweden on 17 November, the biggest question wasn’t when internet service would be restored. (That’d c
In what has become a bit of an annual tradition, I sat down with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at AWS re:Invent this week. Another annual tradition now is that Vogels, who joined Amazon in 2004, publishes
In a previous post, I’ve shown how to use the rayon framework in Rust to automatically parallelize a loop computation across multiple CPU cores. Disappointingly, my benchmarks showed that this only pr
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