In our last installment of “Good Intentions Gone Wrong: When Disability Engineers Go Bad,” we highlighted a particularly egregious Swiss wheelchair design featuring superfluous drones. Thankfully, not all engineers who receive blank checks to design disability solutions are that out … Read more
The first time I thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post about the economics of open source was 2013, so this post has been in the works a while. The closest I got before today … Read more
Frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI all experienced rare outages on Thursday morning, creating downtime for their corresponding AI chatbots. SpaceX, xAI’s parent company, said on Thursday afternoon that the issues with Grok resulted from “an outage at our … Read more
If xAI defaults on its debt, Apollo Global Management ends up in the GPU rental business. That is in the contract, signed in June 2025, on a five billion dollar debt facility arranged by Morgan Stanley. The lenders have the … Read more
The UK government ran one of the most thorough studies on this. When GOV.UK added social sharing buttons, they tracked usage for 10 weeks across 6.8 million pageviews. The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times. That’s a 0.21% usage rate, … Read more
Uber has rewritten its ledger systems five times in the last ten years. And at least one of those rewrites, if not all, could have been avoided. That’s because the root of each generation of money software at Uber was … Read more
“Simplicity is a great virtue, but it requires hard work to achieve and education to appreciate. And to make matters worse, complexity sells better.” — Edsger Dijkstra I think there’s something quietly screwing up a lot of engineering teams. In … Read more
When a few variables belong together, we put them in a struct. Programmers do this automatically without thinking about it much. And most of the time it’s the right choice. Structs are simple, fast, and predictable. But once in a … Read more
The future of software development might just be jazz. Everyone improvising. Nobody following the sheet music. Last week I released Protocollie. Built in 4 days with languages I don’t know, without even directly touching the code. People keep asking “how?” … Read more