Tag Archives: Tech

Red Meat Friday: AWS Is Down, I Can’t Sleep

Posted on 2025-10-24 by jcs

Farce comes to the Internet. All right, farce comes to the Internet again. With the failure of AWS this week, many, many services were interrupted, including my Spanish learning app. It was annoying but, after all, you can always practice … Continue reading →

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Mistakes Startups Make

Posted on 2025-10-22 by jcs

Over at Reddit, MeirDavid has a truly terrifying post on why startups fail. He presents himself as a troubleshooter and his post is based on common problems startups in extremis experience. Like everything on the Internet these days, it’s hard … Continue reading →

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Librephone

Posted on 2025-10-17 by jcs

I just saw this announcement about the Librephone from the FSF. The idea is to provide a replacement for the Android smartphone operating system that would be free and open and not vacuum up everything you do with your phone … Continue reading →

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Should We Stop Avoiding Politics?

Posted on 2025-10-13 by jcs

If you’re familiar with Betteridge’s law of headlines you know that the answer is “no”. Every engineer recognizes politics for what it is: A process used by the unscrupulous to achieve ends that benefit no one but themselves and their … Continue reading →

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Why RSS Is The Right Thing

Posted on 2025-10-08 by jcs

Tom Burkert has a nice post in which he extols the virtues of RSS. You might wonder what there is to extol. RSS is a simple protocol—the “simple” is in its name, after all—and it’s pretty easy to implement. That … Continue reading →

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How RSS Beat Microsoft

Posted on 2025-10-05 by jcs

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of RSS and use it everyday to scour the Internet for potential Irreal topics and also just for topics that I find interesting or useful. I was there at the beginning—although … Continue reading →

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The Brilliance of UTF-8

Posted on 2025-09-13 by jcs

Vishnu Haridas has a nice post on UTF-8 and how it works. He’s impressed with the brilliance of its design. And why not? It provides code points for virtually every written language in the world while maintaining compatibility with ASCII. … Continue reading →

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Bell Labs

Posted on 2025-09-12 by jcs

Editorial Note I’ve had this post in my queue for over a month because just as I was about to publish it, the link to Tasbolatov’s post stopped working. It’s just now come back on line so I’m happy to … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Can We Stop Acting Like 5 Year Olds

Posted on 2025-09-05 by jcs

I recently saw this Tweet by John Carmack about developing new operating systems. Carmack is of the opinion that it’s rarely justifiable and when it is, “[Y]ou practically need an isolated monastic order of computer engineers.” I don’t have an … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Hell On Earth

Posted on 2025-08-29 by jcs

Did you ever wonder what Hell on earth would look like? Here you go. Imagine having to rely on Windows XP, Windows 3.11, or even MS-DOS to get your daily work done. Imagine waiting 15 minutes for your computer to … Continue reading →

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