Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. My father-in-law, with whom I was very close, spent most of his life on the same working-class street in Barcelona’s El Clot neighborhood. Born in 1929, he saw Spain’s bloody civil war taking place…

Series: Waiting on Paychecks: New York’s Rampant Wage Theft Goes Unpunished More in this series This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Documented. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. In the lobby of its…

Introduction from Jon Haidt: In my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, I found that ancient wisdom about human relationships, consciousness, and flourishing holds up well in light of modern psychology. But as the digital age drowns us in exponentially increasing rates of new content—most of which…

A Note from the Author: I am also releasing this series of articles on Linux Context Switching Internals in the form of a short ebook which is currently at an early-access discount at the below link. Paid subscribers get it a discounted rate. Get E-book at 30% discount As a thank you, I am offering…

31st December 2024 A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt

In this article, we will learn how symmetric-key encryption works from a practical perspective. In the “Introduction to encryption for embedded Linux developers” article, we learned the basic concepts, including an introduction to security, confidentiality and encryption, the main motivations and…

What would you give for another five years of robustly strong and healthy life? Your money? Your time? As progress in medical science and access to health care continue to extend our life spans, we have all seen loved ones living longer but with more ailments. Hearts, lungs, joints, and cognition…

This article is an introduction to encryption for embedded Linux developers. It’s the first article in a series about how to use encryption on embedded Linux devices. In this first part, I will cover the basic concepts, including an introduction to security, confidentiality and encryption, the main…

"You know... for kids!" The perfect New Year’s Eve comedy turns 30 Joel and Ethan Coen's The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) bombed at the box office but it's since amassed a strong cult following. Jennifer Ou

REVIEW ESSAY Democracy in Default:Finance and the Rise of Neoliberalism in America by Brian Judge Columbia University Press, 2024, 352 pages Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, policymakers have broken free of historical norms, channeling trillions—sometimes from thin air—to prop up the…

I love books. Each has its own personality—defined by its size and shape, the texture of its pages, the way it smells—and I’m addicted to that tangible feeling of progress as I traverse the pages from front cover to back. So, naturally, I hate e-readers. But physical books are big and heavy (looking…

Illustrations by Yoshi Sodeoka Listen to an audio version of this article. I first heard about ghost artists in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was new to the music-streaming beat. I had been researching the influence of major labels on Spotify playlists since the previous year, and my first…

Software is eating the world and I have snacks for it I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps, and I can’t stop How I tackled takeout, spices, and meal ideas with spreadsheets and Glide. Kevin Purdy – Dec 26, 2024 7:40 AM | 109 Credit: Aurich Lawson Credit: Aurich Lawson Story…

@Martin_Casado tweeted some wisdom (as he often does) in this: He asked what else and I replied with a quick list. Below is “why” these don’t work. I offer this recognizing engineering is also a socia

NOT (QUITE) READY FOR PRIMETIME Passkey technology is elegant, but it’s most definitely not usable security Just in time for holiday tech-support sessions, here's what to know about passkeys. Dan Good

The conventional party platforms no longer address or even comprehend the most pressing challenges facing American institutions. Economic mobility is down and inequality is up, while growth, productivity, and wages are nearly stagnant. Trust in government is at historic lows. Crime and drug abuse…

2024-10-06 I started writing this post in October, when Mozilla announced that it's going to become an adtech company. I got distracted by the professoring business, and didn't finish it until now. It

Neil Brown posted about what brought him joy in computers and the Internet this year. I agree that it could be a cathartic exercise among the gloom and doom, so I thought I’d give it a shot as well. A

Financial losses for today’s start-ups are much more common than they were decades ago, and the losses are much bigger. VCs are making back less from their initial investments than at any point since the global financial crisis of 2007–9. According to a study by Jay Ritter, only 22 percent of…

Edited to add: The main takeaway of this post is meant to be: Labour-replacing AI will shift the relative importance of human v non-human factors of production, which reduces the incentives for societ

In the previous Understand Django article, we covered the built-in auth system. That article gave you a chance to see the User model, ways to login users with Django’s authentication tools, and the fe

Distributed systems are characterized by nodes executing concurrently with no shared state and no common clock. Coordination between nodes are needed to satisfy some correctness properties, but since

If you feel a bit like a deer caught in the headlights every time you hit a dark road recently, you're not alone. Experts say the LED headlights on newer vehicles are, in fact, more blinding than what

One of the most magnetic onscreen duos this year is not a romantic couple or a pair of enemy-to-friend buddies but a coach and mentor and a young athlete. “The Fire Inside” is based on the true story

The tail, or fluke, of a humpback whale is identifiable, like a fingerprint is for a human. Wolfgang Kaehler / LightRocket via Getty Images An ambitious humpback whale is making waves in the marine bi

James Mangold’s excellent biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” chronicles Bob Dylan’s (Timothée Chalamet) arrival in New York in 1961 and his burgeoning success to his electrifying performance at the Newport

Borgmann's distinction between “things” and “devices” is crucial to understanding our relationship with technology. Traditional “things” demand engagement (like a fireplace), while modern “devices” pr

The English historian J.A. Froude was famously gloomy about the ultimate prospects for his chosen branch of literature. “To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not difficult,” he said. “