amontalenti
In my lifetime, there’s been one ecosystem I deeply regret having missed out on: the Sun Microsystems ecosystem of the late 2000s. At that time, the company offered a variety of products that, when used together, formed a comprehensive ecosystem that was a fascinating, albeit expensive alternative…
It’s Friday at 4pm. I’ve just closed my 12th bug of the week. My brain is completely fried. And I’m staring at the bug leaderboard, genuinely sad that Monday means going back to regular work. Which is weird because I love regular work. But fixit weeks have a special place in my heart. What’s a…
Google has resumed work on JPEG XL in Chromium, but there is no timeline for Chrome release News Venkat Tech Journalist News 2 min. read Nov 22nd, 2025 3:41 PM EEST XINSTALL BY CLICKING THE DOWNLOAD FILE A message from our partner Fix Windows 11 OS errors with Fortect: Download Fortect and install…
Japan's high-stakes gamble to turn island of flowers into global chip hub 50 minutes ago Suranjana TewariAsia business correspondent, Hokkaido, Japan Getty Images Hokkaido is a tourism and agricultural region, but Rapidus is making chips there too The island of Hokkaido has long been an agricultural…
This essay is half of a 2-part series about ego, empathy, and humility for developers and technical leaders. For advice on how to execute the ideas in this essay, you might also enjoy My Working Principles For Managing Ego, Empathy, And Humility. In our daily lives empathy and humility are obvious…
I know, this title might come as a surprise to many. Or perhaps, for those who truly know me, it won’t. I am not a fanboy. The BSDs and the illumos distributions generally follow an approach to design and development that aligns more closely with the way I think, not to mention the wonderful…
I haven't done a full-system backup since back in the olden days before Dropbox and Git. Every machine I now own is treated as a stateless, disposable unit that can be stolen, lost, or corrupted without consequences. The combination of full-disk encryption and distributed copies of all important…
Remember when you thought age verification laws couldn't get any worse? Well, lawmakers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and beyond are about to blow you away. It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians…
Here is an exuberant, garrulous, self-aware picture about an ageing and egomaniac film director and his two grownup daughters; it comes from Norwegian film-maker Joachim Trier, who gave Cannes the marvellous romantic drama The Worst Person in the World in 2021, starring the award-winning Renate…
See all topics Email Link Copied! In taking on the role of a filmmaker in his latest movie, Stellan Skarsgård sniffed a chance at payback. “I mean, what an opportunity for revenge,” the Swedish actor said, his eyes lighting up. Sprinkle an idiosyncrasy here, a mannerism there, soaked up from seven…
Graph showing unequal income growth Global changes in real income by income percentile - v1 The Elephant Curve, also known as the Lakner-Milanovic graph or the global growth incidence curve, is a graph that illustrates the unequal distribution of income growth for individuals belonging to different…
As I get older, I increasingly think about whether I’m spending my time the right way to advance my career and my life. This is also a question that your company asks about you every performance cycle: is this engineering manager spending their time effectively to advance the company or their…
Digg was having a rough year. Our CEO left the day before I joined. Senior engineers ghosted out the door, dampening productivity and pulling their remaining friends. Fraudulent voting rings circumvented our algorithms, selling access to our front page, and threatening our lives over modifications…
↑ Talks ↑ Enough With All The Raft Posted 2025-02-2710 minute reading time This talk is an extension of my earlier Data Replication Design Spectrum blog post. The blog post was the analysis of the various replication algorithms, which concludes with showing that Raft has no particular advantage…
Performance Here are some simple benchmarks on an M2 Mac to give a sense of the state of the current implementation. This machine has 8 cores, but 4 big and 4 little, so ×4 speedup is possible with 4-way parallelism but less than ×8 with 8-way parallelism. As an easy first example, we should expect…
written on November 22, 2025 The more I work with large language models through provider-exposed APIs, the more I feel like we have built ourselves into quite an unfortunate API surface area. It might not actually be the right abstraction for what’s happening under the hood. The way I like to think…
The German occupation of Norway from 1940 to 1945 witnessed a remarkable building campaign to align this northern land with Hitler’s New Order. From gleaming highways and ideal cities to maternity centers for a purified Nordic race, plans to remake Norway into a model “Aryan” society fired the…
Credit: Robert Seymour / CC0 / Wikimedia Commons
A couple weeks ago I wandered into a digression about toxic workplaces. Consider this week’s Nightcrawler another small detour into the forgotten value of boredom.
