We recently published a blog post with our reaction to the new Google Developer Program and how it impacts your freedom to use the devices that you own in the ways that you want. The post garnered quite a lot of feedback and interest from the community and press, as well as various civil society…

This article was adapted from a Google Tech on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT episode and post it in your office. By Arham Jain Is your code a tangled mess of business logic and side effects? Mixing database calls, network requests, and other…

I now think that AI/LLMs suck the joy out of programming. I’ve used spicy auto-complete, as well as agents running in my IDE, in my CLI, or on GitHub’s server-side. I’ve been experimenting enough with LLM/AI-driven programming to have an opinion on it. And it kind of sucks. I started programming…

By Kanu Tewary and Andrew Trenk Tech on the Toilet (TotT) is a weekly one-page publication about software development that is posted in bathrooms in Google offices worldwide. At Google, TotT is a trusted source for high quality technical content and software engineering best practices. TotT episodes…

One year from now, with the release of Chrome 154 in October 2026, we will change the default settings of Chrome to enable “Always Use Secure Connections”. This means Chrome will ask for the user's permission before the first access to any public site without HTTPS. The “Always Use Secure…

Follow @popovicu94 If you carefully read the Linux kernel docs, you will find an interesting statement: Linux has also been ported to itself. You can now run the kernel as a userspace application - this is called UserMode Linux (UML). Today, we’ll explore how you can start an unconventional VM by…

Over the past three months, a team of experienced, like-minded engineers and I have been building something really cool within Amazon Bedrock. While I'm pretty excited about what we are building, there is another unique thing about our team - most of our code is written by AI agents such as Amazon Q…

Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com In Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling 2016 memoir of “a family and a culture in crisis,” J.D. Vance, now vice-president of the United States, gives…

NEW YORK (AP) — The trouble started every day at around 3 p.m., after Cathy Higgins had spent five or six hours staring at an array of computer screens at her desk. Her university job overseeing research projects involved peering closely at numbers and details on contracts, applications and budgets.…

TikTok and airlines have something in common with your search engine, your grocery app, and (increasingly) your car: They start out great, lock you in, and then quietly get worse while you keep using them. That very familiar decline now has a catchy name: “enshittification.” Cory Doctorow has been…

Welcome to the Post-Naive Internet Era Severin Matusek, Nick Houde and Paloma Moniz Building the culture we want requires a radical change in mindset, and action. The dream of a free and open Internet isn't dead—but in 2025, it's definitely more complicated. Published Oct. 15, 2025 Share this! We…

When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. Shareware demo downloaded from a BBS? Go ahead! Dodgy code you wrote yourself at 2 AM? Absolutely. The…

People often ask me what I mean when I say “JPEG XL is simply the best thought out and forward thinking image formats there is. Nothing else is close.” This is article is just one example of why. When I heard that JPEG XL’s encoder doesn’t care about bit depth, it sounded almost reckless (and I was…

Driving on one of New York’s poorly maintained and crowded roads, I found myself in a situation one can more safely observe through numerous YouTube ‘bad driver’ videos: a driver for whom all other traffic apparently ceased to exist confidently pulled into a lane I already happened to occupy. After…

I first heard of Mark Fisher when I downloaded a large torrent file advertising itself as some ‘Academic and Theoretical eBook Megapack’ that contained a fairly heterogenous mix of classic texts in the social sciences, philosophy, literary theory, feminism, and economics. This was in 2015, when I…

GitHub Pages, our static site hosting service, has always had a very simple architecture. From launch up until around the beginning of 2015, the entire service ran on a single pair of machines (in active/standby configuration) with all user data stored across 8 DRBD backed partitions. Every 30…

I was privileged to deliver the opening keynote at this month's FediForum, a conference for people building and supporting the open social web. My talk touched on what's happening now, drew on my experiences building Elgg and Known and investing at Matter Ventures, and gave participants three…

written on October 17, 2025 In August I wrote about my experiments with replacing MCP (Model Context Protocol) with code. In the time since I utilized that idea for exploring non-coding agents at Earendil. And I’m not alone! In the meantime, multiple people have explored this space and I felt it was…

