The author announces a joint talk with Alexander Vindman at Cooper Union about the American Dream, democracy, community, and economic mobility. Drawing on experience building and scaling online communities (Stack Overflow, Discourse), the post argues that governance, clear expectations, and self‑governing systems from digital platforms offer insights for creating fairer, scalable civic structures, and promises an honest public conversation with specific ideas.
A personal op-ed urging action to preserve the American Dream: the author details immediate $1M donations to eight nonprofits, pledges half their remaining wealth over five years to long-term efforts protecting democracy and opportunity, and calls for civic engagement and voting reforms. The piece also reflects on building Stack Overflow and Discourse as examples of digital democracy and the role of tech founders in serving the public good.
A reflective essay on the Fermi paradox and the Great Filter that suggests advanced civilizations might miniaturize into computational/nano-scale forms (making them hard to detect), drawing analogies to the historical trend of computing toward smaller, faster, and more efficient systems.
Opinion piece condemning Elon Musk's mismanagement of Twitter, urging users to leave and adopt federated, open-source alternatives like Mastodon and Discourse; advocates decentralization, collective ownership of online communities, stronger moderation tools, and auctions to benefit The Trevor Project.
The author announces a friendly $10,000 charity bet with John Carmack on whether SAE Level 5 fully autonomous passenger cars will be commercially available in any of the top 10 U.S. cities by January 1, 2030. The author bets against the proposition, arguing that fully autonomous driving is vastly more difficult than commonly assumed and framing it as a major computer science challenge. He invites the community to prove him wrong and notes related charity coding work.
The author describes a GitHub project to modernize and port the 1973 classic 101 BASIC Computer Games into ten memory-safe, general-purpose scripting languages (e.g., Python, Java/Kotlin, C#, JavaScript, Ruby, Rust, Lua). The post gives historical context, explains goals (memory safety, modern practices like subroutines), lists target languages and contributors, and invites community participation.
A personal PC-build write-up about downsizing into compact mini-ITX cases (author chose the Streacom DA2 after trying the DAN A4 SFX). The article compares case volumes, lists components (i9-9900KS, RTX 2080 Ti, Samsung NVMe/SATA drives, 64GB DDR4), explains airflow and cooling recommendations (open top/bottom, specific fan placements, use SFX PSU), warns that sustained full CPU/GPU loads may require water cooling, and notes successful burn-in testing.
The post traces how cheaper lithium‑ion batteries helped make electric scooters (exemplified by the Xiaomi Mi M365) affordable and practical, discusses scooter rental companies and their operational shifts, gives a hands‑on review of the M365 (pros, cons, and suggested tweaks), and highlights regulatory and safety issues around public use.
A first-person account of buying and using a 2019 Kia Niro electric vehicle. The author describes how EV ownership transformed their experience—quiet, clean, digitally native, mechanically simpler, and convenient home charging—reviews historical context (early EVs and lithium-ion batteries), and concludes that electric vehicles represent a clear, inevitable technological shift.
The article argues the modern web is bloated largely due to ad tech, shows how ad blockers dramatically reduce page payloads, warns that Chrome is restricting extension-based blockers, and recommends running a Pi‑Hole (network DNS ad blocker) on a Raspberry Pi to restore performance and privacy across all devices.
The author describes building and colocating small, dedicated mini‑PC servers as a cost‑effective, high‑performance alternative to public cloud VMs. He shares hardware specs, sysbench and disk benchmarks, power measurements, a three‑year cost comparison versus DigitalOcean, and operational notes about testing, redundancy, and colocation.
A Stack Overflow co‑founder reflects on the site's first ten years, arguing that it is a wiki‑first, community‑powered Q&A designed for professional programmers. He praises the contributors, outlines structural tensions (peer‑review competition, onboarding friction, and the growing duplicate‑at‑scale problem), and suggests considering beginner‑friendly variants while urging the community to shape the site's future.
The post uses a famous 2016 phishing incident to show how simple, unsophisticated phishing plus a single human/IT error can have major consequences. It analyzes phishing techniques (malicious domains, address-bar tricks, hosting with Let’s Encrypt) and emphasizes that security is now a universal responsibility. Practical advice: enable app-based 2FA (not SMS), use passwords of 11+ characters, adopt a password manager, and use U2F hardware keys for high-risk accounts; it also points to Tech Solidarity’s vetted guidance for organizations.
A reflective essay on the ethical and societal consequences of software, arguing that developers must design systems that serve people, adopt codes of conduct, and take responsibility for unintended harms (e.g., comment sections, data harvesting). The author urges developers to focus on building software that helps people be better versions of themselves, citing the design philosophy behind Stack Overflow and Discourse.
A personal essay about the rise of the Battle Royale genre (especially PUBG and Fortnite), describing the intense, often terrifying gameplay loop and arguing the mode captures the current zeitgeist; the author also notes how video games shaped his programming career and influence how he approaches building software.
The author reviews Discourse’s security posture around backups and data portability, then performs GPU-based offline password-hash cracking experiments (using hashcat and real-world datasets) to measure how resistant PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 (64k) passwords are to attack. He reports results from the tests, discusses implications for password policies and hashing algorithms, and recommends hardening and future plans to adopt slower hash schemes.
A hands-on report using a Razer Core Thunderbolt 3 external GPU enclosure to add a desktop GPU to a Skull Canyon NUC for 4k gaming. Covers Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth and cable limits, observed performance penalties (~15% external, +10% loopback), hardware fit/cooling/power quirks, Windows driver behavior, FPS comparisons versus integrated graphics, and argues eGPU enclosures are a modular, future-proof upgrade path despite current cost.
The author argues that most password composition rules are counterproductive and instead recommends a simple, practical approach: enforce a reasonable minimum Unicode password length, allow broad character support, block known common/breached passwords, perform basic entropy checks, and prevent trivial special-case passwords (e.g., equal to username/email). The post describes implementation choices made in Discourse and emphasizes usability and localization.
A developer reflects on the election of Donald Trump, condemns policies like the travel ban and border wall, rejects nationalism, and pledges to become politically active: contacting representatives, supporting investigative journalism and civil-rights groups, backing civic-tech tools and electoral reform, joining protests, and encouraging others in the tech community to do likewise.
A hands‑on account of building 1U servers and solving thermal problems when a 6‑core Xeon exceeded cooling capacity: measured power draw exceeded TDP, causing throttling. The author iteratively improved cooling (copper heatsink, better thermal paste, fan duct), ran stress tests, and noted that AVX2‑heavy tests like MPrime can produce atypical, worst‑case power draw that may not reflect real workloads.
