The archive
1,040 stories. The 20 most recent are free to read; older reporting sits in the subscriber archive.
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cultureFreeA documentary about the people who keep old software alive
The film is less about code than about the institutions that outlive it.
Nadia Farrow · 5m ago
aiFreeAgent tool permissions need a deny list, not a prompt
Telling a model not to do something is not an access control.
Ada Okafor · 1h ago
gamingFreeA volunteer vault is preserving delisted games, one disc at a time
No storefront, no accounts. Just checksums and a very patient scanning rig.
Jules Ferrand · 3h ago
gamingFreeStudio pulls always-online requirement after 72 hours
A single-player title shipped with a mandatory handshake. Players noticed within the hour.
Jules Ferrand · 7h ago
softwareFreeGood CLI error messages are an API
Users build scripts around your output. Treat the wording accordingly.
Tomas Rehn · 16h ago
cultureFreeMaintainer burnout is a governance problem
The same few people carry the packages everyone depends on.
Nadia Farrow · 20h ago
cultureFreeThe quiet market for digital decluttering
People are paying other people to organise their files.
Nadia Farrow · 20h ago
hardwareFreeSoldered RAM is a warranty decision disguised as a design one
The performance argument is real. So is the repair argument against it.
Mira Kessler · 23h ago
gamingFreeController drift keeps coming back to the same part
The potentiometer is cheap, and the warranty is short.
Jules Ferrand · 1d ago
softwareFreeReproducible builds are finally boring enough to use
The tooling stopped being the hard part. The hard part is now the supply chain around it.
Tomas Rehn · 1d ago
gamingFreeHandheld PCs still lose to battery life
The screens are better. The batteries are not.
Jules Ferrand · 1d ago
gamingFreeSpeedrun tooling is becoming proper open source
The timers, overlays and verification tools are consolidating into maintained projects.
Jules Ferrand · 1d ago
hardwareFreeThe yield math behind the shift to chiplets
Splitting a die improves yield until the packaging becomes the bottleneck.
Mira Kessler · 1d ago
softwareFreeA fuzzer found a 9-year-old miscompile
The trigger was three lines of legal-looking code and a specific optimisation flag combination.
Tomas Rehn · 1d ago
gamingFreeRegional game pricing is diverging again
Currency moves and storefront fees are pushing the same game to different prices in different places.
Jules Ferrand · 1d ago
softwareFreeMonorepo tooling has a maintenance ceiling
The build graph is fine. The team that owns the build graph is not.
Tomas Rehn · 1d ago
aiFreeSynthetic captions are propping up vision datasets
The images are real. The descriptions increasingly are not.
Ada Okafor · 1d ago
aiFreeSynthetic data is hitting a wall nobody wants to name
Model collapse is real, but the more immediate problem is boring: attribution and licensing.
Ada Okafor · 1d ago
cultureFreeCRT nostalgia is now a supply chain
The monitors are scarce, the repairers are fewer, and the prices keep climbing.
Nadia Farrow · 1d ago
softwareFreeThe quiet return of single-file binaries
Static linking is fashionable again. The reasons are less about performance and more about deployment fatigue.
Tomas Rehn · 1d ago
gamingSubscriberEmulation keeps winning in court and losing in stores
Legal clarity and commercial availability are moving in opposite directions.
Jules Ferrand · 3d ago
hardwareSubscriberWhat a fanless laptop actually costs in performance
We ran the same workload on two otherwise identical machines. The difference was thermal headroom.
Mira Kessler · 4d ago
hardwareSubscriberPCIe retimers are quietly eating the motherboard heat budget
Signal integrity is solved. The thermal problem it creates is not.
Mira Kessler · 8d ago
aiSubscriberThe inference cost curve is flattening, and that changes plans
Price per token has stopped halving every few months. Budgets built on that assumption need revisiting.
Ada Okafor · 11d ago
aiSubscriberThe open-weights evaluation gap is narrowing
The best open models are no longer a generation behind on the tasks that matter to most teams.
Ada Okafor · 17d ago
softwareSubscriberWe replaced a 40 MB HTTP client with 600 lines
The hard part was not the requests. It was the error handling everyone had forgotten about.
Tomas Rehn · 18d ago
hardwareSubscriberWe tested 22 power supplies for transient response
Modern GPUs spike hard. Most consumer units are not rated for it.
Mira Kessler · 19d ago
hardwareSubscriberParts pairing is the next right-to-repair fight
Serial-number checks now decide whether a genuine replacement part works. Repair shops say that is the whole game.
Mira Kessler · 21d ago
cultureSubscriberLibraries are lending tools now, not just books
A drill, a sewing machine and a thermal camera are on the shelf next to the paperbacks.
Nadia Farrow · 26d ago
softwareSubscriberEditorial: your dependency tree is a supply chain
Treat it like one — pin, audit, mirror, and stop trusting transitive installs by default.
Tomas Rehn · 26d ago
aiSubscriberSmall embedding models are good enough now
For search over a few million documents, the quality gap has mostly closed.
