I've yearned for a Blackberry form-factor for years, and now Clicks have made that wish come true. I had to pre-order one! If you don’t know what the Clicks Communicator is, this 12 minute video should help: BlackBerry’s design will always have a special place in my heart. I much prefer a physical keyboard over a touchscreen, and I’ve said many times that smartphones are far too big these days. The Clicks Communicator is smaller and it has a proper QWERTY keyboard. It is all ver...

A while ago I made HTML Element of the Day , a site that selects a HTML element every day to be designated the “HTML element of the day.” When I built this project, I decided that I wanted to offer both a web page and a web feed to which people could subscribe. Rather than build an RSS feed for the project, I decided to mark up the page with microformats. microformats are classes you add to your HTML that have semantic meaning. HTML Element of the Day is published as a h-feed . Every entry...

For the new year, a resolution How small that is, with which we wrestle, what wrestles with us, how immense; were we to let ourselves, the way things do, be conquered thus by the great storm,— we would become far-reaching and nameless. What we triumph over is the Small, and the success itself makes us petty. The Eternal and Unexampled will not be bent by us. …growth is: to be the deeply defeated by ever greater things. from  The Man Watching by Rainer Maria Rilke Fo...

Sometimes I get asked questions that would be more fun to answer in public. All letters are treated as anonymous unless permission is otherwise granted. Hello [Redacted]! You asked about a friend's son who is a recent graduate looking for work as a software developer and having a hard time. I like to think of three key aspects of getting a job: 1) knowing where to apply, 2) getting an interview at all, and 3) passing the interview. Knowing where to apply There are three different types ...

We are experiencing one of the most significant technological breakthroughs of the last few decades. Call it what you will: AI, generative AI, large language models… But where does it come from? Academics will tell you that it stems from decades of mathematical efforts on campus. But think about it: if this were the best model to explain what happened, where would the current breakthroughs have occurred? They would have happened on campus first, then propagated to industry. That’s the line...

TL;DR: 2026 is going to be The Year of The Linux Desktop for me. I haven't booted into Windows in over 3 months on my tower and I'm starting to realize that it's not worth wasting the space for. I plan to unify my three SSDs and turn them all into btrfs drives on Fedora. I've been merely tolerating Windows 11 for a while but recently it's gotten to the point where it's just absolutely intolerable. Somehow Linux on the desktop has gotten so much better by not even doing anything differe...

I’ve been working on so many projects in 2025, I thought it was important for me to make a recap, if only just to clear my head. There are many, many, many things to go through and we don’t have a sponsor today, so I’m gonna start right away with facet! facet facet is a project that I started working on in March of this year — that’s right, it’s only been ten months, yet it feels like an eternity. ...

Dear Team, As we near the end of the calendar year, I want to take a moment to reflect on everything we’ve accomplished together. 2025 was an extraordinary year for Shield AI, marked by record-breaking achievements with the Coast Guard, the launch of a new autonomous aircraft, and countless milestones in between. At every step, each of you played an essential role in making 2025 the year it was. I came into Shield AI in May with a background in building business in tech, not defense. Despi...

I love Mat and his Techmoan channel. I’ve been watching his video reviews for years. He has a way of presenting his interest in a device that’s compelling in a way few others can achieve. He could spend an hour reviewing a potato peeler and I’d watch. He did a recent video reviewing a modern cassette player that was surprisingly decent. The cassette player I mean, not the video. Well, the video was too. We’re off to a great start here. The real nugget of wisdom I wanted to share ca...

Leeza SOHO tower under construction, via Federico Italiano on Twitter . Happy new year, and welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at automated code checkers, meranti wood, shifting snowfall patterns, launching spacecraft with bullwhips, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Automated code checkers I’ve previously writte...

Like the dawn of the blaze of a lander over the grays touches your light and spans the open lunar sky A descent energetic yet graceful methodical and careful Spawned from the blue marble verse you bring the best in us. Shadow of Firefly’s Blue Ghost Moon lander performing its final descent before touching down on the Moon. Image: Blue Ghost landing video Poem notes:  I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of working with amazing editors, bosses, and managers over my space writing career acr...