Over the years, acronyms have come and gone to describe America’s tech darlings — the companies college grads dream of joining and Wall Street investors love to watch. First, it was FAANG: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google.Then came the Magnificent Seven.Now, in the age of generative AI, a…

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works Home / Latest / Opinion / Here’s why I prefer to shoot with older Canon EF lenses Dan Mold 19 October 2025 / 10:30 BST17 October 2025 / 11:11 BST Canon EF 50mm f1.2 L USM As a photographer shooting…

by Gary Borjesson To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for,…

This is a story you know, right? It’s early in the war and western Europe has fallen. Only the Channel stands between Britain and the fascist yoke; only Atlantic shipping lanes offer hope of the population continuing to be fed, clothed and armed. But hunting “wolf packs” of Nazi U-boats pick off…

In a world with over five million podcasts, Dwarkesh Patel stands out as an unexpected trailblazer. At just 23 years old, he has caught the attention of influential figures such as Jeff Bezos, Noah Smith, Nat Friedman, and Tyler Cowen, who have all praised his interviews — the latter describing…

Werner Herzog on Psychotherapy: A Review of Into the Abyss by Werner Herzog by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Oct 19, 2025 | A Review of Into the Abyss by Werner Herzog Trigger Warning: This essay discusses capital punishment, murder, violence, death, and contains descriptions of…

Edward Hopper, Ground Swell, 1939, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA. Historical Context Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was an American painter known for his images reflecting isolation and loneliness like his most famous painting, Nighthawks. He was born in Nyack, New York, a port on the…

Since it was made free to download, install and use for whatever you want, VMware Workstation Pro (and macOS counterpart Fusion Pro) has continued to receive frequent updates — the latest of which landed this week. Now sporting a new date-based versioning scheme, VMware Workstation Pro 25H2 is a…

I have a friend named Gerry. I didn’t have much choice about being Gerry’s friend. If Gerry decides you’re going to be his friend, you don’t have much choice about it. He calls. He invites. He emails. If you don’t answer, if you can’t make it, if you make plans and then cancel, he doesn’t care. He…

See all topics Email Link Copied! Over the next five years, New York City will welcome two new momentous spaces for the arts, both along Manhattan’s iconic Fifth Avenue, some 40 blocks apart. The first is an airy new $550-million wing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s modern and contemporary…

Let’s start with sharks were many of us started: with the film that made millions of people afraid to go in the water. In 1975 the shark had long been a mythic figure, the ultimate terror of the deep, but Stephen Spielberg’s adaptation of Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel captured the popular imagination.…

Ever since DeepSeek burst onto the scene in January, momentum has grown around open source Chinese artificial intelligence models. Some researchers are pushing for an even more open approach to building AI that allows model-making to be distributed across the globe. Prime Intellect, a startup…

Taylor Eastman bringing the youth and athleticism to the USSCA Women’s North American Championship, hiking to an overall win. William Crawford / Harbor Pictures Company Lake Wawasee, Indiana, is no stranger to Sunfish history. The Wawasee Yacht Club has been hosting sailors for decades, and when the…

Natural Sciences October 8, 2025 A built-in ‘off switch’ to stop persistent pain J. Nicholas Betley has led collaborative research seeking the neural basis of long-term sustained pain and finds that a critical hub in the brainstem holds a mechanism for stopping pain signals from reaching the rest of…

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works Home / Latest / Opinion / Are DSLRs really still better than mirrorless cameras? 5 reasons why DSLRs are still better than mirrorless Joshua Waller 1 October 2025 / 10:55 BST2 October 2025 / 09:50…

The “I drink your milkshake” is one of the most unbreakable scenes—finales. When some people hear Daniel Day-Lewis’ name, it’s the first thing that comes to mind. Others experience a fever dream that lingers long after they have left the theater. This is one of those cinematic moments that will…

What happens when you say “Hello” to ChatGPT? Such a simple query might seem trivial, but making it possible across billions of sessions requires immense scale. While OpenAI reveals little information about its operations, we’ve used the scraps we do have to estimate the impact of ChatGPT—and of the…