Featured post what's this? ✨ Streaming services’ obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California Illinois passed a similar law, giving services more incentive to make ads less booming.
Pollen tried to remove my article about CEO Callum Negus-Fancey and CTO Bradley Wright, and Google is assisting with it In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it: Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid...
HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74/100. No — 88/100. Actually 83/100. How hiring is becoming a luck filter.
Zanagrams - free daily word puzzle A free daily word puzzle. Drag across the letters to find the hidden words and watch the grid shrink as you solve it.
Age verification is just a precursor to attribution of speech Lots of US states, European countries, and Australia have introduced "age verification" regulations. They present it as the classic "save the children" talking ...
The Extra Gear | Fabio Scagliola Architecting software and servantly leading people. Making music as Nothence. Writing weird stories.
Microsoft Bought a Nuke Plant. You Should Be Worried. Let's cut through the Green Energy PR noise. Microsoft bought their own physics. They have nuclear reactors. You have rolling blackouts.
My coworker Iris isn't a person — Vinicius Brasil We put an AI agent in Slack. The surprise wasn't what she automated — it was that I started leaving the thread less, even for code.
The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters c...
Slop, trust, and a three-line patch A real bug, a three-line fix, and a one-line rejection: what reaching for ‘AI slop’ as a reflex gets wrong about verification, scale, and trust in open source.
Customer service as a mirror of modern life – Connor Gurney As my Now page will tell you, my day job is handling complaints for a major UK-based telecommunications company. My role sits in our executive complaints team, where we deal with the most serious of complaints—those sent to our senior bosses, to MPs, to t...
Why the Metaverse Failed — josh.earth I recently read the excellent long form article The Metaverse Fever Dream by Pixel Envy (Nick Heer). It gets the general vibe right and I encourage you to read it, but I also think it doesn’t capture what the metaverse — meaning Mark Zuckerberg’s vision s...
Life lessons and hot takes from my 30s | Shreyas I recently read Kevin Kelly’s Excellent Life Advice for Living. And immediately after that, on Substack, I also came across Nabeel Qureshi’s Substack post which is in this similar genre of being a listicle. I felt a genuine urge to articulate my own life ...
The Internet needs more You The most scarce thing on the internet isn't traffic. It's a genuine human perspective. Here's why I'm going back to blogging.
My First Encounter With a Political Spambot | Tom Bedor's Blog I had my first encounter with a political spambot this week: a polite robot named Emma texted me wanting to talk about Israel.
Why is there smoke coming from the boiler room? | Willem Vooijs Willem Vooijs - builder and tinkerer sharing insights on electronics, home automation, open source software, and sustainable energy
Run Obsidian as a self-hosted web app Obsidian has been my primary personal knowledge management solution for years. Since Obsidian Bases was added, my Obsidian Vault has become my source of truth for media tracking and project planning,
From Transformer to ChatGPT: The Part That Isn't the Architecture A stack of transformer layers is not yet ChatGPT or Claude. This is the rest of the path: how text becomes tokens, how a raw next-word predictor turns into an assistant across three training phases, how LoRA customizes a model on a budget, and why everyon...
I build a 10 inch mini rack from aluminium extrusions I built a 10-inch mini rack from aluminium extrusions and I had a lot of fun doing it. I want to share my build in this post.
Single point of failure apps Two years ago, I bought a secondary phone. It’s a cheap Android phone that always travels with me outside of town. I’ve for the case that my main phone breaks from a fall, fails to boot after an update, gets lost or runs out of battery. The secondary phon...
I turned my prologue into a short video A video depicting the prologue of my book "Just Fired". This is my story growing up in Saudi Arabia, and ending up in Los Angeles with failed dreams.
Connections in Math: deriving the SVD from scratch Most books state the Singular Value Decomposition as a finished theorem. Here we arrive at it naturally, without even aiming for it — letting the structure of any linear map hand us the factorization for free.
Strong Relationships, Loosely Held The best relationships in my life are seldom the longest ones. One of my best friends Carolina entered my life by storm, a whirlwind of entrepreneurship and road trips in France during the summer of ‘16, topped off with some trauma bonding during the att...
The Waffle Shop Downstairs - Gibberish and Stuff There's a waffle shop near my house that's been there for as long as I can remember. I used to go all the time. At $2 a waffle, it was slightly more expensive than your average bakery waffle, but...
The Curious Case of aa.ns.charter.com I run Pi-hole on my home network. Most days I don’t think about it. But one stray entry in the query log caught my eye, and what I thought would be a five-minute mystery turned into a seven-y…
My Linux Odyssey: How I Ended Up on NixOS A personal account of distro-hopping, window managers, and eventually finding NixOS. Part 1: How It All Started I started using Linux about four years ago. My very first distribution was Fedora, followed by Ubuntu, which I used for about a month before sw...
There Is No Reward Function for Meaning We Only Celebrate Progress Once A century ago, sending word to another continent meant waiting weeks for a ship to cross the ocean. Today, we complain when a video call lags for half a second. For some reason, we celebrate a breakthrough once, then it qui...
GitHub - librepods-org/librepods: AirPods liberated from Apple's ecosystem. AirPods liberated from Apple's ecosystem. Contribute to librepods-org/librepods development by creating an account on GitHub.
On cigarettes – Blog Fiasco There’s something to be said for cigarettes. Most of it, of course, is bad. Cigarettes smell awful. The stench lingers and invades long after the cigarette is gone. Cigarettes, of course, also kill people. Lung cancer from a lifetime of … Continue reading...
We have Mythos at Home: GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our Cyber Benchmarks Among models given nothing but a prompt, the best open-weight option beat Claude Opus 4.8.
Using Opus 4.8 to get a second opinion on an MRI and where it leaves me Welcome to my personal blog! I use it to share what I'm currently learning or thinking about, usually on topics related to technology, business, and health.
