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A major supply-chain compromise involving SolarWinds Orion software was disclosed in December 2020. Attackers had inserted malicious code into legitimate, digitally signed software updates distributed to thousands of organizations. Read more
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Quantum computing is often described as a technology that will make computers unbelievably fast. That description is too simple. Read more
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The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many software teams to work remotely for much longer than they expected. Software development was already more remote-friendly than many professions, but working from home occasionally is very different from building an entire working culture around distance. Read more
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Apple released the first Macs with its M1 system-on-chip in November 2020: the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. The performance and battery-life results immediately showed why Apple had left Intel. Read more
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November 10, 2020 arrives during an extraordinary year. Read more
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AMD announced Zen 3 processors in October 2020 with the Ryzen 5000 desktop family. The most important change was a redesigned core complex that allowed up to eight CPU cores to share one 32 MB L3 cache. Read more
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One of the easiest mistakes in communication is assuming that another person begins where we begin. When I know a topic well, some steps become invisible to me. I stop noticing the background knowledge I am using. Then I explain something to another person and feel surprised when they do not understand. The problem may not be intelligence. It may be distance. Read more
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A traditional antenna has a radiation pattern mainly determined by its physical design. A smart antenna adds signal processing to the system. Instead of treating every direction in the same way, an antenna array can combine signals from multiple elements and shape the effective radiation pattern. This makes beamforming possible. By adjusting phase and amplitude across antenna elements, the system can strengthen transmission or reception in a desired direction and reduce energy in others. Read more
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Starting university in 2020 is different from what many students expected. Education, work, communication, and daily life have all become more dependent on digital systems in a very short time. Read more
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We are usually very good at seeing what is still missing. The unfinished work. The next goal. The skill we do not have yet. Because of this, progress can become invisible. Read more
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NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 30 series in September 2020, introducing the Ampere architecture to consumer graphics cards. The RTX 3080 and 3090 offered major increases in shader throughput and second-generation ray-tracing hardware compared with Turing. Read more
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The year 2020 has made the importance of digital infrastructure unusually visible. Work, education, communication, shopping, entertainment, and many public services have moved online at a scale few people expected. Read more
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Time is the resource we discuss as if it were unlimited and remember as if it disappeared too quickly. I often notice this at the end of a busy day. I did many things. But did I spend the day on things that mattered to me? Busyness can hide that question. Read more
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Epic Games deliberately bypassed Apple’s in-app payment system in Fortnite in August 2020, prompting Apple and Google to remove the game from their stores. Epic immediately filed lawsuits challenging platform rules and commission structures. Read more
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Friendship is one of those parts of life that can look ordinary until we suddenly need it. A good friend does not remove every problem. They do something simpler. They make the problem less lonely. Read more
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OpenAI introduced GPT-3 in 2020 with 175 billion parameters, more than two orders of magnitude larger than GPT-2. The model used the same basic transformer principle—predicting the next token—but scaled data, model size, and computation dramatically. Read more
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The difference between an amateur and a professional is not always talent. Often, it is the relationship with routine. Read more
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Apple announced at WWDC 2020 that Macs would transition from Intel x86 processors to Apple-designed ARM-based silicon. It was the Mac’s third major CPU-architecture transition after Motorola 68k to PowerPC and PowerPC to Intel. Read more
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The Therac-25 is one of the most disturbing cases in software-engineering history because the consequences of failure were not lost files or a crashed program. People were injured and killed. Read more
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Mars Pathfinder landed successfully on Mars on July 4, 1997. Soon after, however, the spacecraft began experiencing unexpected system resets. Read more
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Microsoft released Windows Terminal 1.0 in May 2020 as a modern command-line host for PowerShell, Command Prompt, WSL distributions, and other shells. Read more
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Apple and Google announced a joint Exposure Notification system in April 2020 to help public-health applications detect possible COVID-19 contacts without collecting a centralized history of everyone’s location. Read more
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I started to see blogging as more than publishing articles. A personal blog can become a record of what we learn, what we care about, and how our thinking changes over time. Read more
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In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced offices, schools, and universities around the world to move online almost simultaneously. Video conferencing, VPNs, cloud collaboration, and identity systems suddenly became critical infrastructure. Read more
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Agnosticism is often misunderstood as a weak form of belief or disbelief. Read more
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Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Z Flip in February 2020, bringing a vertically folding OLED smartphone into the mainstream market. Unlike the larger Galaxy Fold, the Z Flip folded a normal phone-sized screen into a compact square. Read more
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The story of computing is also a story about human limits. For thousands of years, people have created tools to count, measure, record, and communicate. An abacus, a mechanical calculator, a punched card, and a modern processor may look completely different, but they all come from a similar desire: to move some mental work outside the human mind. Read more
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Microsoft ended normal support for Windows 7 on January 14, 2020, more than a decade after the operating system’s release. Millions of PCs were still using it, so the event created a large migration and security problem. Read more