written on November 22, 2025 The more I work with large language models through provider-exposed APIs, the more I feel like we have built ourselves into quite an unfortunate API surface area. It might not actually be the right abstraction for what’s happening under the hood. The way I like to think…

The German occupation of Norway from 1940 to 1945 witnessed a remarkable building campaign to align this northern land with Hitler’s New Order. From gleaming highways and ideal cities to maternity centers for a purified Nordic race, plans to remake Norway into a model “Aryan” society fired the…

Credit: Robert Seymour / CC0 / Wikimedia Commons A couple weeks ago I wandered into a digression about toxic workplaces. Consider this week’s Nightcrawler another small detour into the forgotten value of boredom. Last Saturday, our four-year-old didn’t sleep well. So on Sunday morning, I did what…

Explore Best in Travel 2026 Poland Croatia Pakistan Search all of Lonely Planet Lonely Planet Destinations Not sure where to start? Get inspired by destinations chosen in this year's Best in Travel list. Start Discovering Not sure where to start? Get inspired by destinations chosen in this year's…

written on November 21, 2025 I felt like it might be a good time to write about some new things I’ve learned. Most of this is going to be about building agents, with a little bit about using agentic coding tools. TL;DR: Building agents is still messy. SDK abstractions break once you hit real tool…

written on January 24, 2025 Another day, another rant about dependencies. from me. This time I will ask you that we start and support a vibe shift when it comes to dependencies. You’re probably familiar with the concept of “dependency churn.” It’s that never-ending treadmill of updates, patches,…

All great books are in conversation with one another, often asking many of the same fundamental questions, sometimes suggesting roughly similar answers, and occasionally doing so with knowing winks across the centuries. Plato’s Republic and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile are two such books, and since…

The artificial intelligence revolution will be only three years old at the end of November. Think about that for a moment. In just 36 months AI has gone from great-new-toy, to global phenomenon, to where we are today – debating whether we are in one of the biggest technology bubbles or booms in…

Last year, my wife and I were driving south on Interstate 91, somewhere between Vermont and New York City, listening to episode five of the Ram Dass podcast, Here and Now. It wasn't my first listen; I had become addicted to playing and replaying the first seven episodes, all of which come from a…

20 November 2025 When it comes to blogging there are few rules. Write content that is somehow meaningful might be one of them though. I think it’s down to the individual to determine what constitutes meaningful. In the hey-day, the so-called golden age of blogging, there were plenty of people…

Last week, Valve stunned the computer gaming world by unveiling three new gaming devices at once: the Steam Frame, a wireless VR headset; the Steam Machine, a gaming console in the vein of a PlayStation or Xbox; and the Steam Controller, a handheld game controller. Successors to the highly…

To mark Toy Story’s 30th anniversary, we’re sharing a never-before-seen interview with Steve from November 22, 1996—exactly one year after the film debuted in theaters. Toy Story was the world’s first entirely computer-animated feature-length film. An instant hit with audiences and critics, it also…

Training sessions in pop culture Leonard Maltin praised Burt Reynolds's charm in Semi-Tough, a film that parodied est. Werner Erhard and his courses have been referenced in popular culture in various forms of fictional media including literature, film, television and theatre. The original course,…

Nearly everyone has experienced it: After a night of poor sleep, you don’t feel as alert as you should. Your brain might seem foggy, and your mind drifts off when you should be paying attention. A new study from MIT reveals what happens inside the brain as these momentary failures of attention…

When your application suddenly fails at 3 AM, logs will be your best friend the next morning. But until this happens, we often treat logs as an afterthought. Sometimes there is a discussion on log levels or wording of the message, but we rarely go beyond that. After all, what's so interesting in…

We’re rolling out changes to NotebookLM to make it fundamentally smarter and more powerful. First, a set of back-end improvements provide a major boost to performance and quality, and second, we are expanding the ability to set goals for your notebook, allowing each notebook to adapt to your needs.…

photo cred: my dad People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline. I’m not…