It’s time for a yearly review again. Time flies. Nerdy things I enjoyed I read a few books this year. The whole Dungeon Crawler Carl series was absolutely amazing and it quickly jumped up to one of my favorite series of all time. I can’t be held accountable for everything I’ve ever said to a stripper. Princess Donut Board games are great. I still don’t play nearly as much as I’d like to but my kids are quickly growing up and to my eternal joy they’re...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with V.H. Belvadi, whose blog can be found at vhbelvadi.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Naz Hamid and the other 130 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? I’...

This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 and Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 . It’s been a year filled with a lot of different trends. The year of "reasoning" The year of agents The year of coding agents and Claude Code The year of LLMs on the command-line The year of YOLO and the Normalization of Deviance The year of $200/...

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"The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution" by Francis Fukuyama - while reading this book it occurred to me that domains of study like political sciense must be incredibly difficult and frustrating. Imagine trying to match a model onto a set of data; the model has thousands of parameters, but you only have dozens or a couple of hundred of data points. This is what political sciense is like; there's a huge number of parameters and variables, far more than actual...

Since 2009, this website has run on Drupal . Starting with Drupal 6, and progressing through major site upgrades and migrations to 7, 8, 9, and 10, I used the site as a way to dogfood the same CMS (Content Management System) I used in my day job for over a decade . But as time progressed—especially after completing a grueling upgrade from Drupal 7 to 8 —my enthusiasm for maintaining what's now a more enterprise-focused Digital Experience Platform or 'DXP' for a personal blog has ...

This document curates the most common questions Shreya and I received while teaching 700+ engineers & PMs AI Evals. Warning: These are sharp opinions about what works in most cases. They are not universal truths. Use your judgment. 👉 Want to learn more about AI Evals? Check out our AI Evals course . It’s a live cohort with hands on exercises and office hours. Here is a 25% discount code for readers. 👈 Listen to the audio version of this FAQ If you prefer to listen ...

The Betty White Award  goes to people who die at the end of the year--- too late to be on those articles with titles like                                                              people we lost this year. The  point of the award is that news outlets and blogs should WAIT until Jan before having any articles that look back on the prior year. (I tell Lance we should have our end-of-the-year post in January just in case someone solves P vs NP the last week of D...

I entered the new year holding an inconsolable, shrieking baby while London set off an armageddon of fireworks around us. So goes parenthood. The baby is fine, just congested and teething. I am as “fine” as anyone can be after months of chronic sickness, broken sleep, and parental troubleshooting. I am very tired and full of stoic perspective, but still savouring the baby babble sounds, tiny fingers on my face, and three-teeth grins. When people ask me how parenting is going, I've taken to...

Previously: 2024 , 2023 , 2022 , 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , 2017 A surprisingly persistent personality quirk I have is that I care a lot about the changeover of the new year. I quite like consuming yearly predictions, year-in-reviews, and so on, and use the calendar transition as a time for reflection. Work I’ve now been at Databricks for a little over 3.5 years, and it’s been quite a fun ride. In most ways, it’s exceeded my expectations from when I joined. I’ll hopefull...

Software above some complexity level tends to sport an extension language, becoming a kind of software platform itself. Lua fills this role well, and of course there’s JavaScript for web technologies. WebAssembly generalizes this, and any Wasm-targeting programming language can extend a Wasm-hosting application. It has more friction than supplying a script in a text file, but extension authors can write in their language of choice, and use more polished development tools — debugging, test...

There are numbers every Python programmer should know . For example, how fast or slow is it to add an item to a list in Python? What about opening a file? Is that less than a millisecond? Is there something that makes that slower than you might have guessed? If you have a performance sensitive algorithm, which data structure should you use? How much memory does a floating point number use? What about a single character or the empty string? How fast is FastAPI compared to Django? I wanted to ta...