My Friend Colin Woodard has a Seriously Brilliant Theory

Building the right thing shouldn't take very long -- doing away with nonsense makes product development really fast"

My Plea to the W3C: Giving a semantic meaning to an "Obsolete" element. I'll cut right to the chase, here's my proposal: The `` element...

Been quite a fun week for people like me who enjoy following what’s happening in the various corners of the web. Since I have a bunch of scattered …

Will AI soon surpass the human brain? If you ask employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other large tech companies, it is inevitable. However, researchers at Radboud University and other institutes show new proof that those claims are overblown.

Or how those bloody Normans screwed up our language Are you an English-speaking monoglot like me? Feel faintly ashamed that you can only speak the one...

The speed of change in technology often appears to be the industry's defining characteristic. Nothing highlights that perception more than the recent and relentless march of AI advancements. But for as much as some things in technology change, many other things stay the same. Like vi! vi is a programming text editor that was created by...

Climate Change is happening and everyone is surprised. And yet we have known it was coming for over 50 years.

This post will be very plain. That is because is excellent in a way that is obvious and requires little explaining. is a minimalistic blogging service tha...

Exceptions are often a better way to handle errors than returning them as values. We argue that traditional exceptions provide better user and developer experience, and show that they even result in faster execution.

WM Motor filed for bankruptcy in October 2023, and Singulato and Aiways have left the market, too. An estimated 160,000 Chinese car owners are left in the lurch.

Romania and Latvia, both members of NATO, on September 8 accused Russia of violating their countries' airspace with military drones, escalating tensions between Moscow and the West.

It is with great sorrow but even greater fury that I have submitted my resignation from the NaNoWrimo Authors Board this morning. Why? Because they’ve come out with an absolutely insupportable posi…

Post prompted by a series of posts I read recently, written by Matthew, So1o, Simone, and Alex and also by posts on the 32bit.cafe. I wrote some 1000 …

The preferred tool of Arthur C Clarke, Anne Rice and George R R Martin

A property agreement between two men, signed in 1061, includes heartfelt declarations of lifelong trust and faithfulness.

Git blame an infrastructure update

I look left and right, and I'm the only one who…

If you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you...

And how we are already fostering independent web communities

Folger Shakespeare Library is the world's largest Shakespeare collection, the ultimate resource for exploring Shakespeare and his world. Shakespeare belongs to you. His world is vast. Come explore. Join us online, on the road, or in Washington, DC.

The man who invented the interactive fiction genre talks about its past and future.

CCP Games, the Icelandic developer behind long-running MMO Eve Online, is gearing up to share the keys to its universe.…

Project's creator talks to Ars about where FreeDOS has been, where it's going.

A case for planting more trees in urban areas.

This must be what killed the old No Time To Play wiki. You can thank "progress".

The new Chinese owner of the popular Polyfill JS project injects malware into more than 100 thousand sites.

The one-page guide to Vim: usage, examples, links, snippets, and more.

Exploring vim's builtin easy mode

The EU Council and its participants have decided to withdraw the vote on the contentious Chat Control plan proposed by Belgium, the current EU President.

Leading games executives recall their E3 memories and discuss its life, death and future

The Arecibo Telescope in Purto Rico, used for SETI research until its collapse in 2020 (Source) Almost anyone with any interest in astronomy, space travel, astrophysics, or old-fashioned science fi…

The New Leaf Journal’s short introduction to and history of RSS and related feed specifications such as Atom feeds and JSON feeds.

Lisp is an ambiguous category. But Common Lisp isn't, right? It's a restricted self-sufficient language, after all.

While ncurses still has a place in the modern world, ANSI escape codes may be better in some situations:

• you can use (almost) any programming language, not just those that have a curses binding or a foreign function interface;
• you're literally just printing out some short codes: that's both efficient and liberating;
• you can use features that modern terminal emulators have, but (n)curses doesn't.

As for the downsides:

• ANSI escapes are like coding in machine language – you'll need a cheatsheet;
• some hardware videoterminals never supported the standard;
• ncurses does more useful work besides translating for those old things.

It's still good to have another tool in the toolbox, doubly so when it's easy and fun to tinker with.