Essays, dispatches, and notes on software simplicity, the independent web, and building things that last.
— A savage post-mortem of how a simple network for sharing physics papers turned into a 15-megabyte battery-draining surveillance obstacle course.
— An engineering post-mortem of ActivityPub, Mastodon, and PeerTube: why decentralization is essential, and why running an instance is a hilarious technical and social migraine.
— Why trading an open chronological XML feed for an algorithmic dopamine slot machine was the worst technological trade deal in human history.
— An unsparing satire of modern frontend engineering: how we ended up installing 1,800 npm packages and 400MB of node_modules just to display five paragraphs of text.