Competition The Pixel 10 Pro starts at $1000/€1100, which sounds like serious high-end smartphone money, give or take. The vanilla Pixel 10 goes for $200/€200 less, the 10 Pro XL asks $200/€200 more, while the previous generation Pro's pricing is more of a moot point, but it's safe to say it's…

Subscribe to receive notifications of new posts: 2025-10-28 When your Worker slows down or starts throwing errors, finding the root cause shouldn't require hours of log analysis and trial-and-error debugging. You should have clear visibility into what's happening at every step of your application's…

I’m on the right, biting a nail nervously. We’re in an Italian hotel because this happened on day 1 of our offsite. On Monday the AWS us-east-1 region had its worst outage in over 10 years. The whole thing lasted over 16 hours and affected 140 AWS services, including, critically, EC2. SLAs were…

I’ve been working with containers professionally for several years now, using Docker and Kubernetes daily in production environments. Like many developers, I initially treated containers as a “black box” - I knew how to use them, but didn’t really understand what was happening under the hood. It…

In the previous article about rethinking my backups I had a TODO item regarding moving away from using intermediary dumps of database content. Here's some notes about that. The old way Not ideal Redundant data storage Constant change The new way Learnings Avoid pipe confusion with…

We recently published a blog post with our reaction to the new Google Developer Program and how it impacts your freedom to use the devices that you own in the ways that you want. The post garnered quite a lot of feedback and interest from the community and press, as well as various civil society…

This article was adapted from a Google Tech on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT episode and post it in your office. By Arham Jain Is your code a tangled mess of business logic and side effects? Mixing database calls, network requests, and other…

I now think that AI/LLMs suck the joy out of programming. I’ve used spicy auto-complete, as well as agents running in my IDE, in my CLI, or on GitHub’s server-side. I’ve been experimenting enough with LLM/AI-driven programming to have an opinion on it. And it kind of sucks. I started programming…

By Kanu Tewary and Andrew Trenk Tech on the Toilet (TotT) is a weekly one-page publication about software development that is posted in bathrooms in Google offices worldwide. At Google, TotT is a trusted source for high quality technical content and software engineering best practices. TotT episodes…

One year from now, with the release of Chrome 154 in October 2026, we will change the default settings of Chrome to enable “Always Use Secure Connections”. This means Chrome will ask for the user's permission before the first access to any public site without HTTPS. The “Always Use Secure…

Follow @popovicu94 If you carefully read the Linux kernel docs, you will find an interesting statement: Linux has also been ported to itself. You can now run the kernel as a userspace application - this is called UserMode Linux (UML). Today, we’ll explore how you can start an unconventional VM by…

Over the past three months, a team of experienced, like-minded engineers and I have been building something really cool within Amazon Bedrock. While I'm pretty excited about what we are building, there is another unique thing about our team - most of our code is written by AI agents such as Amazon Q…

Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com In Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling 2016 memoir of “a family and a culture in crisis,” J.D. Vance, now vice-president of the United States, gives…

NEW YORK (AP) — The trouble started every day at around 3 p.m., after Cathy Higgins had spent five or six hours staring at an array of computer screens at her desk. Her university job overseeing research projects involved peering closely at numbers and details on contracts, applications and budgets.…

TikTok and airlines have something in common with your search engine, your grocery app, and (increasingly) your car: They start out great, lock you in, and then quietly get worse while you keep using them. That very familiar decline now has a catchy name: “enshittification.” Cory Doctorow has been…

Welcome to the Post-Naive Internet Era Severin Matusek, Nick Houde and Paloma Moniz Building the culture we want requires a radical change in mindset, and action. The dream of a free and open Internet isn't dead—but in 2025, it's definitely more complicated. Published Oct. 15, 2025 Share this! We…

When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. Shareware demo downloaded from a BBS? Go ahead! Dodgy code you wrote yourself at 2 AM? Absolutely. The…

People often ask me what I mean when I say “JPEG XL is simply the best thought out and forward thinking image formats there is. Nothing else is close.” This is article is just one example of why. When I heard that JPEG XL’s encoder doesn’t care about bit depth, it sounded almost reckless (and I was…