Digital Seams

I recently saw complaints about Google's search engine crawler taking down websites by sending them too much traffic:We had googlebot blast a random customer system and almost cause an outage, this is when I first learnt that google will use it for AI tra

"We are not suggesting this is attainable on the first try, but we think we know how to get there."There are no new ideas in software engineering, only ones we've learned and then forgotten. In 1989, the Zero Defects memo at Microsoft was already arguing

You've probably used code touched by Seth Larson - he's the lead maintainer for one of the most widely-used Python libraries, urllib3, and he works on open-source security at the Python Software Foundation. But his personal blog is a different animal enti

The internet feels smaller than it used to be, as fun stuff concentrates into a few mega-platforms. But it doesn't have to be that way. Nolen Royalty creates strange, fun new places and invites everyone inside to play chess, draw on eggs, or even write se

Morry Kolman's art makes you laugh. Then it makes you think. He might be best known for Traffic Cam Photobooth, which uses the traffic camera infrastructure at intersections throughout New York City… so that you can take a selfie. As part of the Making th

For decades, Amit Patel's interactive explainers have been reference points for programmers, game developers, and curious people on the internet. Red Blob Games is one of my personal favorites. As part of the Making things project (intro here), I asked Am

Today, it has never been easier to create something, anything. But when given the opportunity, most people never do.I feel this. I feel this so much, as a writer who hacks around on this blog; as a coder who has never made anything truly great; as a music

I keep hearing variants of this complaint lately:"This (tool / workflow / service / slot machine) is slower than me doing it manually. Therefore, it's not worth using."These people are missing the point. Speed is easy to measure - that's great. But focusi

This weekend, I gave a talk at BSides SF 2026 to a full theater at the Metreon AMC.This is that talk, as a blog post. It's about the hidden ecosystem of attackers' tools and how they factor into attacker ROI. Before we get started, I do want to thank the

2026-03-01: clashes of tech and the US government.This week, the US Department of War clashed with Anthropic over restrictions on military use, ultimately throwing them out in favor of OpenAI (see Jasmine Sun's notes). While it feels unprecedented - and c