Last Saturday, our four-year-old didn’t sleep well. So on Sunday morning, I did what…
Explore Best in Travel 2026 Poland Croatia Pakistan Search all of Lonely Planet Lonely Planet Destinations Not sure where to start? Get inspired by destinations chosen in this year's Best in Travel list. Start Discovering Not sure where to start? Get inspired by destinations chosen in this year's…
written on November 21, 2025 I felt like it might be a good time to write about some new things I’ve learned. Most of this is going to be about building agents, with a little bit about using agentic coding tools. TL;DR: Building agents is still messy. SDK abstractions break once you hit real tool…
written on January 24, 2025 Another day, another rant about dependencies. from me. This time I will ask you that we start and support a vibe shift when it comes to dependencies. You’re probably familiar with the concept of “dependency churn.” It’s that never-ending treadmill of updates, patches,…
ENOSUCHBLOG Programming, philosophy, pedaling. Home Tags Series Favorites Archive Main Site TILs Nov 21, 2025 Tags: oss, security TL;DR: Dependency cooldowns are a free, easy, and incredibly effective way to mitigate the large majority of open source supply chain attacks. More individual projects…
All great books are in conversation with one another, often asking many of the same fundamental questions, sometimes suggesting roughly similar answers, and occasionally doing so with knowing winks across the centuries. Plato’s Republic and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile are two such books, and since…
The artificial intelligence revolution will be only three years old at the end of November. Think about that for a moment. In just 36 months AI has gone from great-new-toy, to global phenomenon, to where we are today – debating whether we are in one of the biggest technology bubbles or booms in…
Last year, my wife and I were driving south on Interstate 91, somewhere between Vermont and New York City, listening to episode five of the Ram Dass podcast, Here and Now. It wasn't my first listen; I had become addicted to playing and replaying the first seven episodes, all of which come from a…
20 November 2025 When it comes to blogging there are few rules. Write content that is somehow meaningful might be one of them though. I think it’s down to the individual to determine what constitutes meaningful. In the hey-day, the so-called golden age of blogging, there were plenty of people…
Last week, Valve stunned the computer gaming world by unveiling three new gaming devices at once: the Steam Frame, a wireless VR headset; the Steam Machine, a gaming console in the vein of a PlayStation or Xbox; and the Steam Controller, a handheld game controller. Successors to the highly…
To mark Toy Story’s 30th anniversary, we’re sharing a never-before-seen interview with Steve from November 22, 1996—exactly one year after the film debuted in theaters. Toy Story was the world’s first entirely computer-animated feature-length film. An instant hit with audiences and critics, it also…
Training sessions in pop culture Leonard Maltin praised Burt Reynolds's charm in Semi-Tough, a film that parodied est. Werner Erhard and his courses have been referenced in popular culture in various forms of fictional media including literature, film, television and theatre. The original course,…
Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure 15 November, 2025 In 2007, I was spending a my norther-hemisphere summer experimenting with UI automation. Born of those efforts, xdotool came into being when I separated it from another project. The goal was modest - write some scripts…
Nearly everyone has experienced it: After a night of poor sleep, you don’t feel as alert as you should. Your brain might seem foggy, and your mind drifts off when you should be paying attention. A new study from MIT reveals what happens inside the brain as these momentary failures of attention…
When your application suddenly fails at 3 AM, logs will be your best friend the next morning. But until this happens, we often treat logs as an afterthought. Sometimes there is a discussion on log levels or wording of the message, but we rarely go beyond that. After all, what's so interesting in…
We’re rolling out changes to NotebookLM to make it fundamentally smarter and more powerful. First, a set of back-end improvements provide a major boost to performance and quality, and second, we are expanding the ability to set goals for your notebook, allowing each notebook to adapt to your needs.…
In August 2025, Google announced that starting next year, it will no longer be possible to develop apps for the Android platform without first registering centrally with Google. This registration will involve: Paying a fee to Google Agreeing to Google’s Terms and Conditions Providing government…
photo cred: my dad People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline. I’m not…
Competition The Pixel 10 Pro starts at $1000/€1100, which sounds like serious high-end smartphone money, give or take. The vanilla Pixel 10 goes for $200/€200 less, the 10 Pro XL asks $200/€200 more, while the previous generation Pro's pricing is more of a moot point, but it's safe to say it's…
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2025-10-28 When your Worker slows down or starts throwing errors, finding the root cause shouldn't require hours of log analysis and trial-and-error debugging. You should have clear visibility into what's happening at every step of your application's…
I’m on the right, biting a nail nervously. We’re in an Italian hotel because this happened on day 1 of our offsite. On Monday the AWS us-east-1 region had its worst outage in over 10 years. The whole thing lasted over 16 hours and affected 140 AWS services, including, critically, EC2. SLAs were…
I’ve been working with containers professionally for several years now, using Docker and Kubernetes daily in production environments. Like many developers, I initially treated containers as a “black box” - I knew how to use them, but didn’t really understand what was happening under the hood. It…
In the previous article about rethinking my backups I had a TODO item regarding moving away from using intermediary dumps of database content. Here's some notes about that. The old way Not ideal Redundant data storage Constant change The new way Learnings Avoid pipe confusion with…
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