◄ Previous Chapter Next Chapter ► Story of Damon and Pythias There lived in those days in Syracuse two young men called Damon and Pythias. They were very good friends, and loved each other so dearly that they were hardly ever seen apart. Now it happened that Pythias in some way roused the anger of…

For the last several years, I’ve been building and maintaining developer tools in my spare time, chiefly mise. What started as a simple rewrite of asdf in Rust has become an incredibly successful local dev manager. mise now has 27k+ stars on GitHub and is the 10th most downloaded Homebrew formula.…

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate. The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider making a donation or becoming a Friend of the Foundation to help us maintain these…

I’ve been vibe-coding a lot lately. Like, a lot a lot. Maybe not quite the “AI psychosis” Andrej Karpathy recently joked about on No Priors, but not wildly far off either.[1] But the more I vibe, the more a thought recurs, i.e. that AI coding agents may be about to make free software matter more…

SSH certificates: the better SSH experience When I ssh into a server for the first time, I’m confronted with a dialog which asks me to verify I’m actually talking to the machine I expect to be talking to. It is likely that the majority of users cross their fingers and type ‘yes’, which is not really…

For eight years, I’ve wanted a high-quality set of devtools for working with SQLite. Given how important SQLite is to the industry, I’ve long been puzzled that no one has invested in building a really good developer experience for it. A couple of weeks ago, after ~250 hours of effort over three…

The old problem For most of Linux history, voice input was an afterthought. Dragon NaturallySpeaking was Windows-only. The open source alternatives — CMU Sphinx, Julius — demanded days of configuration for mediocre results. And when the Linux desktop split between X11 and Wayland, even the hacks…

And now for something completely different, here's a wacky idea (not really fully formed enough to be a theory) that I have about the meaning of life. TL;DR the meaning of life is to decrease entropy. (Note: I chose the word meaning instead of purpose for this post as purpose specifically refers to…

S3 Files delivers a shared file system that connects any AWS compute resource directly with your data in Amazon S3. With S3 Files, Amazon S3 is the first and only cloud object store that provides fully-featured, high-performance file system access to your data. It provides full file system semantics…

I created my first AWS account at 10:31 PM on April 10th, 2006. I had seen the announcement of Amazon S3 and had been thinking vaguely about the problem of secure backups — even though I didn't start Tarsnap until several months later — and the idea of an online storage service appealed to me. The…

ZeroFS makes S3 storage feel like a real filesystem. It provides file-level access via NFS and 9P and block-level access via NBD. Fast enough to compile code on, with clients already built into your OS. No FUSE drivers, no kernel modules, just mount and go. Get Started Configuration Why ZeroFS?…