Tag
A technical blog post diving into the history and background of Rust's RangeFrom type, tracing its evolution from early RFCs to current and future range types, with a follow-up planned on design opinions.
A photographer reflects on finding a job at Polo Ralph Lauren through a newspaper classified ad in 2000, using digital archives to verify his memory.
Dennis Ritchie recounts quirky error messages and comments from early Unix source code, including the famous 'values of β will give rise to dom!' and the unlikely comment 'You are not expected to understand this.'
Game Engine Black Books has been updated with a revised edition, high-quality print edition, and PDF version, and the LaTeX source code has been released. With forewords by John Carmack and John Romero.
A veteran bug bounty hunter reflects on HackerOne's evolution from its golden age of live hacking events to its current state, questioning what changed and whether the platform still serves its original hacker-first mission.
An excerpt from John C. Lilly's 1978 autobiography presents a speculative narrative about machines evolving into solid-state intelligence and eventually surpassing and replacing mankind.
A tweet recalling how Tesla narrowly avoided bankruptcy on Christmas Eve 2008, closing a funding round in the final hour with Elon Musk putting in all his money and assets.
Jill Lepore discusses her upcoming book 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State' on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, arguing that tech companies and AI leaders are overstepping into governmental roles and selling an old fantasy in new packaging.
A retrospective on the pre-Google web, covering early search engines like AltaVista and Ask Jeeves, and discovery methods like Usenet and webrings.
A historical essay examining the shift in telephone regulation and equipment ownership around the breakup of the Bell System, focusing on customer premises equipment and the leasing model.
Archaeologists using LiDAR discovered a massive ancient Amazonian civilization with 20,000+ earthworks, rewriting assumptions about pre-Columbian history and challenging earlier beliefs about the region's capacity for complex societies.
A reflection on how Deep Blue's 1997 victory over Kasparov did not harm chess, but instead led to increased interest and more professional players.
A monthly roundup of six interesting science stories that were almost missed, covering an Incan sacrificial boy's cause of death, ancient Egyptian princess archers, cyborg cockroach diving suits, sleepy sperm whale bubbles, Betelgeuse's companion star, and a Medici duke's malaria diagnosis.
John MacFarlane reflects on 20 years of Pandoc, the universal document converter, from its 2006 Haskell-based start to its global adoption in academic and writing tools.
This article explores the evolution of automotive headlights, from oil lamps to modern LED systems, and examines why today's brighter, whiter headlights can be blinding to oncoming drivers.
A blog post examining a 1989 GAMEST column by game designer Fukio Mitsuji (MTJ), who satirically envisioned a 'Rip-O-Bot' that could auto-generate copycat games by randomly assembling existing elements, eerily foreshadowing modern generative AI tools.
RISC OS Open marks its 20th anniversary with a retrospective of key milestones in open-sourcing the RISC OS operating system, including its port to the Raspberry Pi.
A blog post debunks the common myth that lightbulb manufacturers colluded to shorten bulb lifespans for profit, explaining the engineering trade-off between lifespan and efficiency in incandescent bulbs.
An essay exploring why Chinese society appears optimistic about AI despite high youth unemployment, tracing the attitude back to the mass layoffs of the 1990s and arguing that Chinese enthusiasm may be a learned response to inevitable disruption.
A declassified 1984 technical report details Shakey the Robot (1966-1972), the first mobile robot that could perceive its environment, build an internal model, and plan its own actions using the STRIPS planning system.