BlogFlock

A decade and change ago, I used to tell a story about three startups I was involved with, as a way of explaining why the Bay Area startup ecosystem was special. It went like this:

I founded my first startup in Edinburgh, Scotland. Everyone told me to get a real…

[Eli Stark-Elster in Unpublishable Papers]

This meaningful discussion touches on the role — and dangers — of online spaces in the lives of children, but has a lot more to say about how our lives and environments are designed overall.

“[…] Digital space is the only place left…

Many many years ago, I did some work for the NHS. As part of that, I was given access to certain GitHub organisations so that I could contribute to various projects. Once I left that job my access was revoked.

Mostly.

A few weeks ago, I received this email from…

Trail of Bits has developed constant-time coding support for LLVM, providing developers with compiler-level guarantees that their cryptographic implementations remain secure against branching-related timing attacks. These changes are being reviewed and will be added in an upcoming release, LLVM 22. This work introduces the __builtin_ct_select family of intrinsics and…

[Hays Witt and Josh Kramer at New_ Public]

Really interesting to see New_ Public announce its first community product from its Local Lab:

“The main thing to know, maybe the most important thing, is that this is not just another social media app. Roundabout is a community…

[Shomila Malik]

We’re beginning to see the end of the AI hype cycle, and thank goodness. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t uses for aspects of the technology, but it does mean that some of the hyperbole will diminish as investors and speculators move on to the next…

We're been living on our smallholding in Wales for 3 years now. Here's how things have been going this year.

I’m a little late with my update this year because I’ve had a few things going on at home. This has accidentally become an annual tradition at this point, so…

I wrote this in my blog drafts well over a decade ago (exact date unclear). I thought I'd publish it as-is as an aside. I'm sure it was going to be an excellent full post, but clearly this is just the intro. I still agree though: knowing when to go…

[Winnie Lim]

I’ve never been a successful notetaker. Winnie Lim enumerates the many reasons why not, which seem to be very close to her thinking too:

“Because of my personality I tend to solve for the whole before wanting to do something. For years I wanted to figure…

There are many things I like about the WordPress blogging software, and many things I find irritating. The most annoying aspect is that WordPress insists that its way is the best and there shall be no deviance. That means a lot of forced cruft being injected into my site. Headers…