Ada Okafor · 27d ago
aiSubscriberYour evaluation set is probably contaminated
The benchmark score went up because the answer was already in the training data.
Ada Okafor · 27d ago
gamingSubscriberStudios are licensing modding tools instead of fighting them
Official toolchains are becoming a retention strategy.
Jules Ferrand · 30d ago
hardwareSubscriberBenchmark leakage suggests a 20% IPC uplift, with caveats
Numbers from an unreleased engineering sample. We stress-tested the assumptions behind them.
Mira Kessler · 48d ago
softwareSubscriberWebAssembly outside the browser: what actually shipped
Five years of plugin runtimes, edge functions and one very large migration.
Tomas Rehn · 50d ago
cultureSubscriberThe second-hand office boom is cooling
The desks and chairs are still out there. The buyers have already bought.
Nadia Farrow · 54d ago
gamingSubscriberWhat happens when a live-service game sunsets
The servers go off. The purchases do not come back.
Jules Ferrand · 55d ago
aiSubscriberWhy small models are winning on-device
Four-bit quantization plus better distillation is making 3B models genuinely useful in production.
Ada Okafor · 28 Aug 2026
aiSubscriberBatching cuts cost and adds latency. Pick one.
The throughput graph and the latency graph point in opposite directions.
Ada Okafor · 25 Aug 2026
hardwareSubscriberThe small-form-factor desktop is having another moment
Mini-ITX boards are selling again, mostly to people who are tired of dual-slot everything.
Mira Kessler · 22 Aug 2026
hardwareSubscriberECC memory is creeping back onto consumer boards
A handful of workstation boards now support it without a server chipset. That is a bigger deal than it sounds.
Mira Kessler · 18 Aug 2026
hardwareSubscriberThermal paste myths, tested with actual instrumentation
We ran 240 mounts across three coolers. The results are boring and therefore useful.
Mira Kessler · 17 Aug 2026
gamingSubscriberSpeedrunning community retires a 12-year-old route
A frame-perfect discovery invalidates thousands of recorded runs overnight.
Jules Ferrand · 12 Aug 2026
cultureSubscriberNew e-waste rules are shifting the export map
Stricter shipment documentation is pushing informal recyclers out of business.
Nadia Farrow · 9 Aug 2026
cultureSubscriberWhat a four-day week actually changed at one studio
Eighteen months of data from a 40-person team, including the parts that got worse.
Nadia Farrow · 8 Aug 2026
aiSubscriberThe next AI bottleneck is memory bandwidth again
Compute is abundant. Moving data to it is not.
Ada Okafor · 29 Jul 2026
softwareSubscriberSemantic versioning is a promise nobody keeps
The convention is useful. The guarantee is mostly aspirational.
Tomas Rehn · 26 Jul 2026
softwareSubscriberA minimal CI pipeline in 200 lines
No plugins, no marketplace, no YAML sprawl. Just a runner, a queue, and honest logging.
Tomas Rehn · 25 Jul 2026
aiSubscriberThe open-weights licence split is becoming permanent
Two families of licence, two incompatible expectations, and a lot of downstream confusion.
Ada Okafor · 24 Jul 2026
cultureSubscriberRepair cafés are booked out for months
The demand is there. The volunteers are not.
Nadia Farrow · 24 Jul 2026
hardwareSubscriberNvidia's next-gen interconnect reportedly doubles bandwidth per lane
Early silicon samples point at a redesign of the die-to-die fabric — and a supply chain that isn't ready for it.
Mira Kessler · 22 Jul 2026
hardwareSubscriberArm server share crosses a quarter for the first time
Hyperscaler deployments drove the shift; enterprise adoption is still lagging badly.
Mira Kessler · 19 Jul 2026
aiSubscriberLong context is a billing model, not a feature
Every token you add to the prompt is paid for on every request.
Ada Okafor · 19 Jul 2026
softwareSubscriberUsing Postgres as a queue: where it breaks
It works surprisingly far. The failure mode is not throughput, it is bloat.
Tomas Rehn · 17 Jul 2026
hardwareSubscriberUSB4 labelling is still a mess, and retailers know it
The spec is fine. The shelf is not.
Mira Kessler · 14 Jul 2026
cultureSubscriberThe last cybercafé on the street is now a coffee roaster
What disappears when the machines leave the room.
Nadia Farrow · 10 Jul 2026
softwareSubscriberFeature flags become technical debt on a schedule
Every flag starts as a safety switch and ends as a branch nobody dares delete.
Tomas Rehn · 10 Jul 2026
softwareSubscriberObservability bills are a design problem
Most teams do not have a logging cost problem. They have a logging volume problem.
Tomas Rehn · 3 Jul 2026
cultureSubscriberInside the repair shop that refuses to throw anything away
A visit to a workshop where 1990s motherboards are still being reflowed for paying customers.
Nadia Farrow · 2 Jul 2026
gamingSubscriberShader compilation stutter is a pipeline problem
The frame time spike is visible. The cause is usually a build step nobody owned.
Jules Ferrand · 30 Jun 2026