“The unexamined life is not worth living.” This famous quote comes from the history of philosophy, supposedly said by Socrates, as recounted by Plato, in his “Apology.” Over the years, however, this q
web-birthday-2019 transparent 600 #00669b Today, 30 years on from my original proposal for an information management system, half the world is online. It’s a moment to celebrate how far we’ve come, bu
5 min read· Mar 12, 2024 -- Original Hope Three and a half decades ago, when I invented the web, its trajectory was impossible to imagine. There was no roadmap to predict the course of its evolution,
Upon reflection, I’ve come to realize that the relicensing trend towards non-compete licenses has exposed single-vendor Open Source software for what it truly is: proprietary software in hiding (or ne
How many cores is enough for server CPUs? All that we can get, and then some. For the past two decades, the game in compute engines has been to try to pack as many cores and additional functionality a
“There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the tu
Subscriber-only Newsletter Ross Douthat Is the Internet the Enemy of Progress? April 19, 2024, 1:25 p.m. ET Credit...Alain Pilon By Opinion Columnist It’s unusual when you find a strong dose of pessim
Blog Needs a Name HomeAbout Python is Actually Portable Update (2022-07-27) : This post describes a proof-of-concept Python executable (2.7.18 and 3.6.14) built on Cosmopolitan Libc, which allows it t
Sunday February 27, 2022 — Taipei, Taiwan I got into computing for the same reason a lot of quiet young boys do: computers seemed easier than people, safer. I was probably around 12 at the time. I did
Photo by Astemir Almov on Unsplash “There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.” — Ernest Hemingway What is the greatest city on Earth? If you answered “New Y
On an early spring day in 1959, Edward Hunter testified before a US Senate subcommittee investigating “the effect of Red China Communes on the United States.” It was the kind of opportunity he relishe
AI isn't useless. But is it worth it? 0:00/21:51 Listen to a voiceover of this post, download the recording for later, or subscribe to the feed in your podcast app. As someone known for my criticism o
Introduction The PCI Express® (PCIe®) architecture has served as the backbone for I/O connectivity spanning three decades, enabling power-efficient, high-bandwidth, and low-latency communication betwe
👋 Hey, Lenny here! Welcome to this month’s ✨ free edition ✨ of Lenny’s Newsletter. Each week I humbly tackle reader questions about product, growth, working with humans, and anything else that’s stres
What would it look like if you were doing the thing right now? You know the thing. That thing. The dream that haunts you. The one you’ll make real just as soon as you have permission, get answers, and
Where does innovation come from? Startups. Where do startups come from? Venture capital. For nearly half a century, this has been the conventional wisdom of Silicon Valley. Venture capital is the life
The typical shell1 pipeline looks something like this: src | worker | sink Usually src will output lines of data, and worker acts as a filter, processing each line and sending some transformed lines t
Researchers have pioneered a technique that can dramatically accelerate certain types of computer programs automatically, while ensuring program results remain accurate. Their system boosts the speeds
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Fair Warning: this article contains plot spoilers for Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and The Curse of Monkey Island. No puzzle spoilers, however… The ending of 1991’s Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Re
Biologists like to think of themselves as properly scientific behaviourists, explaining and predicting the ways that proteins, organelles, cells, plants, animals and whole biota behave under various c
Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Slowly, that changed. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and
consciousness Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare By Dan Falk April 19, 2024 A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic
artificial intelligence How Do Machines ‘Grok’ Data? April 12, 2024 By apparently overtraining them, researchers have seen neural networks discover novel solutions to problems. Read Later Irene Pérez
After dismissing Mr. Williams, who was one of its senior news analysts, NPR argued that he had violated the organization’s belief in impartiality, a core tenet of modern American journalism. By renewi
With over one billion posts and 16+ billion comments, Reddit has 76 million daily active users, who spend an average of 16 minutes on the site per day. On average, about 1 million posts are added to R
Animation by Slate NPR, the great bastion of old-school audio journalism, is a mess. But as someone who loves NPR, built my career there, and once aspired to stay forever, I say with sadness that it h
If you scroll down to the end of almost any article on Newsweek.com right now — past the headline, the article copy, several programmatic ads, and the author bio — you’ll find a short note. “To read h
We are likely about 5 weeks away from Canon officially announcing the EOS R5 Mark II, along with a development type announcement for the EOS R1. Canon is going to be using Euro 2024 and the Paris Olym
The latest monthly update of the TIOBE index asks, “Is PHP losing its mojo?” For the month of April, TIOBE’s programming language index ranked PHP 17th, “its lowest position ever.” It’s not just TIOBE
As a geek born in the early 1990s, who has been playing with computers from a young age, I think fondly of what tech looked like in the late 1990s and early 2000s. So, naturally, when I got my hands o
When I started writing this newsletter, I did it because I had to write. If I don’t write, I feel bad - I feel like I haven’t created anything (as my job is really about convincing other people to mak
Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe something everyone at work thinks is normal. For some reas
Take your pick of any flagship phone — iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel, hell, even OnePlus or Xiaomi — and it will have a great camera. Not just one great camera, but a system of lenses (on the b
Credits Maria Farrell is a writer and keynote speaker on technology and the future. She has worked on technology policy at the International Chamber of Commerce, the Internet Corporation for Assigned
FOSDEM 2024 NetBSD 10 marks a new level of maturity for this venerable open source Unix system, which somehow manages to be both modern and retro at the same time. By our reckoning, including the mino
This essay is adapted from a talk given at California’s Novato Public Library earlier this year. There are ecological reasons to question how books are made out of trees but metaphysical reasons to re
Alex Garland has been working on “Devs” for more than two years, and there are still months of work ahead before the show’s spring 2020 release. Knowing the commitment required for his mysterious FX l
On March 29, 2024, a single message on the Openwall OSS-security mailing list marked an important discovery for the information security, open source and Linux communities: the discovery of a maliciou
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