The 2030 Self-Driving Car BetIt's my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice:
03/04/22
Updating The Single Most Influential Book of the BASIC EraIn a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career.
12/31/21
Building a PC, Part IX: DownsizingHard to believe that I've had the same PC case since 2011, and my last serious upgrade was in 2015. I guess that's yet another sign that the PC is over, because PC upgrades have gotten really boring. It took 5 years for me to muster
04/19/20
The Rise of the Electric ScooterIn an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price. If electric car prices are decreasing, battery costs must be decreasing, because it's not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car shapes can decline that much, right?
09/12/19
Electric Geek Transportation SystemsI've never thought of myself as a "car person". The last new car I bought (and in fact, now that I think about it, the first new car I ever bought) was the quirky 1998 Ford Contour SVT. Since then we bought a VW station wagon
08/20/19
An Exercise Program for the Fat WebWhen I wrote about App-pocalypse Now in 2014, I implied the future still belonged to the web. And it does. But it's also true that the web has changed a lot in the last 10 years, much less the last 20 or 30.
05/30/19
The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's ComputerWhen we started Discourse in 2013, our server requirements were high:
02/17/19
What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here's my 15 second answer:
10/22/18
There is no longer any such thing as Computer SecurityRemember "cybersecurity"?
09/21/18
To Serve Man, with SoftwareI didn't choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me. For a long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously great-for-everyone career field with zero
12/31/17
The Existential Terror of Battle RoyaleIt's been a while since I wrote a blog post, I guess in general, but also a blog post about video games. Video games are probably the single thing most attributable to my career as a programmer, and everything else I've done professionally after that. I
11/05/17
Hacker, Hack ThyselfWe've read so many sad stories about communities that were fatally compromised or destroyed due to security exploits. We took that lesson to heart when we founded the Discourse project; we endeavor to build open source software that is secure and safe for communities by default, even if
06/02/17
Thunderbolting Your Video CardWhen I wrote about The Golden Age of x86 Gaming, I implied that, in the future, it might be an interesting, albeit expensive, idea to upgrade your video card via an external Thunderbolt 3 enclosure.
03/24/17
Password Rules Are BullshitOf the many, many, many bad things about passwords, you know what the worst is? Password rules.
03/10/17
I'm Loyal to Nothing Except the DreamThere is much I take for granted in my life, and the normal functioning of American government is one of those things. In my 46 years, I've lived under nine different presidents. The first I remember is Carter. I've voted in every presidential election since 1992,
01/30/17
An Inferno on the Head of a PinToday's processors contain billions of heat-generating transistors in an ever shrinking space. The power budget might go from: