Sercan Külcü

Sercan Külcü

Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering, Giresun University

Sitemap

A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there, there is an XML version available for digesting as well.

Pages

ASCII Table

Interactive ASCII and extended character table with decimal codes, search, and encoding view. Read more

Array Simulator

Interactive array simulator for access, update, insertion, deletion, search, traversal, reverse, and Bubble Sort. Read more

Deque Simulator

Interactive deque simulator with operations at both ends, queue and stack usage patterns, traversal, capacity checks, and responsive visualization. Read more

Round Robin Scheduler

Interactive Round Robin process scheduler using a FIFO ready queue, configurable time quantum, process metrics, and automatic execution. Read more

List ADT Simulator

Interactive List ADT simulator comparing ArrayList-style contiguous storage and LinkedList-style node chains across access, insertion, deletion, search, and traversal. Read more

B+ Tree Simulator

Interactive B+ Tree simulator with insertion, point search, range search, leaf traversal, linked leaves, and responsive SVG visualization. Read more

B-Tree Simulator

Interactive B-Tree simulator with insertion, search, deletion, traversal, node splitting, borrowing, merging, and responsive SVG visualization. Read more

General Tree Simulator

Interactive general tree simulator covering parent-child relationships, depth, height, degree, subtree operations, DFS, and BFS. Read more

Binary Heap Simulator

Interactive binary heap simulator with max/min heap modes, insertion, extraction, build heap, heap sort, and synchronized array/tree visualization. Read more

Priority Queue Simulator

Interactive stable priority queue simulator implemented with a binary max heap, including enqueue, dequeue, priority updates, logical service order, and synchronized visualization. Read more

Hash Table Simulator

Interactive hash table simulator using separate chaining, automatic resizing, step-by-step hashing, collision visualization, and operation traces. Read more

Map Simulator

Interactive Map simulator with set, get, has, delete, iteration, insertion-order visualization, and safe rendering. Read more

AVL Tree Simulator

Interactive AVL Tree simulator with insertion, deletion, search, rotations, balance factors, validation, traversals, and responsive SVG visualization. Read more

Red-Black Tree Simulator

Interactive Left-Leaning Red-Black Tree simulator with insertion, deletion, search, rotations, recoloring, validation, and responsive SVG visualization. Read more

Splay Tree Simulator

Interactive Splay Tree simulator with insertion, search, deletion, splay rotations, traversals, metrics, and responsive SVG visualization. Read more

Dijkstra Algorithm Simulator

Interactive Dijkstra algorithm simulator with weighted undirected graphs, priority queue, shortest-path reconstruction, distance table, and responsive SVG visualization. Read more

Directed Graph Simulator

Interactive directed graph simulator with indegree, outdegree, BFS, DFS, topological sorting, cycle detection, adjacency views, and responsive SVG visualization. Read more

Undirected Graph Simulator

Interactive undirected graph simulator with vertex and edge editing, BFS, DFS, connected components, adjacency list and matrix views, and responsive SVG visualization. Read more

Set ADT Simulator

Interactive Set ADT simulator with unique elements, membership, union, intersection, difference, symmetric difference, subset tests, iteration, and responsive visualization. Read more

Don't Say 21

Interactive Don’t Say 21 game with adjustable targets, human and computer modes, and strategic AI. Read more

Nim

Interactive Nim game with human and computer modes, multiple heap configurations, and optimal XOR-based AI. Read more

Connect Four

Interactive Connect Four game with human and computer modes, multiple difficulty levels, threat detection, and move tracking. Read more

Hex

Interactive Hex game with multiple board sizes, human and computer modes, difficulty levels, and undo support. Read more

Othello

Interactive Othello game with heuristic and Minimax alpha-beta computer opponents. Read more

Reversi

Interactive Reversi game with human and computer modes, multiple difficulty levels, legal-move hints, and mobility tracking. Read more

Sorting Race

Interactive side-by-side sorting race comparing several sorting algorithms on the same data. Read more

Colonel Blotto

Interactive Colonel Blotto resource-allocation game with multiple adaptive computer strategies and round history. Read more

Fox & Geese

Interactive Fox & Geese asymmetric pursuit game with side selection, difficulty levels, captures, and trapping. Read more

Java Interfaces

An introduction to Java interfaces, implementation, polymorphism, multiple interface inheritance, and default, static, and private interface methods. Read more

Ultimatum Game

Interactive Ultimatum Game simulator for bargaining, rejection, fairness, and strategic anticipation. Read more

Java Collections Framework

An introduction to the Java Collections Framework, including List, Set, Queue, Map, common implementations, iteration, sorting, and collection selection. Read more

Dutch Auction Simulator

Interactive descending-price Dutch auction simulator with private valuations, first-claim wins, winner surplus, and seller revenue. Read more

Facility Location Simulator

Interactive facility location simulator comparing random placement, K-Means clustering, and a greedy heuristic using customer-to-facility distances. Read more

Synchronization Lab

An interactive synchronization lab covering mutexes, semaphores, producer-consumer, readers-writers, and dining philosophers. Read more

Dama Oyunu

Turkish checkers-style board game against a minimax AI with alpha-beta pruning and four search-depth levels. Read more

Java Streams API

An introduction to the Java Streams API, including stream pipelines, intermediate and terminal operations, collectors, primitive streams, lazy evaluation, and parallel streams. Read more

Public Goods Game

Interactive public-goods game for cooperation, free-riding, threshold projects, punishment, group welfare, and adaptive bot behavior. Read more

Memory Allocation Simulator

An interactive memory allocation simulator for First Fit, Best Fit, Worst Fit, and Next Fit with allocation, deallocation, and fragmentation metrics. Read more

Network Formation Game

Interactive network formation game for strategic link creation, pairwise stability, player utilities, social welfare, and network diameter. Read more

Page Replacement Simulator

An interactive page replacement simulator for FIFO, Optimal, LRU, LFU, and Second Chance with frame-by-frame visualization and page-fault metrics. Read more

Tavla AI

Interactive backgammon with AI-vs-AI and human-vs-AI modes plus Aggressive, Balanced, and Defensive heuristic AI profiles. Read more

Fair Division Game

Interactive fair-division game for alternating item allocation, utility, envy-freeness, greedy opponents, and hidden valuations. Read more

Design Patterns in Java

An introduction to common Java design patterns, including Singleton, Factory, Observer, MVC, Strategy, and when to use or avoid them. Read more

Unit Testing with JUnit

An introduction to unit testing in Java with JUnit 5, including assertions, lifecycle methods, exceptions, parameterized tests, test structure, and good testing practices. Read more

Bayesian Decision Lab

Interactive Bayesian decision lab for priors, noisy signals, posterior beliefs, expected utility, recommendations, and costly information. Read more

Blackjack Decision Lab

Interactive blackjack decision lab for probability, stopping decisions, bankroll management, dealer policy, hit/stand/double choices, and simplified strategy hints. Read more

Hokm

Interactive Hokm partnership trick-taking game with trump selection, follow-suit rules, team scoring, imperfect information, and three bot levels. Read more

Mangala

Interactive Turkish Mangala game with extra turns, tactical capture rules, endgame collection, human-vs-human play, and greedy computer opponents. Read more

Minesweeper

Interactive Minesweeper puzzle with scalable difficulty, flags, flood-fill opening, timer, safe hints, and constraint-based reasoning. Read more

Pişti

Interactive Turkish Pişti capture-card game with pile matching, Jack captures, Pişti bonuses, end scoring, hidden information, and simple computer play. Read more

Age of Çotanak

Interactive 6×6 territory-control strategy game with adjacency-based expansion, tactical conversion, mobility constraints, and simple AI evaluation. Read more

Real-Time Scheduling Simulator

An interactive real-time scheduling simulator for Rate Monotonic and Earliest Deadline First with utilization, deadlines, releases, and deadline-miss visualization. Read more

Linux Process Explorer

An interactive Linux process explorer for learning ps, top, /proc, PID and PPID relationships, process trees, file descriptors, and memory maps. Read more

Prerequisites for Microprocessors

Core prerequisites for microprocessors, including number systems, digital logic, architecture, assembly language, memory addressing, stack, interrupts, I/O, and basic electronics. Read more

Pioneers of Operating Systems

An interactive overview of people whose ideas shaped operating systems, from time-sharing and virtual memory to UNIX, GNU/Linux, Windows NT, virtualization, security, and real-time systems. Read more

Amortized Analysis

An undergraduate introduction to amortized analysis with dynamic arrays, stack multipop, and aggregate, accounting, and potential methods. Read more

Number-Theoretic Algorithms

A supplementary undergraduate introduction to Euclid’s algorithm, modular arithmetic, fast exponentiation, primality testing, modular inverses, and number-theoretic algorithm applications. Read more

Week 4 — Data Representation

Binary, octal and hexadecimal; bits, bytes and words; two’s complement signed integers; IEEE 754 floating point; and character encoding — the physical basis for every C type. Read more

Week 7 — Type Conversions

Integer promotion, the usual arithmetic conversions, explicit casts, the signed-unsigned trap, overflow and truncation, and how to compare floating-point values without being wrong. Read more

Week 11 — Functions

Declaration, definition and calling; prototypes and why they matter; pass-by-value and the call stack; and designing functions with a clear contract for success and failure. Read more

Week 18 — Recursion

Base cases and recursive cases, watching stack frames in a debugger, Towers of Hanoi and binary search, recursion depth and stack overflow, and when to prefer iteration. Read more

Week 21 — Structures

Grouping related data into one type: declaration and designated initializers, dot and arrow access, arrays of structures, passing by value versus by pointer, and self-referential types. Read more

Week 25 — Bit-Level Operations

AND, OR, XOR and NOT; arithmetic versus logical shift; setting, clearing, toggling and testing flags; bit-fields and their portability limits; permissions, packing and checksums. Read more

Week 26 — Files and Streams

Opening and closing files, text versus binary access, reading line by line, fixed-size binary records and seeking, stream state and error checking, and what buffering explains. Read more

Week 42 — Reading Excellent C

Why C looks the way it does, why undefined behavior exists, and how to read sqlite, musl, lua, redis and git — recognizing house style, error and ownership conventions. Read more

Aquarium

Inside a lit tank at two in the morning, drawn pixel by pixel in the browser: caustics on the sand, Snell’s window overhead, swaying plants and fish going nowhere, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Lighthouse at Dusk

A red-and-white lighthouse on a rocky headland at blue hour, made with three.js: the lamp sweeping its beam through the haze over a slow sea, surf breaking white on the rocks and the first stars coming out, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Autumn Courtyard

The stone courtyard of an old timber-framed house in Safranbolu in late autumn, made with three.js: a plane tree in golden leaf, leaves tumbling onto the cobbles, a trickling fountain and long low sunlight, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Basketball

Swipe the ball toward the hoop and score as many baskets as possible in 30 seconds. Read more

Boggle

Find as many words as possible in a 4×4 letter grid before time runs out. Read more

Empty Bus Stop

A bus shelter on a rainy night at the edge of a small town, drawn pixel by pixel in the browser: a flickering timetable, a street lamp mirrored in the wet road, headlights that turn off before the stop, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Washing in the Wind

Washing lines strung across a steep street of old wooden houses in Kuzguncuk, made with three.js: sheets, shirts and towels billowing in the breeze with the sun shining through them, the Bosphorus at the end of the street, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Laundromat, 3 AM

An empty self-service laundromat at three in the morning, drawn pixel by pixel in the browser: one washer turning under a flickering tube while rain runs down the window, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Tea Garden in the Rain

An empty tea garden on a hill above the Black Sea on a rainy afternoon, drawn pixel by pixel in the browser: wet tables and tipped chairs, a dripping awning, a samovar steaming for no one, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Tea Terraces

Steep tea terraces in Rize at dawn, made with three.js: thousands of clipped tea bushes following the contours, cloud-mist breathing in the valleys and ridges fading into blue haze as the first sun gilds the rows, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Jellyfish

A small bloom of moon jellyfish drifting in deep Black Sea water, made with three.js: translucent bells pulsing and glowing at the rim, frilly arms and fine tentacles trailing, light shafts and marine snow, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Beach in October

A Black Sea beach out of season, drawn pixel by pixel in the browser: folded umbrellas in the wind, an empty lifeguard tower, waves running up the sand under fast clouds, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Emoji Quiz

Guess the movie, country, or phrase from the emoji clues — how many can you get right? Read more

Hazel Orchard

A hazelnut orchard on a steep hillside above Giresun, drawn pixel by pixel in the browser: bushes swaying in the wind, late sun dappling the ground, a harvest basket waiting for pickers who never come, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Hazelnuts Drying

Hazelnuts drying on a tarpaulin in a Giresun village yard, made with three.js: thousands of instanced nuts in their husks, crisp afternoon shadows, laundry in the breeze and a glimpse of the Black Sea far below, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Lighthouse in the Storm

A lighthouse on a rock through a Black Sea storm, drawn pixel by pixel in the browser: a rotating volumetric beam, breaking swell, spray and rain, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Floppy Kuş

Tap or press Space to flap your wings — dodge the pipes and beat your high score! Read more

Library at Night

An old university reading room after closing, made with three.js: one green banker’s lamp still lit over an open book, moonlight through tall arched windows sliding across the floor, dust in the beams, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Night Lab

An empty engineering lab after midnight, drawn pixel by pixel in the browser: a live trace on the scope, rain on the window, and every light in the room coming from the instruments themselves. Loops every 48 seconds. Read more

Harbour at Night

A small Black Sea fishing harbour at night, made with three.js: calm reflective water with long rippling reflections of the quay lamps, wooden boats bobbing at their moorings, a blinking green harbour light and a hillside town under a thin moon, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Night Train

An empty sleeper compartment on a night train, drawn pixel by pixel in the browser: a reading lamp over worn seats, a glass of tea trembling to the rail joints, a dark country and a lit station sliding past a window that never stops, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

The Poker Game

Interactive Texas Hold’em poker game with computer opponents, betting controls, hand history, speed settings, and table options. Read more

Monopoly

Interactive Monopoly game with multiple human or AI players, property management, trading, mortgages, houses, hotels, dice, and statistics. Read more

Mantra

A guided mantra exercise for observing thoughts, slowing down and focusing through repetition. Read more

Snow Under a Lamp

A snowy side street at night under an old street lamp, made with three.js: snowflakes glowing in the warm cone of light, a half-buried car, icicles over a lit window and footprints slowly filling, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Snowy Station

An empty platform under falling snow, drawn pixel by pixel in the browser: sodium lamps pooling on the snow, a headlight that never arrives, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Kitchen, Simmering

A small Black Sea kitchen on a winter evening, made with three.js: a dented enamel pot simmering on a blue gas flame, its lid rattling, steam curling in the lamp light and snow falling beyond the fogged window, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Harbour in Winter

A small Black Sea fishing harbour at winter dusk, drawn pixel by pixel in the browser: moored boats rocking on the swell, ropes slackening and tightening, sleet driving past a green harbour light, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Memory Test

Challenge number memory, sequence memory and visual memory with increasing difficulty. Read more

Minimal Timer

A minimal countdown timer with presets, keyboard shortcuts, fullscreen mode and browser notifications. Read more

Movie Quiz

Test your knowledge of 200 popular movies across release years, directors, actors, genres, and titles. Read more

Park Güell

Gaudí’s serpentine bench above Barcelona, rebuilt from a photograph pixel by pixel in the browser: trencadís laid as thousands of flat shards, haze over the city, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

PDF Diff

Compare two PDF files page by page with text and visual differences directly in your browser. Read more

PDF Signer

Draw a signature, place it on a PDF page and download the signed PDF directly in your browser. Read more

PDF Splitter

Split a PDF into individual pages or extract a custom page range — entirely in your browser, no server, no upload. Read more

The Poker Game

Interactive Texas Hold’em poker game with multiple computer opponents, betting actions, speed controls, history, and the original local Poker engine. Read more

Pomodoro Timer

Boost focus with the Pomodoro technique — 25-minute work sessions, short breaks, and long breaks with session tracking and browser notifications. Read more

Pong

Classic Pong against the computer — three difficulty levels, smooth controls, first to 7 wins. Read more

Morning Tea

A glass of tea by a sunlit window, made with three.js: physically based glass and porcelain, soft moving shadows, steam and dust in the light, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Silent Pier

A foggy morning on a Black Sea pier, drawn pixel by pixel in the browser: a software rasteriser, a 41-colour palette and synthesised ambience, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Exam Hall

An empty lecture hall a minute before the exam, drawn pixel by pixel in the browser: low sun through tall windows, dust drifting in the light, a clock stuck at 08:59, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Misty Forest

Early morning inside a Black Sea spruce and beech forest, made with three.js: tall trunks receding into layered mist, low sun breaking through the canopy in shafts of light, ferns, moss and a fallen log by a narrow path, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Spell Bee

Create Turkish words from seven letters while always using the center letter. Read more

Sudoku

Classic Sudoku with notes, hints, undo and unique-solution generation. Read more

Ferry Crossing

Tea on the stern rail of an Istanbul ferry at golden hour, made with three.js: the churning wake, glitter on the Bosphorus, gulls keeping pace and the domes of the old city in warm haze, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Rain on the Window

Rain on a window at night, made with three.js: drops on the glass refracting the blurred city lights behind, a traffic light changing across the street, a plant and a cooling mug on the sill, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Highland House

A wooden house on a Black Sea highland at dusk, drawn pixel by pixel in the browser: one lit window, smoke from the chimney, and fog that climbs the valley and draws back again, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Night on the Plateau

A clear moonless night on a Black Sea plateau, made with three.js: the Milky Way and thousands of stars over dark ridges, a tent glowing from a lantern, a dying campfire and fireflies in the grass, looping every 48 seconds. Read more

Posts

Google Introduces the Pixel 11 Generation

2 minute read

Published:

Google unveiled the Pixel 11 family on August 12, 2026, maintaining the late-summer announcement window that Google established with Pixel 9 (August 2024) and Pixel 10 (August 2025). The lineup — Pixel 11, 11 Pro, 11 Pro XL, and Pro Fold — is built around the Tensor G6, the sixth generation of Google’s custom SoC (first introduced with Pixel 6 in October 2021). Tensor G6 continues the custom silicon strategy Google started to give it control over the NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for on-device AI inference, the ISP (Image Signal Processor) for computational photography pipelines, and the modem for radio performance — components that third-party Qualcomm Snapdragon chips would optimize for a broader market rather than for Google’s specific software features. The Tensor lineup has moved through successive silicon partners and manufacturing nodes since Tensor G1 (Samsung 5nm), with each generation improving the NPU throughput and energy efficiency available for on-device AI tasks. Read more

Kaizen Small Improvements Big Results

14 minute read

Published:

There is a peculiar kind of problem that almost never gets fixed. It is not serious enough to become an emergency. It does not crash the system, stop production, or ruin the day. It simply wastes a few seconds, creates a little frustration, or requires one unnecessary step. So we tolerate it. Then we tolerate it again tomorrow. And the day after that. Read more

A Personal Website Is Never Really Finished

4 minute read

Published:

A personal website is a strange project because there is no real final version. Every other software project has a definition of done — a feature ships, a bug is fixed, a version is released. A personal website has none of those endpoints. You can always change a sentence, move a section, update a post from five years ago, add a page you have been meaning to build, or remove something you are no longer sure should be there. Read more

Why I Still Want A Web I Can Own

4 minute read

Published:

The modern internet has made publishing effortless. Creating an account, writing something, and reaching readers within minutes is genuinely easier than at any point in history. The platform handles servers, design, discovery, and the distribution mechanics that would otherwise require technical expertise most people do not have or want. Read more

AMD Advancing AI 2026 Shows a Broader Accelerator Ecosystem

3 minute read

Published:

AMD held its Advancing AI 2026 event in July 2026, presenting the Instinct MI450 accelerator alongside a rack-scale system strategy, updated ROCm 7 software stack, and deployment partnership announcements from Microsoft Azure, Meta, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The MI450 used AMD’s CDNA 4 architecture on TSMC’s 3nm process, with 288 GB of HBM3e memory per GPU — matching the NVIDIA B200 Ultra’s memory capacity — and Infinity Fabric 4 connections providing 896 GB/s inter-GPU bandwidth in an 8-GPU rack node configuration. AMD positioned the MI450 specifically against NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra systems for large-scale LLM inference and training. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2026

3 minute read

Published:

If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2026, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

The Skills Computer Science Students Need Beyond Coding

4 minute read

Published:

Students entering computer science programs tend to focus on programming languages, frameworks, and algorithms. This is understandable — these skills are concrete, teachable, and immediately demonstrable. You write code, it does something, and the result is visible. Read more

Apple Unveils Siri AI at WWDC26

3 minute read

Published:

Apple previewed a redesigned Siri at WWDC26 on June 8, 2026, alongside iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27 (Tahoe), watchOS 27, visionOS 27, and tvOS 27. The updated Siri replaced the older intent-parsing pipeline with a model capable of maintaining multi-turn conversational context — remembering what a user said two exchanges earlier and acting on cumulative instructions without requiring each request to be self-contained. Apple demonstrated examples such as “add the restaurant my sister mentioned in her last email to my Maps list,” a task requiring Siri to access Mail, parse unstructured text, identify an entity, and act across two apps with a single spoken instruction. Read more

Games as a Way to Understand Algorithms

4 minute read

Published:

Games are full of algorithms, but we rarely notice them because we are busy trying to win. A path has to be found. An opponent has to decide what to do. A score has to be updated. Behind many small game actions is a computer science problem that has a real name and a real solution. Read more

What AI Agents Still Get Wrong

4 minute read

Published:

AI agents have moved from demo to daily use over the past year. The pattern is familiar: an agent receives a goal, plans steps, calls tools — reading files, executing code, querying APIs, sending messages — and continues until the task is complete or it encounters something it cannot handle. The step from “answer a question” to “carry out a task with multiple steps and side effects” seemed like a natural progression. The experience of actually using these systems has revealed where the progression is less natural than it looked. Read more

Google I-O 2026 Expands Agentic AI Across Products

3 minute read

Published:

Google I/O 2026 ran May 19–20 in Mountain View, with Sundar Pichai’s keynote focused almost entirely on agentic AI applications. Google announced Gemini 3.5 Flash — a lightweight, low-latency model optimized for real-time interaction — and Gemini Omni, positioned as a model that could natively generate, edit, and reason across text, images, audio, video, and code in a single model pass rather than routing to separate specialist models for each modality. Gemini Omni was available initially to Gemini Advanced subscribers and through Vertex AI. Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Arrives

2 minute read

Published:

Canonical released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “Resolute Raccoon” on April 23, 2026, following the two-year LTS cadence from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS “Noble Numbat” (April 2024) and five years after Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish” (April 2022). As the eleventh long-term-support release, 26.04 carries the standard five-year free security and maintenance update commitment from Canonical for desktop and server, extensible to ten years through the Ubuntu Pro subscription for enterprise users. The kernel version shipped as the 26.04 HWE (Hardware Enablement) base, with a GA kernel selected for stability and broad driver compatibility across the hardware range certified through Canonical’s Ubuntu Certified programme — spanning AMD Ryzen and EPYC, Intel Core and Xeon, Ampere Altra, and the ARM server lineup that had grown substantially in cloud deployments since Graviton2. GNOME 49 on the desktop introduced refinements to fractional scaling (HiDPI displays at non-integer ratios, a long-standing pain point), improved color management pipeline integration, and updated Wayland protocol support across graphics hardware. PipeWire had fully replaced PulseAudio for audio and JACK for pro-audio use cases, completing the audio subsystem transition that began with Ubuntu 22.10. Read more

Why I Still Enjoy Plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

4 minute read

Published:

In March 2026, the modern web development landscape includes dozens of frameworks, meta-frameworks built on top of frameworks, build tools that compile JavaScript that compiles to JavaScript, AI-assisted scaffolding that generates entire project structures before you have written a line of code, and package managers competing to install those structures most efficiently. Read more

NVIDIA Unveils Vera Rubin at GTC

3 minute read

Published:

NVIDIA held GTC 2026 in San Jose in March, with Jensen Huang’s keynote presenting the Vera Rubin platform as a fully integrated AI computing system rather than a discrete GPU. Vera Rubin paired the Rubin GPU with the Vera CPU — NVIDIA’s first custom Arm-based server processor, moving away from the AMD EPYC CPUs used in previous DGX systems. Vera CPUs were connected to Rubin GPUs using NVLink-C2C, the same chip-to-chip interconnect used internally within Grace Hopper Superchips, providing bandwidth of 900 GB/s between CPU and GPU — roughly 7× PCIe 5.0. This allowed Vera Rubin compute nodes to treat CPU and GPU memory as a single flat address space rather than copying data across a PCIe bus. Read more

Learning by Simulation

4 minute read

Published:

Some ideas become easier the moment they start moving. A static diagram can explain a binary search tree, but watching a node rotate during an AVL rebalancing — seeing the pointers change in sequence — creates a different kind of understanding. A paragraph can describe a CPU scheduling algorithm, but watching processes arrive, wait in the queue, and get CPU time in a step-through simulation makes the policy feel concrete rather than abstract. Read more

Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.6

3 minute read

Published:

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 on February 5, 2026, available through the Claude API at $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens, with a 200K-token context window in standard usage and a 1M-token context window in beta for enterprise customers with large codebase or document-analysis requirements. Claude Opus 4.6 was positioned as Anthropic’s most capable model for agentic tasks — long-running workflows where the model executes sequences of tool calls, code execution, web searches, and file operations across sessions measured in minutes or hours rather than single-turn exchanges. Read more

The Return Of Small Software

4 minute read

Published:

Software has become incredibly capable, and that capability has brought weight. A task that should take thirty seconds — resizing an image, converting a file format, extracting text from a PDF — can now require creating an account, accepting a terms of service agreement, waiting for an upload, and navigating an interface designed for users who do this professionally every day. Read more

Microsoft Introduces the Maia 200 AI Accelerator

3 minute read

Published:

Microsoft introduced Maia 200 at its January 2026 Azure hardware event as the successor to the first-generation Maia 100 accelerator (announced November 2023, deployed in Azure in 2024). Maia 200 is manufactured on TSMC’s 3nm process and contains 216 GB of HBM3e memory across six stacks, delivering approximately 7 TB/s of memory bandwidth — roughly 1.75× the bandwidth of an NVIDIA H100 SXM5 (3.35 TB/s) and competitive with the H200 (4.8 TB/s). The chip includes 272 MB of on-chip SRAM, 10+ petaFLOPS at FP4, and 5+ petaFLOPS at FP8 for matrix operations used in transformer inference. Read more

OpenAI Releases GPT-5.2

2 minute read

Published:

OpenAI released GPT-5.2 on December 11, 2025 as an incremental update to GPT-5 (which had launched in May 2025 as a unified model intended to consolidate the separate GPT-4o and o-series reasoning models into a single system). GPT-5.2 focused on reliability improvements for long-running agentic tasks: more consistent tool use (fewer dropped function calls in multi-step sequences), improved handling of very long context documents (128K+ token inputs with better attention to content in the middle of the context window — a known weakness in all transformers), and tighter code generation that produced fewer subtle logic errors in multi-file software tasks. OpenAI’s internal and third-party evaluations on agentic benchmarks (SWE-bench for software engineering, GAIA for general assistant tasks, and internal multi-step research task suites) showed measurable improvements over GPT-5.0, though the improvements were characterized as refinements rather than capability jumps. Read more

Can AI Make Us Better Programmers or Just Faster Ones?

3 minute read

Published:

AI tools have made certain parts of programming faster in ways that are hard to argue with. Generating a function from a description, explaining what an error message means, writing test cases for a known interface, translating code between languages — these tasks take a fraction of the time they did two years ago. That efficiency gain is real and significant. Read more

Google Releases Gemini 3

3 minute read

Published:

Google released Gemini 3 on November 18, 2025, making it available the same day in the Gemini app (replacing Gemini 2.0 Flash as the default), Google AI Studio, Vertex AI, and Google Search’s AI Mode — the generative answer panel that had been gradually expanding across Search since mid-2024. Gemini 3 came in Ultra, Pro, and Flash tiers; the Flash variant was designed for low-latency applications at lower per-token cost, while Ultra targeted complex reasoning and multimodal tasks. Read more

Ubuntu 25.10 Advances the Linux Desktop

2 minute read

Published:

Ubuntu 25.10 “Questing Quokka” was released on October 23, 2025, the interim release immediately preceding Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, scheduled for April 2026 with five years of standard enterprise support. Like all non-LTS Ubuntu releases, 25.10 received only nine months of security maintenance (through July 2026), targeting developers, enthusiasts, and infrastructure teams who want current software versions rather than the stability-optimized LTS freeze. The release shipped GNOME 48, which introduced a tiled window management feature (GNOME’s response to years of community requests for built-in tiling without extensions), updated color management, and improved notification grouping. The included Linux kernel was 6.12, which had reached upstream LTS status in December 2024, adding improved scheduler latency for interactive workloads and continued refinement of the SCHED_EXT extensible scheduler framework that allows user-space BPF programs to implement custom scheduling policies. Read more

What Makes a Good Programming Assignment?

4 minute read

Published:

A programming assignment looks simple to describe: write a program that does something, test it, submit it. But the difference between an assignment that produces genuine learning and one that produces submitted code is significant, and it is mostly in the design. Read more

Apple Introduces Its 2025 iPhone Generation

3 minute read

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Apple announced the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Plus, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max on September 9, 2025, with sales beginning September 19. The standard iPhone 17 received the most significant redesign in years: a slimmer aluminum-and-glass form factor and an A18 chip (previously exclusive to Pro models in 2024), bringing faster Neural Engine performance and improved camera processing to the base lineup. iPhone 17 Air — replacing the Plus as the thin-and-light option — launched at 5.5mm thin, the slimmest iPhone ever, at the cost of a smaller battery. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2025?

3 minute read

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In 2025, computers can already generate code, explain errors, summarise documents, create images, and assist with many tasks that once required substantial manual work. It is reasonable for a student to ask: if AI can do more of the work, why study Computer Engineering? Read more

The Beauty of Simple Algorithms

3 minute read

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I like clever algorithms, but I often enjoy simple algorithms more. There is something satisfying about a solution that looks almost obvious after you understand it — where the entire idea fits in your head at once. Read more

OpenAI Releases GPT-5

3 minute read

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OpenAI released GPT-5 on August 7, 2025, available to ChatGPT users across Free, Plus ($20/month), and Pro ($200/month) tiers and via the API. Rather than launching as a separate model requiring users to switch manually from GPT-4o or o3, GPT-5 was positioned as a unified system: it handled conversational and creative tasks with the low latency of earlier models while applying extended reasoning — essentially the o-series chain-of-thought approach — automatically when the system judged a problem hard enough to warrant it. Read more

OpenAI Introduces ChatGPT Agent

4 minute read

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OpenAI launched ChatGPT Agent in July 2025, combining GPT-5’s language understanding with a set of tools — web browser control, Python code execution via a sandboxed interpreter, file reading and writing, and external API calls — into a product designed to complete multi-step tasks with minimal user prompting per step. Unlike the earlier Operator (launched January 2025 for browser-only tasks) or Code Interpreter (launched June 2023 for data analysis in a stateless sandbox), ChatGPT Agent maintained state across a full session: it could browse the web, download a CSV file, write a Python script to process it, debug an error in the script, generate a chart, and return the result in one continuous workflow without the user re-explaining context between steps. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2025

3 minute read

Published:

If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2025, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

The Value of Building Things Nobody Asked For

3 minute read

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Some of my favorite personal projects started with a thought that is hard to justify: I want to see what happens if I make this. No one asked for it. No deadline. No user waiting. Sometimes no clear reason beyond the fact that the idea kept returning to my mind until I decided to try it. Read more

Apple WWDC Expands On-Device AI Development

2 minute read

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Apple’s WWDC 2025 (June 9–13, Cupertino) introduced iOS 19, iPadOS 19, and macOS 16, with a significant portion of the developer keynote dedicated to expanding the Foundation Models framework that had debuted in iOS 18/macOS 15 (shipped September 2024). The Foundation Models framework allowed third-party applications to call Apple’s on-device approximately-3-billion-parameter language model without packaging model weights in the app bundle or routing requests to external APIs. iOS 19’s expansion added a Streaming API (returning partial tokens as they were generated rather than waiting for the full response), a multi-modal input API (accepting image and text prompts for the same model), and task-specific Adapter APIs — lightweight fine-tuned adapter layers (roughly 100 MB each) that developers could download and attach to the system model to specialize it for domain-specific tasks like legal document analysis or code review without replacing the base model. Read more

What Teaching Programming Taught Me About Patience

3 minute read

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Programming looks very logical from the outside. Teaching programming is much more emotional. A student can understand a difficult idea in five minutes and then spend half an hour looking for a missing semicolon. Another student may struggle with the same topic for days and suddenly understand it after one small example — the third or fourth version of an explanation you were not sure was any different from the others. Read more

Google I-O Pushes Gemini Deeper Into Search and Android

3 minute read

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Google I/O 2025 was held May 20–21, 2025, at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, and the two-day developer conference was organized almost entirely around Gemini integration across Google’s product surface. The headlining model announcement was Gemini 2.5 Pro, which Google described as its most capable model to date, alongside Gemini 2.5 Flash for high-throughput lower-cost applications. AI Mode in Google Search — an opt-in interface replacing the standard ten-blue-links results page for complex queries — was expanded from its experimental state to a broader US rollout, presenting multi-step AI-generated responses with citations and follow-up query suggestions. Project Astra, Google’s universal AI assistant research prototype using a smartphone camera and screen as real-time context (demonstrated internally in 2024), was announced as the foundation for Gemini Live’s expanded capabilities: the live version of Gemini on Android could now see and respond to what the phone’s camera was pointed at, maintaining a spoken conversation while analyzing video frames in real time. Jules, an autonomous coding agent integrated with GitHub, was announced as capable of reading a GitHub issue, writing a fix across multiple files, running tests, and opening a pull request — competing directly with Anthropic’s Claude Code and GitHub Copilot Workspace in the agentic developer tooling space. Read more

Why Data Structures Still Matter in the Age of AI

4 minute read

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AI can write code very quickly now. It can produce a function, explain an error, or suggest a solution in seconds. Because of this, I sometimes hear a simple question: if AI can write the code, do students still need to learn data structures? Read more

Meta Releases a New Llama Generation

3 minute read

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Meta released Llama 4 Scout and Maverick on April 5, 2025, marking the Llama family’s shift from dense transformers to mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. Scout had 17 billion active parameters out of 109 billion total (16 experts, one selected per token), and a 10 million token context window — the longest of any openly released model at the time. Maverick had 17 billion active parameters out of 400 billion total (128 experts) and achieved competitive scores against GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash on coding and reasoning benchmarks. A third model, Llama 4 Behemoth at over 2 trillion total parameters, was announced as still in training. Read more

NVIDIA GTC Focuses on Blackwell Ultra and Rubin

3 minute read

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NVIDIA held GTC 2025 in San Jose from March 17–21, with Jensen Huang’s keynote detailing the Blackwell Ultra accelerator and announcing the Rubin architecture roadmap. Blackwell Ultra — the B200 Ultra — raised HBM3e memory to 288 GB per GPU (up from 192 GB on the B200) and increased FP4 throughput to support the larger context windows and reasoning chains frontier models were beginning to require. NVLink 6 connected up to 576 B200 Ultra GPUs within a single NVLink domain, enabling the full weight matrix of a large model to reside in fast GPU memory rather than requiring frequent host-memory transfers. Read more

OpenAI Expands Agentic Research Tools

2 minute read

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OpenAI released Deep Research on February 2, 2025, initially for ChatGPT Pro subscribers ($200/month). The feature used an internal version of the o3 reasoning model to autonomously conduct multi-step research tasks: planning a search strategy, executing dozens of web searches, reading and synthesizing source documents, tracking intermediate findings, and producing a 2,000–5,000 word report with inline citations. A typical Deep Research task ran for 5–30 minutes without user intervention, producing outputs comparable in depth to what a research analyst might produce in a few hours. The model was given access to Bing web search and document reading tools; it could adapt its search plan based on what it found at each step, a form of “reflection” where the model assessed the quality of evidence and decided whether to investigate further or broaden scope. Google had launched Gemini Deep Research on December 9, 2024 (powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro with Google Search), making this the first major head-to-head competition between deep research agents within weeks of each other. Read more

How AI Shape The Future Of Coding

3 minute read

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In February 2025, AI code generation has moved from novelty to daily practice for a significant fraction of working developers. GitHub Copilot has been available for almost three years. Cursor and similar editors embed AI at a deeper level than autocomplete. Reasoning-capable models can now engage in multi-step software design conversations. The question has shifted from “will this change programming?” to “how is it already changing it and what comes next?” Read more

Clean Code Psychopath

4 minute read

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John Woods wrote something that has stayed with me: “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” The quote is usually cited as a case for clean code. But there is a darker inversion of the same pressure that I have been thinking about — the developer who becomes so committed to an idea of clean code that the code stops serving the project. Read more

DeepSeek R1 Shakes the AI Model Market

3 minute read

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DeepSeek released R1 on January 20, 2025, alongside a detailed technical report describing the model’s architecture and training methodology. DeepSeek is a Chinese AI research lab founded in 2023 as an offshoot of High-Flyer Capital Management, a quantitative hedge fund, with the stated goal of pursuing AGI research independent of product revenue pressures. The R1 model itself was a 671-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts architecture with approximately 37 billion parameters active per token during inference — a design that substantially reduced the computational cost of a forward pass relative to a dense model of equivalent total parameter count. The training pipeline centered on GRPO (Group Relative Policy Optimization), a reinforcement learning technique that rewarded correct answers on verifiable tasks (mathematics, competitive programming, formal logic) without requiring a separately trained reward model for each capability area. An intermediate model, R1-Zero, was trained using only RL with no supervised fine-tuning whatsoever; it spontaneously developed extended internal reasoning traces — long chains of intermediate steps visible in the model’s output before its final answer — a behavior the researchers described as emerging from the optimization objective rather than being explicitly trained. The final R1 model incorporated a small amount of supervised fine-tuning on high-quality examples followed by additional RL training, and performed comparably to OpenAI’s o1 model on benchmarks including AIME 2024 (mathematics olympiad problems), Codeforces (competitive programming), and MATH-500. Read more

Father Son Game Dev

4 minute read

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Many children spend hours playing games. Some of them eventually ask a more interesting question: how are games made? That question is an opening. I have been exploring it with my son, and I want to share what the experience has actually taught me — about teaching, about programming, and about spending time together on something real. Read more

OpenAI Releases the o3 Reasoning Model Preview

3 minute read

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OpenAI previewed o3 on December 20, 2024 in a “12 Days of OpenAI” event, releasing benchmark results before the model was publicly available. The headline number was 87.7% on ARC-AGI (Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence), a benchmark of visual pattern-recognition puzzles that had been specifically designed to resist language models through its emphasis on systematic generalization rather than pattern matching from training data. GPT-4o had scored 5% on the same benchmark; the previous state-of-the-art AI system had reached 53%. ARC-AGI creator François Chollet had explicitly stated that the benchmark could not be gamed by scale alone, making o3’s score the most discussed AI capability result of 2024. Read more

NVIDIA Becomes Central to the AI Infrastructure Boom

2 minute read

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By November 2024, NVIDIA had become the indispensable infrastructure provider for large-scale AI training and inference, with its market capitalization briefly reaching $3.4 trillion in June 2024 — briefly making it the world’s most valuable company and reflecting the AI infrastructure spending wave triggered by ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch. The H100 SXM5 (Hopper architecture, TSMC N4, 80 GB HBM3, 3.35 TFLOPS BF16/FP16 dense training throughput, 700W TDP) had become the standard unit for LLM training: OpenAI trained GPT-4 on an estimated 25,000 A100s (Hopper’s predecessor); Anthropic, Google, and Meta deployed H100 clusters of similar scale. H200 SXM5 (announced December 2023, HBM3e 141 GB at 4.8 TB/s bandwidth vs H100’s 80 GB at 3.35 TB/s) offered approximately 1.9× inference throughput on memory-bound LLM serving workloads. NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL72 rack (announced March 2024, available late 2024 in Blackwell generation): 36 Grace Arm CPUs + 72 Blackwell B200 GPUs in a 72-GPU NVLink domain, delivering 1.44 ExaFLOPS FP4 for AI inference — targeting trillion-parameter model serving at economics impractical with H100. Read more

Intel Announces Core Ultra 200S

2 minute read

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Intel announced Core Ultra 200S desktop processors (codenamed Arrow Lake) on October 24, 2024 for the LGA1851 socket. The flagship Core Ultra 9 285K featured 8 Lion Cove P-cores and 16 Skymont E-cores plus 4 low-power E-cores — 24 cores total — with no HyperThreading on any core: Intel removed simultaneous multithreading (SMT) from Lion Cove’s design entirely, arguing that the wider out-of-order execution engine in Lion Cove (larger instruction window, more execution units per core than Raptor Lake’s Golden Cove) made SMT less valuable than adding real cores. The 285K had a 125W TDP base and 250W max turbo power, with boost clocks to 5.7 GHz. The design was a disaggregated package: the CPU compute tile was manufactured on Intel 20A (Intel’s own process, roughly equivalent to TSMC N5 class), the GPU tile and SoC tile on TSMC N6, and the I/O tile on TSMC N6, all connected via Intel’s Foveros Direct die-to-die interconnect at 36 μm pitch — the same approach Intel used for Meteor Lake mobile (December 2023) now arriving at the desktop. Read more

Toyota The Company That Made Efficiency A Philosophy

16 minute read

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Toyota is often described as one of the world’s largest automobile manufacturers. That description is correct. It is also incomplete. Toyota became important not only because of the cars it produced, but because of the way it learned to produce them. Read more

Welcome to Our Department

1 minute read

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If you are beginning Computer Engineering in 2024, welcome to a field where tools are becoming more powerful and judgment is becoming more important. Read more

OpenAI Releases the o1 Reasoning Model

3 minute read

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OpenAI released o1 on September 12, 2024 — initially called “o1-preview” for ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers at $20/month, with API access at $15 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens. A smaller, faster variant called o1-mini launched the same day at $3/$12 per million tokens, designed for coding and STEM tasks on a tighter budget. The full o1 model (removing the “preview” label) launched December 5, 2024. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2024?

2 minute read

Published:

In 2024, artificial intelligence is becoming a normal part of software products rather than a separate research topic. The pace of change this year has been striking even by recent standards. Read more

Google Introduces the Pixel 9 Generation Early

3 minute read

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Google announced the Pixel 9 on August 13, 2024 — the earliest ever for a Pixel launch, moved from October to beat Apple’s iPhone 16 announcement in September. The Pixel 9 lineup included four models: Pixel 9 ($799, 6.3-inch), Pixel 9 Pro ($999, 6.3-inch), Pixel 9 Pro XL ($1,099, 6.8-inch), and Pixel 9 Pro Fold ($1,799, foldable). All used Google’s Tensor G4 processor (manufactured by Samsung on 4nm), with 12GB RAM on the standard Pixel 9 and 16GB on Pro models — increases over the Tensor G3’s 12GB configurations, explicitly motivated by on-device AI workload requirements. Read more

CrowdStrike Update Causes a Global Windows Outage

4 minute read

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At approximately 04:09 UTC on July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike began deploying a content configuration update to its Falcon sensor — the kernel-level security agent running on Windows endpoints — that caused millions of machines to crash with a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) and enter an unrecoverable boot loop. CrowdStrike Falcon operates as a kernel-mode driver (running at CPU Ring 0 privilege) that inspects process creation, network connections, file system operations, and memory allocations at a level below normal applications, giving it visibility into attacks that user-mode security tools cannot detect. The faulty update was not the Falcon sensor binary itself but a “rapid response content” channel file — a configuration update named C-00000291-*.sys that defined detection logic templates for a new IPC (Inter-Process Communication) Template Type. A bug in the validator for this new template type caused the Falcon sensor to attempt to access memory through a null pointer when loading the file during Windows boot, triggering a kernel STOP error before Windows could complete initialization. Machines that had already booted and were running were not immediately affected; machines that rebooted after 04:09 UTC during the rollout window entered the crash loop. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2024

3 minute read

Published:

If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2024, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

Apple Announces Apple Intelligence

3 minute read

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Apple announced Apple Intelligence at WWDC on June 10, 2024, as a set of generative AI capabilities built into iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. Initial features included Writing Tools (rewrite, proofread, and summarize text in any app), Image Playground (generating images from text prompts in three styles), Genmoji (custom emoji generated from descriptions), a redesigned Siri with conversational context and screen awareness, and a summarized notification inbox using on-device language models. Apple Intelligence launched in beta with iOS 18.1 in October 2024, initially for US English only, with language expansion planned through 2025. Read more

Microsoft Introduces Copilot Plus PCs

4 minute read

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Microsoft announced Copilot+ PCs on May 20, 2024, defining a hardware category requiring a minimum 40 TOPS (tera-operations per second) NPU (Neural Processing Unit) — more than any existing Windows laptop NPU at the time. The first wave of Copilot+ PCs launched June 18, 2024, using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus processors, which contained an Oryon CPU (derived from Nuvia’s acquisition), an Adreno GPU, and a Hexagon NPU rated at 45 TOPS. Devices from Surface, Samsung, Dell, HP, ASUS, Lenovo, and Acer launched simultaneously, priced from $999. Intel and AMD Copilot+ PC laptops (using Intel Lunar Lake and AMD Strix Point with their respective 47–50 TOPS NPUs) followed in fall 2024. Read more

Meta Releases Llama 3

4 minute read

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Meta released Llama 3 on April 18, 2024, with 8-billion and 70-billion parameter models in both base and instruction-tuned variants, distributed through Hugging Face, llama.meta.com, and major cloud providers (AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Azure AI). The 8B and 70B Instruct variants outperformed comparable open-weight models (Mistral 7B, Gemma 7B) on standard benchmarks and approached GPT-3.5 Turbo performance on tasks like MMLU (79.5% for Llama 3 70B vs GPT-3.5’s ~70%) and coding. Meta announced that a Llama 3 model exceeding 400 billion parameters was in training. Read more

AI Coding Assistants Are Becoming Part Of The Editor

4 minute read

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GitHub Copilot launched technical preview in June 2021 and became generally available in June 2022. In the roughly two years since, it has gone from curiosity to part of the daily development environment for many teams. By March 2024, GitHub reports over a million paying users and adoption at the majority of Fortune 500 companies. ChatGPT and Claude have expanded the use case beyond inline completion to conversational assistance — asking questions about code, requesting explanations, and generating complete functions in a chat interface. Cursor, a VS Code fork with deeper model integration, has emerged in 2023-2024 as a model for what tight AI-editor integration can look like. Read more

NVIDIA Announces the Blackwell GPU Architecture

3 minute read

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NVIDIA announced the Blackwell GPU architecture at GTC on March 18, 2024 in a keynote where Jensen Huang said the company was “not in the semiconductor business — we’re in the infrastructure business.” The flagship B200 GPU used two connected dies (the GB202 silicon) totaling 208 billion transistors on TSMC’s 4NP custom process — more than double the H100’s 80 billion transistors on 4N. The B200 delivered 20 petaFLOPS at FP4, compared to the H100’s 4 petaFLOPS at FP8 (halving precision doubles throughput, so the increase was partly from precision and partly from transistor count). HBM3e memory reached 192 GB per B200 with 8 TB/s bandwidth — nearly 2.4× the H100’s 3.35 TB/s. Read more

Google Releases Gemini 1.5

3 minute read

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Google announced Gemini 1.5 Pro on February 15, 2024 in a research preview that made it available to select developers through Google AI Studio and the Gemini API. The headline capability was a context window of up to one million tokens — roughly 750,000 words, equivalent to approximately 30,000 lines of code, 11 hours of audio, 1 hour of video, or several complete novels in a single request. For comparison, GPT-4 Turbo (announced November 6, 2023) offered a 128,000-token context, and Claude 2.1 (November 2023) offered 200,000 tokens; Gemini 1.5’s one-million-token window was five to eight times larger than any commercially available alternative at the time. Google demonstrated the capability with tasks including analyzing an entire 402-page technical manual to answer detailed questions, understanding a full-length movie provided as video frames, and performing few-shot in-context learning from hundreds of examples rather than the dozens that fit in previous context windows. The model also supported multimodal inputs — text, images, audio, and video — within the same context window, enabling queries like “at what timestamp in this hour-long lecture does the professor make an error in this equation?” Read more

Apple Vision Pro Reviews Bring Spatial Computing Into Focus

3 minute read

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Apple opened Vision Pro preorders on January 19, 2024, selling out the first wave in minutes; early pre-order confirmations showed delivery dates in late February. Review embargoes lifted February 1, 2024, one day before the retail launch on February 2. The $3,499 starting price (with prescription lens inserts adding $149–$299) resulted in a device that journalists handled as a premium technology artifact rather than a consumer product, and reviewer consensus reflected that tension: extraordinary engineering at a price and form factor that limited its audience. Read more

Google Releases Gemini

3 minute read

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Google introduced Gemini on December 6, 2023, as a natively multimodal model family in three sizes: Nano (running on-device in Pixel 8 Pro phones), Pro (replacing Bard as Google’s conversational AI), and Ultra (the largest version, subject to further safety testing before release). Unlike earlier Google models that added multimodal capability by aligning separate text and vision encoders, Gemini was trained from the start on interleaved sequences of text, images, audio, and video, allowing reasoning that crossed modalities within a single pass. Read more

Java Superstars

4 minute read

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Java 21 arrived in September 2023 as the latest long-term support release, and it is a significant one. Virtual threads — the main deliverable of Project Loom — are now production-ready. Structured concurrency and scoped values are in preview. Pattern matching for switch is finalized. Record patterns work in instanceof checks. After years of shorter improvement cycles since Java 9, the platform has changed considerably. The people shaping this evolution are worth understanding, but so is the community structure that makes Java’s development sustainable. Read more

OpenAI’s Leadership Crisis Shakes the AI Industry

2 minute read

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On November 17, 2023, OpenAI’s board — composed of Ilya Sutskever (co-founder and Chief Scientist), Adam D’Angelo (Quora CEO), Tasha McCaulay (FTX Future Fund), and Helen Toner (Georgetown CSET) — fired CEO Sam Altman in a surprise announcement, stating he “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” Greg Brockman, President and co-founder, resigned in protest within hours. The board named CTO Mira Murati interim CEO, then replaced her with Emmett Shear (co-founder of Twitch) days later. The timing came 11 days after OpenAI’s first developer conference (DevDay, November 6), where GPT-4 Turbo and the GPT Store had been announced, with ChatGPT at approximately 100 million weekly active users. Read more

Staying Engaged In Computer Science Classes

5 minute read

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Computer science classes can become difficult for a reason that has nothing to do with intelligence: the subject moves from concrete to abstract unusually fast. A student learns to write a loop on Monday and hears about time complexity, memory models, and formal proofs before the month ends. It is easy to lose the thread between what you can see on the screen and what the teacher is now talking about. Read more

Ubuntu 23.10 Shows the New Desktop Installer Direction

3 minute read

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Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur” was released on October 12, 2023 as a nine-month interim release between the Ubuntu 23.04 (April 2023) and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (April 2024) releases. The most significant infrastructure change was the default deployment of Canonical’s new Flutter-based desktop installer, replacing the Ubiquity installer that had been the standard Ubuntu desktop installation tool since Ubuntu 5.10 “Breezy Badger” in October 2005. Ubiquity was built on Python and GTK, and while it had received updates throughout its 18-year life, its architecture made it difficult to share code between the desktop installer, the Ubuntu Server installer (Subiquity, introduced in Ubuntu 18.04), and the Ubuntu Core IoT/embedded installer. The new installer, written in Dart using the Flutter framework (the same cross-platform UI toolkit Google uses for mobile apps), shared the Subiquity backend used for server installations and presented a redesigned step-by-step interface with cleaner visuals, accessibility improvements, and a new partitioning UI. The choice of Flutter was notable: it was a cross-platform framework primarily associated with mobile and web development, not traditional Linux desktop software, reflecting Canonical’s assessment that Flutter’s widget consistency across platforms made it the most practical choice for sharing a single codebase across the desktop, server, and embedded installer variants. Other desktop changes included GNOME 45 (released September 20, 2023), which featured a new Quick Settings panel replacing the old system menu, an updated Activities overview with a workspace indicator in the top bar, and a breaking change to GNOME Shell extension APIs that required all existing extensions to be updated for GNOME 45 compatibility — a recurring pattern in GNOME releases that frustrated extension maintainers. Read more

Apple Introduces the A17 Pro

2 minute read

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Apple introduced the A17 Pro on September 12, 2023, exclusively in the iPhone 15 Pro ($999) and Pro Max ($1,199) — the first time Apple gave a chip a “Pro” designation to distinguish it from the A16 Bionic continuing in the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus. The A17 Pro was built on TSMC’s first-generation 3nm process (N3B, using EUV lithography), containing 19 billion transistors — up from the A16 Bionic’s 16 billion transistors on TSMC’s 4nm node. The A17 Pro’s 6-core CPU delivered 2 high-performance cores (at approximately 3.78 GHz) and 4 efficiency cores; Apple claimed 10% faster CPU performance than A16 while improving power efficiency at similar performance levels. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2023?

3 minute read

Published:

In 2023, generative artificial intelligence has changed the public conversation about computing. Tools that can produce text, images, and code have made many people ask what software work will look like in the future. Read more

LK-99 Claims Trigger Intense Computational Analysis

2 minute read

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On July 22, 2023, two preprint papers appeared on arXiv from Sukbae Lee and colleagues at the Quantum Energy Research Center in Seoul, claiming that a lead-apatite compound doped with copper — chemical formula Pb₉Cu(PO₄)₆O, dubbed LK-99 — exhibited superconductivity at room temperature and ambient pressure. A video showing a small pellet partially levitating above a magnet (a demonstration of the Meissner effect, in which superconductors expel magnetic fields) spread on social media within days. If true, the claim would be the most significant physics discovery in decades: room-temperature superconductors would transform power transmission, computing, and MRI machines by eliminating the need for liquid helium or liquid nitrogen cooling. Read more

Meta Releases Llama 2

2 minute read

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Meta released Llama 2 on July 18, 2023 in partnership with Microsoft, distributing model weights through Hugging Face, llama.meta.com, and Microsoft Azure. The release included three sizes — 7B, 13B, and 70B parameters — in both base (pretrained) and Chat (RLHF-aligned) variants, under a custom commercial license that permitted use by organizations with fewer than 700 million monthly active users without additional licensing, and required a separate agreement from Meta for larger deployments. This was a significant change from the first LLaMA (February 2023), which had been released for research-only use and whose weights leaked via torrent within a week. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2023

3 minute read

Published:

If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2023, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

Apple Introduces the Vision Pro

3 minute read

Published:

Apple introduced Vision Pro at WWDC on June 5, 2023 as a “spatial computer” starting at $3,499. It went on sale February 2, 2024 in the US. The headset contained two micro-OLED displays (23 million pixels total across both eyes, higher than a 4K TV viewed from a typical distance), driven by an M2 chip for application processing and a new R1 chip for real-time sensor fusion. Twelve cameras, six microphones, and five sensors including LiDAR and a TrueDepth camera fed data continuously to the R1, which processed and delivered images to the displays within 12 milliseconds — a latency Apple stated was below human perceptual thresholds for lag between head movement and visual update. Read more

Google Announces the PaLM 2 Model

4 minute read

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Google announced PaLM 2 at Google I/O on May 10, 2023, as the successor to PaLM (Pathways Language Model, April 2022, 540 billion parameters). PaLM 2 was offered in four sizes — Gecko (deployable on mobile devices), Otter, Bison, and Unicorn (the largest, with parameter count undisclosed) — allowing Google to serve the same model family from on-device inference to large cloud deployments. Google’s technical report described PaLM 2 as trained on a significantly broader multilingual corpus (100+ languages and programming content spanning 20+ programming languages) than PaLM, with a smaller model-to-data ratio (a “chinchilla-optimal” approach, citing Hoffmann et al. 2022’s finding that smaller models trained on more data outperform larger models on less data at the same compute budget). Read more

SpaceX Starship Completes Its First Integrated Flight Test

3 minute read

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SpaceX launched Starship’s first integrated flight test (IFT-1) on April 20, 2023 at 8:33 AM CDT from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas. The fully stacked vehicle — Super Heavy booster (B7) plus Starship upper stage (S24) — stood approximately 120 meters (394 feet) tall, making it the largest rocket ever flown. Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor 2 engines produced approximately 74.4 MN (16.7 million pounds-force) of liftoff thrust, surpassing the Saturn V (35.1 MN) and NASA’s Space Launch System Block 1 (39.1 MN) to make it the most powerful rocket ever successfully launched from the pad. The vehicle successfully cleared the launch tower and rose to approximately 38 km altitude over the Gulf of Mexico before the mission ended with an unplanned vehicle breakup. During the ascent, several Raptor engines failed to ignite or shut down early — approximately 6 of 33 engines were observed non-functional during flight — though the vehicle was designed to fly with 3–4 engine failures. Stage separation (planned as a “hot staging” maneuver, with the upper stage’s engines igniting before booster engine shutdown) did not execute as planned; the vehicle began rotating uncontrollably approximately 2:50 into the flight. The flight termination system (FTS) was triggered by SpaceX’s flight safety officer approximately 4 minutes into the flight as the vehicle descended uncontrolled over the Gulf. Read more

Gordon Moore Has Passed Away At The Age Of 94

4 minute read

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Gordon Moore died on March 24, 2023, at the age of 94. His name is inseparable from one of the most consequential observations in the history of technology: Moore’s Law. The observation shaped not only the semiconductor industry but the software written to run on it, and the expectations of everyone who used computers for half a century. Read more

GPT-4 Is Released

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OpenAI released GPT-4 on March 14, 2023, making it available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers ($20/month) and via the API to developers on a waitlist. Microsoft had already integrated GPT-4 into Bing Chat (launched February 7, 2023) before the formal public release — an early signal that enterprise integration was ahead of consumer access. OpenAI published a GPT-4 Technical Report the following day, disclosing extensive benchmark results but deliberately omitting parameter count, training compute, dataset composition, and architecture specifics, citing “competitive and safety reasons.” This represented a notable break from the research transparency of GPT-2 (2019) and GPT-3 (2020), both of which had technical papers with full methodology. On standard academic benchmarks, GPT-4 scored in the 90th percentile on the bar exam (GPT-3.5 had scored the 10th percentile), in the 93rd percentile on the SAT reading/writing section, and 88th percentile on SAT math. On MMLU (57 academic subjects, 5-shot), GPT-4 scored 86.4% versus GPT-3.5’s 70%. The model launched with 8,192 token context (a 32K context version was available to select API partners), compared to GPT-3.5’s 4,096 tokens. Read more

Meta Releases LLaMA

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Meta released LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) on February 24, 2023, as a family of decoder-only transformer models at four sizes: 7B, 13B, 33B, and 65B parameters. Training used 1 to 1.4 trillion tokens drawn from Common Crawl (67%), GitHub, Wikipedia, books, ArXiv papers, and Stack Exchange — a much larger dataset than GPT-3’s 300 billion tokens. The 13B model matched or exceeded GPT-3 (175B parameters) on most standard benchmarks, demonstrating that smaller models trained longer on cleaner data could match much larger models trained on fewer tokens, a finding that echoed the “Chinchilla scaling laws” paper DeepMind had published in March 2022. Read more

Leonardo Da Vinci: The Man Beyond The Mona Lisa

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When people hear Leonardo da Vinci, the Mona Lisa usually appears first. That is understandable — it is one of the most recognized paintings in the world, displayed behind bullet-proof glass in the Louvre to crowds that number in the tens of thousands daily. But the painting is a narrow window into a much larger life. Leonardo spent more hours filling notebooks with observations and designs than he did holding a paintbrush. Read more

How Do Computers Make Decisions?

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Computers do not make decisions in the human sense. They follow logical rules with perfect consistency and no understanding of why those rules exist. The interesting question is how that simple foundation — binary logic operating on electrical signals — scales up to the decision-making behavior we observe in real systems. Read more

Why Do Computers Use 1s And 0s?

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People often ask why computers use 1s and 0s when we normally count with ten digits. The answer starts with the hardware — but the real reason runs deeper than transistors. Read more

Why We Need Operating Systems?

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A computer without an operating system would still be a computer. The processor would still execute instructions. Memory would still store values. But using it would require detailed knowledge of the specific hardware — the exact memory addresses where data should be placed, the precise sequence of instructions to communicate with a storage device, the mechanism for switching between different tasks. Early computers operated this way. Human operators loaded programs manually, assigned resources directly, and managed the hardware as closely as the machine itself. Read more

Microsoft Expands Its Partnership With OpenAI

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Microsoft announced on January 23, 2023 a new multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment in OpenAI, reported as approximately $10 billion — the third major investment after $1 billion in 2019 and approximately $2 billion in 2021. The announcement came 54 days after ChatGPT’s November 30, 2022 public launch, during which ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users in 2 months — faster than any consumer internet product including TikTok (9 months) and Instagram (2.5 years) to the same milestone. The investment was structured partly in Azure cloud computing credits rather than fully in cash, deepening OpenAI’s existing exclusive reliance on Microsoft Azure for all training and inference compute. The financial structure included a “capped profit” arrangement: Microsoft and other investors receive returns up to a specific multiple of their investment, after which OpenAI’s nonprofit parent entity receives subsequent profits — a structure designed to allow investor returns while preserving OpenAI’s nonprofit mission orientation. Read more

LastPass Discloses Password Vault Breach Details

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LastPass disclosed on December 22, 2022 that an August 2022 security incident — in which an attacker had compromised a developer’s workstation and exfiltrated source code, technical documentation, and internal secrets — had been used as the first stage of a second, larger breach. In the second incident (September through October 2022), the attacker used credentials and keys stolen from a LastPass DevOps engineer’s home computer (compromised through a vulnerable third-party media player with an unpatched remote code execution vulnerability) to access LastPass’s cloud backup storage on Amazon S3. The attacker exfiltrated backups of LastPass customer vault data along with encryption keys and other infrastructure data. The disclosure came four months after the initial August 2022 breach notification, which had incorrectly characterized the damage as limited to source code and had not mentioned that customer vault data was at risk. The delayed and initially incomplete disclosure was widely criticized by security researchers and customers. Read more

To Be A Student Or To Graduate?

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Students and graduates face different kinds of problems, and that difference is larger than it first appears. Understanding it early can make the transition significantly less disorienting. Read more

The Importance Of Active And Collaborative Education

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A student can sit quietly through an entire lesson, nod at the right moments, and still learn very little. This is the central problem with passive education. Attention is not the same as understanding, and understanding is not the same as being able to use something. Read more

OpenAI Releases ChatGPT

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OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022 as a free research preview powered by GPT-3.5-turbo, an optimized version of the GPT-3.5 model family trained using InstructGPT techniques developed by OpenAI researchers in 2022. The training pipeline combined supervised fine-tuning (human contractors writing example conversations demonstrating helpful assistant behavior), reward model training (human raters comparing pairs of model responses and indicating which was better), and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to update the language model’s weights toward higher-scoring responses. The resulting model was dramatically better than raw GPT-3 at following instructions, maintaining topic coherence across a conversation, declining inappropriate requests, and producing well-structured output — behaviors that emerged from the RLHF process rather than raw pretraining. The web interface (chat.openai.com) required only a free account and a web browser, making it the first large language model experience accessible to a mainstream audience without any technical setup. OpenAI had previously offered GPT-3 access through an API requiring developer registration and payment, which limited its reach to technically sophisticated users. ChatGPT eliminated that barrier: within five days of launch it had one million registered users, and within two months it reached 100 million monthly active users — the fastest product in history to reach that milestone, surpassing TikTok (nine months) and Instagram (two and a half years) by a wide margin. Read more

Elon Musk Completes the Twitter Acquisition

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Elon Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, ending months of legal, financial, and public drama around one of the world’s most visible social platforms. The deal mattered not only because of the price or the personalities involved, but because Twitter had become a strange kind of public infrastructure: part newswire, part social network, part professional identity system, and part political arena. Read more

How AI Tools Empower Developers To Write Better Code

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GitHub Copilot went into technical preview in June 2021. By October 2022, it has been available to the general public for several months, and the reports from developers who use it daily are specific enough to form a clearer picture of what it actually changes. Read more

NVIDIA Announces the RTX 40 Series

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NVIDIA unveiled the GeForce RTX 40 series at a September 20, 2022 event, with the RTX 4090 and two versions of RTX 4080 (16GB and 12GB) announced. The RTX 4090 launched October 12 at $1,599; the 16GB RTX 4080 launched November 16 at $1,199. The 12GB “4080” was withdrawn after public backlash over the naming and re-released in January 2023 as the RTX 4070 Ti at $799. All used the Ada Lovelace architecture on TSMC’s 4N process node (a customized version of 5nm). The RTX 4090 contained 76.3 billion transistors on the AD102 die, nearly double the RTX 3090 Ti’s 40.4 billion on Samsung 8N. Read more

What Are The Latest Trends In Software Development?

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Every year, lists of software development trends appear. Most of them include the same items at different stages of hype. In September 2022, I want to try something different: instead of simply listing what is popular, I want to say what I think is real, what is overstated, and what is worth investing in now. Read more

Stable Diffusion Opens a New Era of Generative Images

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Stability AI released Stable Diffusion 1.4 publicly on August 22, 2022, making the model weights downloadable under the CreativeML Open RAIL-M license (allowing commercial use with behavioral restrictions, unlike prior generative image models locked behind APIs). The model had been developed by CompVis (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, led by Robin Rombach) with funding from Stability AI and collaboration from Runway ML, based on the “Latent Diffusion Models” paper (Rombach et al., arXiv December 2021, CVPR 2022 Best Paper). The training dataset was LAION-5B (5.85 billion image-text pairs scraped from the public web), the largest openly published training dataset at the time, curated by the LAION non-profit organization. The SD 1.x models fit in approximately 4 GB (fp32 weights) or 2 GB (fp16), runnable on consumer NVIDIA GPUs with 6–8 GB VRAM or Apple Silicon M1/M2 (via CoreML or MPS backends, slower but functional without a discrete GPU) — a stark contrast to DALL-E 2 (OpenAI, April 2022, API-only at ~$0.02/image) and Midjourney (March 2022, Discord bot, subscription, closed source). Read more

James Webb Telescope Images Showcase Massive Scientific Computing

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NASA publicly released the first full-color science images from the James Webb Space Telescope on July 12, 2022 — President Biden previewed one image (SMACS 0723, a gravitational lensing deep field) at the White House on July 11. JWST had launched December 25, 2021 on an Ariane 5 rocket, deployed its 18-segment primary mirror and sunshield over two weeks in orbit, and reached its operational position at the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (approximately 1.5 million kilometers from Earth in the direction away from the Sun) on January 24, 2022. Mirror alignment completed April 28, 2022, and commissioning of the four science instruments concluded in late June 2022 before the July release. The five inaugural images demonstrated capabilities across JWST’s instrument suite: the SMACS 0723 deep field showed thousands of galaxies as they existed 13 billion years ago through gravitational lensing; the Carina Nebula image revealed previously obscured star formation regions in infrared wavelengths that visible-light telescopes couldn’t penetrate; the WASP-96b spectrum showed the atmospheric transmission spectrum of an exoplanet with identifiable water vapor, carbon dioxide, and cloud signatures; the Southern Ring Nebula showed a dying star’s ejected shells in both NIRCam and MIRI imaging; and Stephan’s Quintet showed five interacting galaxies in an unprecedented wide-field infrared mosaic. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2022

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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2022, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

Apple Announces the M2 Processor

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Apple announced the M2 processor at WWDC on June 6, 2022, first shipping inside a redesigned 13-inch MacBook Air that launched June 17 at $1,199. M2 used TSMC’s second-generation 5nm process and kept the same broad heterogeneous architecture as M1 — four performance cores, four efficiency cores, and up to ten GPU cores — while improving each block. Read more

Google Reveals Imagen

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Google Research published the Imagen paper on May 23, 2022, alongside a website showing examples — but without releasing the model or a public API. Imagen combined a frozen 4.6-billion-parameter T5-XXL text encoder (the same language model used for NLP tasks) with a pipeline of three cascaded diffusion models: a base model generating 64×64 images from text, then two super-resolution diffusion models upscaling to 256×256 and 1024×1024. The T5-XXL encoder had been trained on text only, not image-text pairs, and Google’s finding was that using a large language model’s text representations as conditioning signals produced better text-image alignment than training a custom CLIP-style encoder specifically for image generation — suggesting that language understanding, not vision-specific training, drove Imagen’s prompt adherence. Read more

Generative Image Models Are Getting Hard To Ignore

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Image generation from text has improved remarkably quickly. Systems such as DALL-E 2, announced by OpenAI this year, can create images from written descriptions with a level of coherence that would have looked much less convincing only a short time ago. Read more

Elon Musk Reaches an Agreement to Buy Twitter

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Elon Musk disclosed a 9.2% stake in Twitter on April 4, 2022, making him the company’s largest shareholder, then reached an agreement to acquire Twitter for $54.20 per share — approximately $44 billion total — on April 25, 2022, after initially being offered a board seat. Musk financed the deal with $21 billion in equity (his own funds and co-investors including Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who committed $1 billion), a $12.5 billion margin loan against Tesla stock, and $13 billion in bank debt underwritten by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and others. Read more

How Can I Stay Up-to-date With New Technologies And Best Practices?

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Software development changes quickly enough to make almost everyone feel behind sometimes. In early 2022, there is Rust gaining serious traction for systems work, TypeScript becoming the default for large JavaScript projects, Kubernetes appearing in most deployment discussions, and a growing set of AI-assisted coding tools that did not exist two years ago. Meanwhile, fundamentals like data structures, networking, and operating systems are unchanged. Read more

NVIDIA Introduces the Hopper GPU Architecture

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NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced the Hopper GPU architecture at GTC (GPU Technology Conference) on March 22, 2022, during a keynote delivered in a chip fab-styled theatrical setting featuring a life-size H100 GPU prop. The flagship H100 (die GH100) was manufactured on TSMC N4 (4nm class) and contained 80 billion transistors — 2.6× the transistor count of the Ampere A100 (54 billion on Samsung 8nm). H100 SXM5 (the high-performance server module) shipped with 80 GB HBM3 at 3.35 TB/s memory bandwidth (vs A100’s 80 GB HBM2e at 2.0 TB/s), and delivered approximately 3.35 TFLOPS BF16/FP16 dense training throughput (vs 312 TFLOPS for A100) — roughly a 3× improvement in raw training arithmetic. The 4th-generation Tensor Cores added FP8 support, and the Transformer Engine (a hardware-software co-design) automatically selected between FP8 and FP16 precision on a per-layer, per-tensor basis during transformer training — using FP8 where precision loss was acceptable (typically activations and gradients after normalization) and FP16 where it was critical (typically weights and output projections), without requiring model developers to manually annotate precision choices. Read more

Valve Releases the Steam Deck

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Valve began shipping Steam Deck units on February 25, 2022, fulfilling reservations placed starting July 2021 in order of the $5 deposit queue (over 100,000 units were pre-ordered in the first 48 hours). The hardware was built around AMD’s “Van Gogh” APU (internally codenamed “Aerith”): a Zen 2 quad-core/8-thread CPU (2.4–3.5 GHz) paired with an RDNA 2 GPU with 8 compute units (1.0–1.6 GHz, 1.6 TFLOPS FP32), 16 GB LPDDR5 RAM in a unified memory architecture, and a 40 Whr battery providing roughly 2–8 hours depending on the game’s GPU load. Three models shipped: 64 GB eMMC at $399, 256 GB NVMe PCIe 3.0 at $529, and 512 GB NVMe at $649. The 7-inch 1280×800 IPS display ran at 60 Hz with 400 nits brightness. All models included the same APU and memory — only storage and screen coating differed. Read more

Microsoft Announces Its Plan to Acquire Activision Blizzard

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Microsoft announced the acquisition of Activision Blizzard on January 18, 2022 for $68.7 billion in cash — $95 per share, a 45% premium over Activision’s closing price on January 14. If completed, it would be the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history and the largest in gaming history, surpassing Take-Two’s $12.7 billion acquisition of Zynga (also announced January 2022). Activision Blizzard’s portfolio included Call of Duty (the best-selling annual game franchise globally), World of Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, Candy Crush (King subsidiary), Hearthstone, and StarCraft. CEO Bobby Kotick, who was facing shareholder pressure over workplace misconduct allegations at Activision Blizzard, would eventually exit after closing. Read more

FAQ Of Student Software Engineers

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Students who want to become software engineers ask many of the same questions. Here are the ones I hear most often, answered as directly as I can. Read more

Log4Shell Exposes the Risk of Ubiquitous Dependencies

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The Log4Shell vulnerability was disclosed in December 2021 in Log4j, a Java logging library embedded in an enormous number of applications. The flaw became critical because a specially crafted string could trigger JNDI lookups that, in vulnerable configurations, led to remote code execution. Read more

AWS Announces Graviton3

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Amazon Web Services announced Graviton3 at re:Invent 2021 (December 1, 2021, Las Vegas) as its third-generation custom Arm server processor. The chip used 64 Arm Neoverse V1 cores (a high-performance variant of the Armv8.4 ISA, compared to the Neoverse N1 cores in Graviton2) manufactured on TSMC’s N5 (5nm) process versus Graviton2’s TSMC 7nm. AWS claimed 25% better compute performance, 2× better floating-point performance, 2× better cryptography performance, and 3× better machine learning performance compared to Graviton2 (the last comparison due to Graviton3’s support for BF16 and INT8 matrix multiply instructions via Arm’s Scalable Vector Extension). Graviton3 was also the first AWS-designed chip with DDR5-4800 memory support — a full year before DDR5 became widely available in consumer desktop platforms — yielding 50% higher memory bandwidth than Graviton2’s DDR4. AWS claimed 60% better energy efficiency versus comparable x86-based EC2 instances in the same workload category. Read more

Windows 11 Is Released

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Windows 11 released on October 5, 2021 as a free upgrade for eligible Windows 10 PCs, with a phased rollout that Microsoft controlled through hardware compatibility scoring — PCs meeting all requirements received a notification over weeks rather than all at once. The visual design replaced Windows 10’s left-anchored Start menu with a centered taskbar and Start button (repositionable to the left via settings), added rounded window corners, a redesigned Snap Layouts interface (Windows key + Z showing snap zone presets for 2–4 windows), and a new Widgets panel (news, weather, and calendar tiles). The Microsoft Store was rebuilt to accept Win32 applications (not only UWP apps), and Microsoft added DirectStorage API support — the same technology in Xbox Series X/S that allows the GPU to decompress NVMe SSD data directly, bypassing CPU and reducing game load times. Auto HDR automatically upgraded DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games to use HDR color on supported displays. Read more

Apple Introduces the A15 Bionic

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Apple announced the A15 Bionic on September 14, 2021 with the iPhone 13 lineup: iPhone 13 ($799), 13 Mini ($699), 13 Pro ($999), and 13 Pro Max ($1,099). The A15 was manufactured on TSMC’s enhanced 5nm process (N5P), containing 15 billion transistors compared to the A14’s 11.8 billion. The CPU used 2 Avalanche high-performance cores and 4 Blizzard efficiency cores — Apple claimed 50% faster CPU performance than competitors at the time (targeting Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888, which used Samsung 5nm and measured roughly 30–35% behind the A15 in single-thread benchmarks). The 16-core Neural Engine delivered 15.8 TOPS, up from the A14’s 11 TOPS, supporting the new Cinematic Mode video feature. Read more

Grady Booch, A Pioneer Of Computing Technology

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Grady Booch is one of the most influential people in the history of software engineering, but his contributions are sometimes reduced to “he helped create UML,” which understates both what he built and what he argued for. I want to give his work more space. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2021?

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In 2021, it is difficult to find an important technology that does not involve computing. Cloud platforms run global services, artificial intelligence is entering more products, and the global semiconductor shortage has reminded everyone that software still depends on physical hardware. Read more

The Metaverse Is Still More Question Than Answer

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The word “metaverse” comes from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, where it describes a persistent virtual world accessible through goggles — a shared space where people can walk, talk, and conduct business as avatars. The term has been sitting in technology culture since then, invoked occasionally, not quite arriving. Read more

Apple Announces CSAM Detection Plans

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Apple announced plans in 2021 for child-safety features that included on-device detection of known child sexual abuse material before images were uploaded to iCloud Photos. The announcement immediately became one of the most difficult privacy debates in consumer technology. Read more

Some Of Popular Java Developers

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Java has existed since 1995, and in 2021 it is releasing a new version every six months, with Java 17 arriving later this year as the next long-term support release. The language has changed significantly over that period — records, sealed classes, pattern matching, text blocks, and a new approach to concurrency through Project Loom are all reshaping what Java code looks like. Behind that evolution are people who made specific technical decisions that influenced how millions of developers think and write code. Read more

Steam Deck Is Announced

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Valve announced the Steam Deck on July 15, 2021 and opened reservations the following day. The handheld PC came in three storage configurations: $399 (64 GB eMMC), $529 (256 GB NVMe), and $649 (512 GB NVMe). The device used a custom AMD APU — codenamed Aerith — with four Zen 2 CPU cores at up to 3.5 GHz, RDNA 2 graphics with 8 compute units, and 16 GB of unified LPDDR5 memory. The 7-inch 1280×800 touchscreen was rated at 60 Hz. First units shipped to customers beginning February 25, 2022. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2021

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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2021, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

Windows 11 Is Announced

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Microsoft announced Windows 11 at a dedicated event on June 24, 2021, led by Chief Product Officer Panos Panay. The announcement followed weeks of leaks — a build of Windows 11 had circulated online on June 15, 2021, confirming the visual redesign before the official event. The user interface changes included a centered taskbar and Start button (repositionable to the left in Settings), a new Start menu showing pinned apps and recent documents (but removing live tiles entirely), redesigned context menus and dialog boxes with rounded corners, a Widgets panel (news, weather, sports, calendar pulled from Microsoft services), and Snap Layouts (hovering over a window’s maximize button revealed 2–4 zone layout presets). The Microsoft Store was redesigned to allow Win32 application submission — developers could submit traditional desktop software, not only UWP/MSIX apps — addressing one of developers’ long-standing grievances with the previous Store. DirectStorage (a Windows API allowing the GPU to decompress NVMe data directly, bypassing CPU and system RAM for asset loading) was announced as a Windows 11 feature, though it was later backported to Windows 10 as well. Read more

Revolutionizing The Artificial Intelligence Landscape

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Artificial intelligence in 2021 is surrounded by excitement that sometimes makes it difficult to see clearly. The same conversation that includes genuine technical milestones also includes cryptocurrency speculation, NFT marketplaces, and metaverse announcements. The noise makes it harder to identify what is real and durable. Read more

Google Announces LaMDA

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Google introduced LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) at Google I/O on May 18, 2021 as a language model trained specifically for multi-turn, open-ended conversation. The model had 137 billion parameters and was trained on 1.56 trillion words of public web documents and dialogue data. Unlike Google’s earlier neural conversation research, LaMDA was designed to maintain coherent context across many conversational turns rather than responding to isolated queries. Read more

Apple Introduces the M1 iMac and New iPad Pro

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Apple introduced a redesigned 24-inch iMac and a new iPad Pro in April 2021, both using the M1 processor announced at the Mac event in November 2020. The iMac, priced from $1,299, replaced the 21.5-inch and 27-inch Intel models with a single M1 design just 11.5 mm thick — thinner than many smartphones — in seven colors. It included a 24-inch 4.5K Retina display, a 1080p front camera, and a six-speaker sound system. The M1 Mac mini and MacBook Air had already launched; adding the iMac and iPad Pro showed the chip could span from compact desktops to tablets with the same architecture. Read more

Microsoft Introduces Mesh for Mixed Reality

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Microsoft announced Mesh at its Ignite conference on March 2, 2021 as a cloud platform for shared, real-time mixed-reality experiences. The initial demonstration ran on HoloLens 2 ($3,500), showing multiple people in different locations appearing as holographic representations — either realistic avatars built from photogrammetry or simplified cartoon avatars — in a shared three-dimensional workspace where they could manipulate 3D models, annotate CAD files, and communicate spatially. The Azure backend handled spatial anchoring (tying virtual content to real-world coordinates), identity and access control, real-time state synchronization, and cross-device rendering adaptation. Read more

NVIDIA Launches the GeForce RTX 3060

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NVIDIA released the GeForce RTX 3060 on February 25, 2021 at an MSRP of $329. It used the GA106 die on Samsung’s 8nm process with 3,584 CUDA cores, 13 Shader TFLOPS, and — unusually for its price tier — 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus. The RTX 3060 Ti ($399, December 2020) used a cut-down GA104 die with 8 GB; the standard RTX 3060’s larger memory allocation was a deliberate decision to make it attractive for content creation workloads where VRAM capacity matters as much as throughput. Read more

Quotes From Famous Computer Scientists

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Computer science has produced many memorable sentences. The best of them are useful not because they settle arguments, but because they reframe questions in ways that make a problem easier to think about. Here are several I return to often, with what I actually think they mean. Read more

Apple Silicon And The Return Of Processor Diversity

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Apple announced its transition from Intel processors to its own Apple Silicon at WWDC in June 2020 and shipped the first M1 Macs — the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini — in November 2020. By January 2021, reviews and benchmarks have had time to accumulate, and the results are unusual enough to warrant serious attention. Read more

WhatsApp Privacy Changes Trigger a Messaging-App Migration

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WhatsApp began notifying its 2 billion users on January 4, 2021 about an updated privacy policy requiring acceptance by February 8, 2021 to continue using the app (a deadline later extended to May 15, 2021 after widespread backlash). The notification was poorly worded and generated mass confusion: many users interpreted it as WhatsApp announcing that it would begin sharing the content of private messages with Facebook for advertising purposes. Social media posts warning friends to switch to Signal or Telegram spread rapidly, often citing this misunderstanding. WhatsApp published blog posts attempting to clarify that message content remained end-to-end encrypted and invisible to WhatsApp’s servers — true since WhatsApp had implemented the Signal Protocol end-to-end encryption for all personal chats in April 2016. WhatsApp had been acquired by Facebook for approximately $19 billion in February 2014, and co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton (who left Facebook in 2018; Acton donated $50 million to found the Signal Foundation in January 2018 alongside Moxie Marlinspike) had originally committed to maintaining WhatsApp’s privacy properties. The January 2021 policy update was primarily about WhatsApp’s Business API: companies using WhatsApp to communicate with customers (for order confirmations, customer service, etc.) would be able to store those business-customer conversations on Facebook’s infrastructure and potentially use that data for Facebook advertising targeting. Read more

SolarWinds Reveals a Major Software Supply Chain Attack

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FireEye disclosed on December 8, 2020 that it had been breached and its Red Team tools stolen; investigating that intrusion led to the discovery of a much larger campaign. On December 13, 2020, SolarWinds and the U.S. government simultaneously disclosed that SolarWinds Orion — a widely deployed IT monitoring platform used by the U.S. government, Fortune 500 companies, and critical infrastructure — had been compromised at its build stage. Attackers (attributed to APT29, Russia’s SVR intelligence service) had modified SolarWinds’ Orion software build process between March and June 2020, inserting a backdoor component called SUNBURST into legitimate, digitally signed Orion updates (versions 2019.4 through 2020.2.1). Approximately 18,000 organizations downloaded the malicious updates; among SolarWinds’ roughly 33,000 customers at the time, the installed-base included the U.S. Treasury, Department of Commerce, Department of Homeland Security, State Department, NIH, and parts of the Department of Defense. Read more

What Is Quantum Computing?

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Quantum computing is often described as a technology that will make computers unbelievably fast. That description is too simple and somewhat misleading. A quantum computer is not a faster version of an ordinary computer for every task. It is a different model of computation that can offer major advantages for specific kinds of problems — and very little advantage for most of the things ordinary computers do every day. Read more

Remote Work Is Changing How Software Teams Communicate

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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

Apple Releases the First M1 Macs

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Apple released the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini with M1 on November 17, 2020. The MacBook Air started at $999, the MacBook Pro at $1,299, and the Mac mini at $699 — unchanged prices from their Intel predecessors. Apple had announced the transition from Intel to Apple silicon at WWDC in June 2020, promising a two-year transition window; the first M1 Macs arrived only five months later. Read more

AMD Announces the Zen 3 Architecture

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AMD announced Zen 3 on October 8, 2020 with the Ryzen 5000 desktop processor family, going on sale November 5, 2020: Ryzen 9 5950X (16 cores/32 threads, $799), Ryzen 9 5900X (12c/24t, $549), Ryzen 7 5800X (8c/16t, $449), and Ryzen 5 5600X (6c/12t, $299). The foundational architectural change was the redesign of the Core Complex (CCX): Zen 2 divided its cores into two 4-core CCXes each with their own 16 MB L3 cache, so a thread on one CCX accessing data cached on the other CCX faced ~40 ns of cross-CCX latency. Zen 3 merged all 8 cores of a CCD (Core Chiplet Die) into one unified CCX sharing a single 32 MB L3 cache, cutting cross-core L3 latency from ~40 ns to ~10 ns. The impact was largest in gaming workloads where the game engine, physics, audio, and rendering threads frequently accessed shared game state: Ryzen 5000 regularly outperformed the competing Ryzen 3000 by 15–20% in gaming despite using the same TSMC 7nm (N7P slightly refined) manufacturing process, demonstrating that the architectural bottleneck had been the CCX boundary latency rather than clock speed or manufacturing node. Read more

Smart Antennas

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A traditional antenna has a radiation pattern largely fixed by its physical shape and orientation. If you want to direct signal in a particular direction, you physically point the antenna that way. Smart antennas change this. By combining multiple antenna elements with signal processing, a system can steer its effective beam electronically — no moving parts required. In 2020, with 5G networks rolling out and Wi-Fi 6 becoming standard in new hardware, smart antenna techniques are no longer only a research topic. They are inside the devices people are using today. Read more

NVIDIA Announces the RTX 30 Series

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NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced the GeForce RTX 30 series on September 1, 2020 in an online event, with the RTX 3080 ($699), RTX 3090 ($1,499), and later RTX 3070 ($499, October 29) going on sale September 17, October 24, and October 29 respectively. The Ampere architecture (GA102/GA104 dies manufactured on Samsung 8nm, not TSMC as NVIDIA had used previously) reorganized the streaming multiprocessor design so that each SM contained twice the FP32 CUDA core count of Turing by adding a second FP32 data path that could also execute INT32 simultaneously — effectively doubling FP32 throughput without doubling the SM count, at the cost of the INT32-FP32 overlap being an architecture-specific optimization rather than general-purpose parallelism. The RTX 3080 shipped with 8,704 CUDA cores and 10 GB GDDR6X at 320 GB/s bandwidth; the RTX 3090 shipped with 10,496 CUDA cores and 24 GB GDDR6X at 936 GB/s. The GDDR6X memory (developed by Micron) used PAM4 (Pulse-Amplitude Modulation 4) signaling at 19.5 Gbps per pin versus GDDR6’s 16 Gbps, adding approximately 21% bandwidth at equivalent pin count and frequency. Compared to the RTX 2080 Ti ($999, Turing’s flagship, 4,352 CUDA cores, 11 GB GDDR6, 14.2 TFLOPS FP32), the RTX 3080 offered approximately 29.8 TFLOPS FP32 — more than 2× the shader throughput — at $699. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2020?

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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, and in many cases at a speed that revealed which systems were ready and which were not. Read more

Epic Games Challenges Mobile App Store Policies

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On August 13, 2020, Epic Games updated Fortnite — one of the world’s most widely played games, with approximately 350 million registered accounts — to offer a direct payment option that bypassed Apple’s in-app purchase system. Epic’s “Epic Direct Payment” offered Fortnite’s in-game currency (V-Bucks) at a 20 percent discount compared to the price charged through Apple’s IAP system ($7.99 versus $9.99 for 1,000 V-Bucks), where Apple’s 30 percent commission had been built into the price. Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines required all digital content purchases in iOS apps to use Apple’s in-app purchase system, with Apple receiving 30 percent (15 percent for subscriptions after the first year, for developers earning under $1M through Apple’s Small Business Program). Apple removed Fortnite from the App Store within hours of detecting the policy violation; Google removed it from Google Play the same day (though Fortnite had already been available via direct download/sideload on Android). Epic had prepared for the removal: simultaneously with the update, Epic filed a lawsuit against Apple in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, and a separate lawsuit against Google, both alleging antitrust violations. Epic also published a parody video titled “Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite” — a direct parody of Apple’s famous “1984” Super Bowl advertisement — with Fortnite characters fighting an “Apple Corporation” controlling citizens, reversing the iconic imagery to cast Apple as the monopoly rather than the liberator. Read more

GPT-3 Demonstrates the Scale of Large Language Models

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OpenAI published the GPT-3 paper (“Language Models are Few-Shot Learners”) on arXiv May 28, 2020, and opened a private API beta in June 2020. The model contained 175 billion parameters — 117 times larger than GPT-2’s 1.5 billion — trained on approximately 300 billion tokens drawn from a filtered version of Common Crawl (60%), WebText2 (the web corpus from GPT-2, 22%), two book datasets (16%), and English Wikipedia (3%). The transformer architecture used 96 layers, 96 attention heads, and 12,288-dimensional embeddings, requiring approximately 800 GB to store in 16-bit floating-point precision. Estimated training cost was roughly $4.6 million at then-current V100 cloud GPU prices, requiring several thousand GPUs for months. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2020

3 minute read

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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2020, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

Apple Announces the Move From Intel to Apple Silicon

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Apple announced at WWDC 2020 (June 22, 2020) that Macs would transition from Intel x86-64 processors to Apple-designed ARM-based silicon over a two-year period — the Mac’s third major CPU architecture change after Motorola 68k to PowerPC (1994) and PowerPC to Intel (2005–2006). Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the transition alongside a Developer Transition Kit (a Mac mini with the A12Z Bionic chip from the iPad Pro, loaned to registered developers for $500) to allow software porting before consumer hardware arrived. Apple emphasized two compatibility layers: Universal 2 binaries (a fat binary format containing both ARM64 and x86-64 code in one application package, allowing one download to run natively on both architectures) and Rosetta 2 (a successor to the original Rosetta used during the PowerPC-to-Intel transition, now performing ahead-of-time translation of x86-64 code to ARM64 at app install time rather than interpreting at runtime, giving dramatically faster performance than runtime JIT translation). Virtualization of ARM Linux and Windows for ARM was also supported. Read more

Software Bug Of Therac-25

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The Therac-25 is one of the most studied cases in software-engineering history because the consequences of the bugs it contained were not degraded performance or corrupted data. Patients received radiation doses hundreds of times above therapeutic levels. At least six people were seriously injured. Three died. Read more

Software Bug Of Pathfinder

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Mars Pathfinder landed successfully on July 4, 1997 — the first Mars lander since the Viking missions of 1976. The entry, descent, and landing were flawless. Within days, the spacecraft and its small rover Sojourner were returning data and images. Then the resets began. Read more

Microsoft Releases Windows Terminal 1.0

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Microsoft released Windows Terminal 1.0 in May 2020, roughly a year after its first public preview at Microsoft Build 2019. The application replaced decades-old infrastructure: Command Prompt ran on conhost.exe, a host that dated to Windows NT and had no support for modern text rendering, multiple tabs, or proper Unicode. Read more

Apple and Google Announce Exposure Notification Technology

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Apple and Google announced the Exposure Notification API on April 10, 2020, seventeen days after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, in an unprecedented collaboration between the two companies whose competing mobile operating systems controlled over 99 percent of the global smartphone market. The announcement came as governments worldwide were evaluating contact-tracing applications that varied widely in their privacy properties — Singapore’s TraceTogether (March 20, 2020) used a centralized Bluetooth proximity log architecture where the health ministry held contact graphs, raising concerns about government surveillance. Several European countries were building centralized systems as well. The Apple-Google design deliberately chose a decentralized architecture: each phone generated a daily Temporary Exposure Key (TEK) using a cryptographically secure random source, then derived short-lived Rolling Proximity Identifiers (RPIs) from the TEK every 10-20 minutes using HMAC-SHA256. Phones broadcast their current RPI over Bluetooth Low Energy advertising packets while simultaneously logging the RPIs they observed from nearby devices, along with signal strength (RSSI) as a proxy for distance. No names, phone numbers, GPS locations, or account identifiers were broadcast or logged — only the cryptographic identifiers, which were unlinkable to individuals without knowledge of the originating TEK. Read more

Remote Work Tools Become Critical Infrastructure

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The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, and within days, shelter-in-place orders in major cities (San Francisco Bay Area March 16, New York City March 22) forced millions of knowledge workers, students, and teachers to begin working and learning from home simultaneously. The speed and scale of the transition placed unprecedented demand on digital collaboration infrastructure. Zoom Video Communications had approximately 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019; by April 2020 that figure had reached 300 million — a 30× increase in four months — representing a growth trajectory that would normally take 5-7 years at expected rates. Zoom’s architecture (WebRTC-based media with their own media encoding, meeting rooms hosted on Zoom’s servers) had to scale media processing, recording storage, and global anycast network routing in weeks rather than years. Microsoft Teams grew from 32 million daily active users in March 2020 to 75 million in April 2020. Slack, which had been primarily a text-based channel tool, saw concurrent user counts surge to 12.5 million. These platforms faced not only scale challenges but reliability requirements that consumer-grade services had never faced: a dropped video call in a business meeting, a school lesson that couldn’t connect, or a hospital telemedicine consultation that failed had real costs that casual use did not. Read more

Samsung Unveils the Galaxy Z Flip

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Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Z Flip at Samsung Unpacked on February 11, 2020, pricing it at $1,380 — significantly less than the Galaxy Fold ($1,980) and Motorola Razr 2019 ($1,499), its direct competitors in the emerging foldable clamshell category. The Z Flip’s 6.7-inch Infinity Flex Dynamic AMOLED display folded vertically to a compact 73.6×87.4 mm square, compared to the Motorola Razr’s similar form factor. The critical materials difference was Samsung’s use of Ultra-Thin Glass (UTG) — approximately 30 μm thick glass from Schott AG with a polymer backing — as the display substrate, replacing the plastic film (polyimide) used in the Galaxy Fold and Motorola Razr. The UTG provided a harder surface that resisted fingernail scratching and felt more like traditional glass to the touch, though it was still flexible enough to fold. A 1.1-inch 300×116 pixel cover display showed time, notifications, and music controls when closed. The SoC was the Snapdragon 855+ (not the then-current Snapdragon 865), with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB UFS 3.0 storage, running Android 10 with One UI 2.1. Read more

The Story Of Computing

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The story of computing is also a story about human limits. For thousands of years, people have built tools to extend what the mind alone can do — to count faster, to record more, to calculate at scales impossible by hand. An abacus, a mechanical calculator, a punched card, and a modern processor look completely different but serve the same basic impulse: move some mental work outside the human mind. Read more

Microsoft Ends Support for Windows 7

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Microsoft ended extended support for Windows 7 on January 14, 2020 — a milestone that the company had announced and counted down for years. Windows 7 had shipped October 22, 2009, giving it a 10-year-3-month support lifecycle: mainstream support ended January 13, 2015 (after which no new features or non-security fixes were added), and extended support (security patches only) ran for five additional years until January 14, 2020. At end-of-life, Windows 7 still accounted for approximately 26–33% of all active Windows PCs globally depending on the survey methodology — tens of millions of machines ranging from home desktops to industrial controllers to hospital workstations — making it one of the largest simultaneous end-of-support events in consumer software history. The healthcare sector illustrated the most severe risks: WannaCry (May 12, 2017) had spread via the EternalBlue exploit (a leaked NSA tool targeting the SMBv1 protocol), affecting over 300,000 computers running Windows 7 and Windows XP across 150 countries, shutting down approximately one-third of NHS England trusts and forcing cancellation of 19,000 medical appointments. The SMB vulnerability had been patched (MS17-010, March 14, 2017) but hospitals running Windows 7 systems hadn’t applied the patch due to lengthy medical device recertification cycles. Read more

Wi-Fi 6 Hardware Becomes Widely Available

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The Wi-Fi Alliance certified the 802.11ax standard as “Wi-Fi 6” in September 2019, after three years of IEEE standardization work beginning with the 802.11ax task group formation in 2014. The standard’s peak theoretical throughput reached 9.6 Gbps (vs 3.5 Gbps for Wi-Fi 5/802.11ac) using a combination of 1024-QAM modulation (25% more data per symbol than Wi-Fi 5’s 256-QAM) and wider 160 MHz channels, but the more consequential improvements were in multi-device efficiency. Intel shipped the Wi-Fi 6-certified AX200 M.2 adapter in July 2019 (the first mainstream PC Wi-Fi 6 card), Samsung’s Galaxy S10 (March 2019) was the first Wi-Fi 6-certified smartphone, and Apple’s iPhone 11 (September 2019) added Wi-Fi 6 — establishing it in flagship hardware before Christmas 2019. Router availability was wider: the Netgear Nighthawk AX12 (RAX200) launched at ~$500, Asus ROG Rapture GT-AX11000 at ~$450, and TP-Link Archer AX6000 at ~$300, all in 2019. Read more

GitHub Announces Actions for General Availability

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GitHub Actions reached general availability on November 13, 2019, extending a beta period that began in August 2018. The feature added a built-in CI/CD system to GitHub repositories, letting developers define automated workflows in YAML files stored at .github/workflows/. A workflow specified triggers (push to a branch, pull request opened, release created, scheduled cron, or manual dispatch), jobs (each running in an isolated virtual machine), and steps (shell commands or reusable “actions” from the GitHub Marketplace). GitHub provided hosted runners on Ubuntu (2-core, 7GB RAM), Windows, and macOS at no cost for public repositories, with paid minutes for private repositories starting at $0.008 per minute for Linux. Read more

Google Claims Quantum Supremacy With Sycamore

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Google published a paper in Nature on October 23, 2019 claiming that its 53-qubit Sycamore processor had achieved “quantum supremacy” — completing a specific computational task that would take the world’s fastest classical supercomputers an astronomically long time to match. The paper had leaked two days early when a draft appeared on NASA’s website (NASA collaborates with Google on quantum computing research) on September 20, 2019, generating widespread coverage before the official publication. The task chosen was Random Circuit Sampling (RCS): apply a random sequence of quantum logic gates to the 53 qubits (one of Sycamore’s 54 qubits was non-functional), then measure all qubits to obtain a 53-bit output string. Repeat this millions of times. The output distribution of a random quantum circuit is theoretically very hard to classically simulate because the quantum state evolves through a superposition of 2^53 (approximately 9 quadrillion) simultaneous values during the computation. Google estimated that the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory — the world’s fastest at 200 petaflops at the time — would require approximately 10,000 years to sample from the same distribution that Sycamore sampled in 200 seconds. Sycamore operated at approximately 15 millikelvin (colder than the cosmic microwave background at ~2.7 K) using superconducting transmon qubits, achieving a two-qubit gate error rate of approximately 0.6 percent and a single-qubit gate error rate below 0.1 percent — among the lowest error rates achieved in a superconducting quantum processor at that scale. Read more

Welcome to Our Department

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If you are starting Computer Engineering in 2019, you are entering a discipline that touches almost every industry. Read more

Apple Introduces the A13 Bionic

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Apple introduced the A13 Bionic with the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max in September 2019. The chip used TSMC’s second-generation 7nm process (N7P) with around 8.5 billion transistors, up from 6.9 billion in the A12. Two high-performance CPU cores were rated at 20% faster than the A12’s, and four efficiency cores used 40% less power for the same workload. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2019?

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In 2019, software is becoming an invisible layer inside almost everything we use. Phones, vehicles, payment systems, factories, streaming services, medical devices, and public infrastructure all depend on computing. Studying Computer Engineering means learning how this layer is designed. Read more

OpenAI Releases GPT-2 in Stages

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OpenAI published its research paper on GPT-2 in February 2019 and released the model in stages across the year: the 117M parameter version in February, the 345M version in May, the 774M version in August, and the full 1.558 billion parameter model in November 2019. The staged release was explicitly justified by OpenAI’s concerns about potential misuse for generating disinformation and spam at scale — the first time a major AI lab publicly withheld model weights for safety rather than commercial reasons. Read more

Daily Life Of A Software Engineer

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The daily life of a software engineer is usually less dramatic than movies make programming look. There are no montages of cascading green characters or last-minute keystrokes that save cities. Most days are a mixture of reading, testing, discussing, debugging, and — somewhere in the middle — writing code. Read more

Book Suggestions For Software Engineers

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Software engineers spend a lot of time learning from screens — documentation, source code, issue trackers, tutorials, and online discussions. Books offer a different pace. They allow one author to develop an idea fully, without competing with notifications and search results, and without the pressure to be immediately practical that tutorials often carry. Read more

Facebook Announces More Details of Libra’s Technical Design

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Facebook published the Libra whitepaper on June 18, 2019, through its Calibra subsidiary, proposing a global digital currency backed by a reserve basket of low-volatility assets — approximately 70% USD, 26% EUR, and smaller allocations to JPY and GBP government securities and money market funds. The Libra Association, incorporated in Geneva, Switzerland, launched with 28 founding members (later expanded to 100 targeted) including Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe, Uber, Lyft, and Spotify, each contributing $10 million. Facebook’s own subsidiary Calibra (later Novi) would build the consumer wallet, while the Association would govern the protocol. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2019

3 minute read

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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2019, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

Raspberry Pi 4 Is Released

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The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B was released on June 24, 2019, in three RAM variants: 1GB ($35), 2GB ($45), and 4GB ($55) LPDDR4 — replacing the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ (launched March 2018) as the current flagship. The BCM2711 SoC used a quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 at 1.5 GHz, an out-of-order execution microarchitecture significantly more capable than the Pi 3’s in-order Cortex-A53 at 1.4 GHz. Sysbench CPU benchmarks showed roughly 2–3× improvement in integer throughput; the out-of-order pipeline allowed the Cortex-A72 to extract instruction-level parallelism that the A53 executed strictly in sequence. Read more

Google Introduces the Pixel 3a and On-Device AI Features

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Google announced the Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL at Google I/O on May 7, 2019. The Pixel 3a launched at $399 (5.6-inch) and the 3a XL at $479 (6-inch) — less than half the Pixel 3’s $799 starting price. The phones used a Snapdragon 670 (Pixel 3a) rather than the Pixel 3’s Snapdragon 845, with a plastic back instead of glass, no wireless charging, and no front stereo speakers. They retained the same 12.2MP rear camera sensor and f/1.8 lens as the Pixel 3, the same pixel binning algorithm, and Google’s full HDR+ and Night Sight computational photography pipeline running in software on the Snapdragon 670’s DSP. Read more

6TiSCH Protocol

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Low-power wireless devices face a fundamental tension. They need reliable communication, but their batteries may need to last months or years in places where replacing them is difficult or expensive. Keeping a radio active continuously is not an option. 6TiSCH is a protocol architecture designed to resolve this tension — allowing constrained devices to participate in Internet-style networks while managing energy carefully. Read more

Microsoft Releases Chromium-Based Edge Preview Builds

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Microsoft announced the new Chromium-based Edge on December 6, 2018, and released the first Canary and Dev channel builds on January 20, 2019, followed by the Beta channel on April 8, 2019. The decision meant abandoning EdgeHTML — the proprietary rendering engine built from the remnants of Trident (Internet Explorer’s engine) and introduced with Windows 10 in 2015 — along with the Chakra JavaScript engine. At the time of the announcement, Edge held approximately 4% global browser market share versus Chrome’s ~63%, Internet Explorer’s ~7%, and Firefox’s ~10% (StatCounter data, Q4 2018). The compatibility situation was the primary driver: websites routinely displayed “Works best in Chrome” banners when accessed from Edge, and developer tools in Chromium’s DevTools were far more capable than Edge’s F12 tools. The extension ecosystem was another gap — the Chrome Web Store had tens of thousands of extensions while Edge’s own extension library had a few hundred. Read more

Google Introduces Stadia

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Google announced Stadia at GDC in March 2019, promising a cloud gaming service that would stream games running on data-center hardware directly to Chrome browsers, Chromecast Ultras, and Pixel phones. The platform launched November 19, 2019 in 14 countries with a Founder’s Edition bundle ($129) containing a Stadia Controller, a Chromecast Ultra, and three months of Stadia Pro ($9.99/month), which offered 4K/60fps streaming and a rotating selection of free games. A free tier at 1080p/60fps was announced but not released until April 2020. Read more

Google Announces the End of Google Plus for Consumers

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Google shut down the consumer version of Google+ on April 2, 2019. The shutdown had been announced October 8, 2018, when Google disclosed that a software bug introduced in March 2015 and patched in March 2018 had exposed the private profile fields of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts to third-party app developers through the People API — specifically, apps that were granted access to public profile data could also read private profile fields (name, email address, occupation, gender, age) that users had intended to share only with specific people. Google had not publicly disclosed this bug when it was discovered in March 2018 — citing that no evidence of misuse had been found — a decision criticized after The Wall Street Journal reported it in October 2018, suggesting Google’s non-disclosure was influenced by concerns about regulatory and reputational consequences following the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal (March 2018). A second API bug was found in November 2018, affecting approximately 52.5 million users by exposing additional profile fields (name, email address, occupation, age) to apps that users had not explicitly authorized, accelerating the shutdown timeline from August 2019 to April 2, 2019. Read more

NVIDIA Introduces RTX Graphics to More Laptop Systems

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NVIDIA announced GeForce RTX 20-series laptop GPUs at CES in January 2019, bringing the Turing architecture’s dedicated RT cores for ray tracing and Tensor cores for DLSS into mobile systems. The mobile lineup included the RTX 2060, 2070, and 2080, with most high-end configurations also available in Max-Q variants designed for thinner chassis. Read more

Kubernetes 1.13 Strengthens Cloud-Native Infrastructure

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Kubernetes 1.13 released on December 3, 2018, marking kubeadm — the official Kubernetes cluster bootstrapping tool — as generally available (GA) after nearly two years in alpha/beta. kubeadm init (initialize a control plane node) and kubeadm join (join a worker node to an existing cluster) provided a consistent, supported procedure for bringing up a production-grade Kubernetes cluster from bare OS without hiding the cluster behind a managed service abstraction. Prior to kubeadm GA, bootstrapping a cluster involved either running a vendor-managed installer (kops, Rancher, OpenShift) that made different decisions about network configuration and storage, or manually reading multi-page documentation to run etcd and the kube-apiserver, kube-scheduler, and kube-controller-manager as system services. kubeadm’s GA status meant distributions and tooling could declare a standard bootstrapping interface, enabling reproducible cluster setup across on-premises hardware, VMs, and bare metal. Read more

Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ Is Released

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The Raspberry Pi Foundation released the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ in November 2018 at $25, ten dollars less than the Model B+. It brought the processor and wireless capabilities of the Pi 3B+ — the fastest model in the third generation — into the smaller Model A form factor, which had always prioritized size and cost over maximum connectivity. Read more

Machine Learning Is Becoming A Normal Software Tool

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Machine learning is no longer something I hear about only in research papers. TensorFlow was open-sourced in November 2015. Keras made it more approachable — and Google officially adopted Keras as TensorFlow’s high-level API in 2017. PyTorch, released by Facebook’s research lab in September 2016, gained significant traction in academic research through 2017 and 2018 because its dynamic computation graph made debugging more natural. scikit-learn has made classical machine-learning algorithms available in Python with a consistent API since 2011. Cloud platforms — AWS SageMaker (launched November 2017), Google Cloud ML Engine, Azure Machine Learning — now offer managed environments for training and deploying models without running your own infrastructure. Read more

IBM Announces Its Acquisition of Red Hat

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IBM announced on October 28, 2018 that it would acquire Red Hat for $34 billion in cash — $190 per share, representing a 63 percent premium over Red Hat’s closing stock price on October 26 — in the largest software acquisition in history at that point, surpassing Microsoft’s $26 billion LinkedIn acquisition in 2016. Red Hat had been founded in 1993 by Marc Ewing and Bob Young and had built its business on a commercial support and subscription model for open-source software: customers paid not for the software itself (which remained freely available) but for Red Hat’s enterprise support lifecycle, certification testing, and legal indemnification. By fiscal year 2018, Red Hat reported approximately $3 billion in annual revenue, growing around 20 percent per year. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty framed the acquisition as the cornerstone of IBM’s pivot to hybrid cloud — the model in which enterprise workloads run partly on on-premises servers, partly on private clouds, and partly on public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP), with Red Hat’s technology providing a consistent operating environment across all three. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) had become the dominant enterprise Linux distribution, running the majority of Fortune 500 production workloads. Equally important was OpenShift, Red Hat’s Kubernetes distribution, which Red Hat had built up through its acquisition of CoreOS (February 2018, ~$250 million) — giving IBM a leading Kubernetes management platform at a moment when container orchestration was becoming the standard for cloud-native application deployment. Read more

Apple Introduces the A12 Bionic

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Apple announced the A12 Bionic on September 12, 2018 alongside the iPhone XS ($999), XS Max ($1099), and XR ($749 — releasing October 26). Manufactured on TSMC’s first-generation 7nm process (N7, not yet EUV-based) with approximately 6.9 billion transistors, the A12 was one of the first mass-production chips built at 7nm — Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 remained on 7nm TSMC but didn’t ship until December 2018, and Samsung’s 7nm processes weren’t available until 2019. The A12’s CPU used two Vortex high-performance cores (2.49 GHz) and four Tempest efficiency cores — Apple’s first chip with a heterogeneous big.LITTLE-style CPU arrangement, following ARM’s own design pattern — plus a four-core GPU that Apple claimed was 50% faster than the A11’s GPU. Read more

How Computer Computes?

5 minute read

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A computer looks complicated from the outside, but its basic operation can be described with a simple cycle repeated billions of times per second. Understanding that cycle helps explain why software behaves the way it does — why some operations are fast, others slow, and what actually happens when code runs. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2018?

3 minute read

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Technology in 2018 is increasingly built around data. Companies collect it, applications process it, machine-learning systems learn from it, and users are becoming more aware — sometimes more alarmed — about how it is stored and protected. That makes Computer Engineering a particularly relevant field to study. Read more

NVIDIA Announces the Turing GPU Architecture

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NVIDIA announced the Turing GPU architecture at SIGGRAPH on August 13, 2018, with the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti ($999/$1,199), RTX 2080 ($699/$799), and RTX 2070 ($499) going on sale September 20, 2018. Turing (TU102 die for RTX 2080 Ti, TU104 for RTX 2080) was manufactured on TSMC’s 12nm FinFET process and contained 18.6 billion transistors in the flagship TU102 — 54% more than Pascal’s GP102 (12 billion). The two defining new hardware blocks were RT Cores (first ever in a consumer GPU, one per SM) and 2nd-generation Tensor Cores (inherited from the Volta data-center GPU, brought to consumer hardware for the first time). RT Cores accelerated the most computationally expensive parts of ray tracing: BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) traversal (the tree search to find which scene geometry might intersect a ray) and ray-primitive intersection testing (the geometric calculation to determine exact intersection point and surface normal). Without RT Cores, ray tracing required thousands of CUDA cores to evaluate these tests in software, consuming the majority of the compute budget for even one bounce of reflected light per pixel at 1080p resolution. With RT Cores offloading these two operations to fixed-function hardware, the CUDA cores could focus on shading and color calculation, allowing real-time ray-traced shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion at playable frame rates for the first time. Read more

Popular Questions About Software

4 minute read

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People who are not software developers often have remarkably good questions about how software works. Here are some of the ones I hear most often, along with honest answers. Read more

Google Chrome Begins Stronger HTTPS Warnings

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Chrome 68 shipped on July 24, 2018 with a single widely noticed change: every HTTP page displayed a “Not secure” label in the address bar’s security chip, to the left of the URL. Previously, Chrome and other browsers had used a positive indicator model — HTTPS pages showed a green padlock icon with or without the domain name, while HTTP pages showed nothing or a neutral icon, creating the impression that HTTP was a safe baseline rather than an actively insecure choice. Google had been phasing in the change across multiple Chrome releases: Chrome 56 (January 2017) first added the “Not secure” label on HTTP pages containing password or credit card input fields; Chrome 62 (October 2017) extended the label to all HTTP pages with any form input and all HTTP pages in Incognito mode; Chrome 68 expanded it to all HTTP pages unconditionally. Chrome 70 (October 2018) made the label red-colored when users began typing into any HTTP page, adding visual urgency at the moment of risk. Google had announced this incremental plan in September 2016 as part of its public commitment to treating HTTPS as the baseline security assumption for the web. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2018

3 minute read

Published:

If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2018, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

GitHub Is Acquired by Microsoft

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Microsoft announced the acquisition of GitHub on June 4, 2018 for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock — the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history at the time, surpassing the $2.5 billion paid for Minecraft’s developer Mojang in 2014. The deal closed October 26, 2018. GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath, who had co-founded the company with Tom Preston-Werner and P.J. Hyett in 2008, stepped down; Nat Friedman (previously CEO of Xamarin, itself acquired by Microsoft in 2016) was appointed GitHub CEO. Read more

About Computer Vision Technology In Food Science

4 minute read

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Computer vision is often associated with faces, autonomous vehicles, or robotics. Food science is a less obvious application, but it is one of the areas where camera-based inspection has been deployed commercially for decades — and where recent advances in deep learning have significantly expanded what is practical. Read more

JavaScript Modules Are Finally Becoming Normal

3 minute read

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For most of JavaScript’s history, the language had no built-in way to split code across files and have those files depend on each other explicitly. This is a basic feature that Python, Java, and Ruby all had from early on. JavaScript’s absence of a module system was a genuine hole, and the ecosystem filled it with workarounds that accumulated into something genuinely complicated. Read more

GDPR Changes How Software Handles Personal Data

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The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became enforceable on May 25, 2018, two years after its adoption in April 2016. It applied to any organization processing personal data of EU residents, regardless of where the organization was headquartered — making it effectively a global regulation for any company with EU users. Maximum fines were €20 million or 4% of global annual turnover, whichever was higher. The first major fine came in January 2019: France’s CNIL fined Google €50 million for insufficient transparency in its Android onboarding consent flow. British Airways received a £183 million fine (later reduced to £20 million) in 2020 for a 2018 data breach affecting 500,000 customers. Read more

Cloudflare Launches 1.1.1.1 Public DNS

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Cloudflare launched its public DNS resolver at the IP address 1.1.1.1 on April 1, 2018 — deliberately choosing April Fool’s Day for a memorable launch date — in partnership with APNIC (Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre). APNIC had owned the 1.1.1.1 address for years but had been unable to use it productively because router firmware worldwide had hardcoded it as a test address, flooding it with junk traffic; the partnership gave Cloudflare access to the memorable address while APNIC gained research data on global DNS query patterns. Cloudflare’s anycast network (servers in 150+ cities at that time) delivered median global response times of ~14 ms according to independent tracking by DNSPerf.com, compared to ~20 ms for Google’s 8.8.8.8 (launched December 2009) and ~20 ms for OpenDNS’s 208.67.222.222 (launched 2005) — making Cloudflare’s claim of “the world’s fastest DNS resolver” defensible at launch. The secondary resolver address was 1.0.0.1. Read more

GDPR And The Question Of Who Owns Personal Data

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The timing of this post is not accidental. This month — March 2018 — the Cambridge Analytica story broke in the New York Times and the Observer, describing how the company had harvested data from up to 87 million Facebook users without their explicit consent, using an academic researcher’s app as the collection mechanism. The story arrived two months before the GDPR’s enforcement date of May 25, 2018. If there was ever a moment to think carefully about who owns personal data and what obligations come with collecting it, this is it. Read more

Google Announces Kubernetes Is Graduating at the CNCF

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Kubernetes achieved graduated project status in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation on March 6, 2018, becoming the first project to complete the CNCF’s three-level maturity progression (Sandbox → Incubating → Graduated). The CNCF had been founded in July 2015 when Google donated Kubernetes to the foundation at the same event where Kubernetes 1.0 was announced (July 21, 2015, at OSCON in Portland) — a governance move designed to prevent Kubernetes from being perceived as Google’s proprietary project and to enable contributions and adoption across the industry without concerns that Google could change the direction unilaterally. CNCF graduation required a Technical Oversight Committee vote with a two-thirds supermajority; prior to the vote, the project had to demonstrate documented governance processes, committer diversity (no single company dominating more than 50 percent of commits), completion of a third-party security audit, and substantial production adoption by organizations outside the originating company. By March 2018, Kubernetes had over 1,400 contributors from 200+ organizations across its repositories, with Google’s share of commits having fallen well below 50 percent as Red Hat, CoreOS (acquired by Red Hat February 2018), Huawei, Microsoft, and IBM made substantial contributions. Simultaneously with Kubernetes’s graduation, Prometheus (the monitoring system originally developed at SoundCloud) also graduated, making the two foundational pieces of the cloud-native stack — orchestration and observability — both vendor-neutral CNCF graduated projects. Read more

SpaceX Launches Falcon Heavy With Advanced Computing Onboard

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SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy for the first time on February 6, 2018 from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A — the same pad that launched Apollo 11 in 1969. The rocket combined three Falcon 9 first-stage cores (27 Merlin 1D engines total) and could deliver 63,800 kg to low Earth orbit, 26,700 kg to geostationary transfer orbit, and 16,800 kg to Mars — more than any operational rocket since NASA’s Saturn V flew its last mission in 1973. The test payload was Elon Musk’s personal 2010 Tesla Roadster, with a “Starman” mannequin in the driver’s seat and a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the glovebox. The car was placed into a heliocentric solar orbit intended to reach Mars’s orbit; it slightly overshot, entering an orbit with aphelion approximately 257 million kilometers from the Sun. Read more

Meltdown Spectre And The Cost Of Going Fast

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On January 3, 2018, Google Project Zero published details of two classes of vulnerabilities affecting almost every modern processor: Meltdown and Spectre. The coordinated disclosure involved Intel, AMD, ARM, the major operating system vendors, and cloud providers — a coordination effort that had been running secretly since June 2017 while patches were developed. Read more

Meltdown and Spectre Expose CPU Speculation Risks

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Meltdown and Spectre became public in January 2018 and changed how many engineers thought about processor performance. The vulnerabilities were disturbing because they did not look like ordinary software bugs. They came from the techniques modern CPUs use to run programs faster, especially speculative execution and caching. Read more

Apple Confirms It Slows Some Older iPhones to Protect Batteries

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Apple confirmed on December 20, 2017 that iOS implemented “performance management” — dynamic CPU and GPU frequency limiting — on older iPhones with chemically degraded batteries, following a Reddit post by user “TeckFire” in October 2017 claiming that replacing an iPhone 6S battery had restored its performance, and a detailed benchmark analysis published December 9, 2017 by John Poole of Primate Labs (makers of Geekbench). Poole compared Geekbench 4 single-core scores from thousands of iPhone 6S devices running different iOS versions and found a distinctive bimodal distribution in iOS 10.2.1 and later: devices clustered at either the expected ~2500 score range or a lower ~1400-1600 range, with the lower cluster growing larger in iOS versions released in 2017. When Poole tested the same 6S with a fresh battery versus a degraded one, the degraded battery device scored in the lower cluster. Apple’s statement confirmed that iOS 10.2.1 (released January 23, 2017) had introduced performance management for iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, and 6s Plus, and that iOS 11.2 extended it to iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. The feature had not been disclosed in any iOS release notes, developer documentation, or user-facing settings. Read more

The Rise Of Smart Speakers

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Amazon introduced the Echo in late 2014, and it spent a year available only by invitation before opening broadly. Google Home launched in November 2016. Apple announced HomePod at WWDC in June and it will ship next year. In three years, voice-activated speakers have moved from a product few people had heard of to the fastest-growing consumer electronics category. Read more

Mozilla Releases Firefox Quantum

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Mozilla released Firefox 57 — branded Firefox Quantum — on November 14, 2017, describing it as the biggest improvement to Firefox in over a decade. The release incorporated Stylo, a parallel CSS engine written in Rust and derived from Mozilla’s experimental Servo browser project. Stylo processed style recalculation across multiple CPU cores simultaneously, taking advantage of modern multi-core CPUs that the original Firefox engine (Gecko) had been written before were common. Mozilla reported Firefox 57 used 30% less memory than Firefox 52 and was twice as fast on the Speedometer browser benchmark, while internal testing showed it catching up to Chrome on most common web page rendering tasks. Read more

Google Releases the Pixel 2

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Google announced the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL on October 4, 2017. The standard Pixel 2 had a 5-inch 1080p OLED display and sold for $649; the Pixel 2 XL had a 6-inch 2880×1440 pOLED display and sold for $849. Both used the Snapdragon 835, 4GB RAM, and a single 12.2 MP rear camera with an f/1.8 aperture — no telephoto lens, no wide-angle, just one sensor with a dual-pixel autofocus array. The iPhone 8 Plus released the same month had a dual 12MP setup (wide + telephoto), and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 also shipped with two rear cameras. Read more

Apple Introduces Face ID with the iPhone X

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Apple announced the iPhone X (pronounced “ten”) on September 12, 2017 at the Steve Jobs Theater — the first event at the new Apple Park campus in Cupertino — pricing it at $999 for 64 GB and $1,149 for 256 GB. The iPhone X replaced the physical Home button (present on every iPhone since 2007) entirely, enabling a 5.8-inch OLED Super Retina display (2436×1125, 458 ppi) that covered almost the entire front face of the device with a notch at the top for the TrueDepth camera system. The TrueDepth camera array comprised seven components: a dot projector (projecting 30,000 invisible infrared dots in a structured pattern onto the user’s face), an infrared camera (capturing the distortion of the dot pattern to build a precise 3D depth map), a flood illuminator (illuminating the face with IR light to enable recognition in the dark), a 7MP visible-light front camera, an ambient light sensor, a proximity sensor, and a speaker. The system worked in darkness where no 2D camera could function, and Apple quoted a false-acceptance rate of 1 in 1,000,000 for Face ID versus 1 in 50,000 for Touch ID — a 20× improvement in the probability of a random person’s face unlocking the phone. Read more

AMD Launches the Threadripper Platform

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AMD launched Ryzen Threadripper on August 10, 2017, with the Threadripper 1950X (16 cores, 32 threads) at $999 and the Threadripper 1920X (12 cores, 24 threads) at $799. Both used AMD’s TR4 socket, a physically massive 4094-pin LGA package on the X399 chipset. The 1950X was priced directly against Intel’s new Core i9-7900X (10 cores, $999 launched two months earlier) and offered 60% more cores for the same price — a competitive statement rather than a niche positioning. Read more

How To Study To Be A Good Software Developer

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Learning software development can easily become overwhelming because there is always another topic to study. A programming language leads to a framework. The framework leads to databases, networking, testing, operating systems, design, and security. Each topic reveals three more. Read more

Intel Launches the Skylake-X Platform

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Intel launched Skylake-X in June 2017 for the LGA 2066 socket (Basin Falls platform), replacing Broadwell-E. The lineup opened with the 10-core Core i9-7900X at $999 and the 8-core i7-7820X at $599, then extended in August to 12-, 14-, 16-, and 18-core models topped by the i9-7980XE at $1,999. All chips supported quad-channel DDR4, 44 PCIe 3.0 lanes (on the top SKUs), and Intel’s X299 chipset. Core i9 was itself a new brand tier Intel created with this launch because i7 no longer distinguished the highest-end parts. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2017

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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2017, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

Apple Introduces the Core ML Framework

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Apple introduced Core ML at WWDC on June 5, 2017, shipping with iOS 11 (September 19, 2017), macOS High Sierra (September 25, 2017), watchOS 4, and tvOS 11. Core ML provided a unified on-device inference framework: developers converted pre-trained models from common training frameworks (Keras, Caffe 1, scikit-learn, XGBoost, libsvm) into Apple’s .mlmodel format using the coremltools Python package, then added the .mlmodel file to an Xcode project where Xcode automatically generated a Swift/Objective-C class wrapping the model’s inputs and outputs. At runtime, Core ML automatically routed computation to the most appropriate hardware: the CPU (using BNNS — Basic Neural Network Subroutines — a low-level optimized library), GPU (via Metal Performance Shaders, for models with GPU-friendly layer types), or the Neural Engine on devices that had one. The A11 Bionic (iPhone X, September 2017) shipped the first dedicated Neural Engine — a 2-core block running at approximately 600 GOPS, used exclusively for Core ML inference and not exposed to general Metal computation — enabling face recognition for Face ID and Animoji at low power. The A12 Bionic (iPhone XS, September 2018) expanded this to an 8-core Neural Engine capable of 5 TOPS, an 8× improvement, and established the Neural Engine as a permanent dedicated accelerator on all subsequent Apple SoCs. Read more

Google Announces Kotlin Support for Android

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Google announced first-class Kotlin support for Android at Google I/O on May 17, 2017, endorsing Kotlin as an officially supported language for Android development alongside Java. Kotlin was created by JetBrains (the company behind IntelliJ IDEA, on which Android Studio was based) and had reached version 1.0 in February 2016 after years of development that started in 2010. The announcement included immediate support in Android Studio 3.0 (released October 2017) — Kotlin tooling was built into the IDE at the same level as Java, with full debugging support, code completion, refactoring, and a Java-to-Kotlin converter that could automatically translate existing Java files. Kotlin compiled to JVM bytecode (like Java), meaning Kotlin and Java source files in the same project compiled to interchangeable .class files, and Kotlin code could directly call Java APIs and vice versa — including the entire Android SDK (android.app.Activity, android.widget., android.content.), all Jetpack libraries, and any Java library in Maven Central. Read more

Kotlin Arrives On Android

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Java has been the main language of Android development since the first Android SDK in 2008. It has worked, but it has also accumulated frustrations that Android developers have complained about for years. Kotlin — designed by JetBrains and reaching version 1.0 in February 2016 — has been gaining serious traction as an alternative, and the community momentum suggests this is no longer a niche experiment. Read more

Docker Introduces the Moby Project

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Docker announced the Moby Project at DockerCon 2017 in Austin, Texas on April 18, 2017, as a structural reorganization of Docker’s open-source components. Solomon Hykes, Docker’s founder and CTO, introduced Moby as an open framework of modular components from which container systems — including Docker itself — could be assembled. Moby encompassed the building blocks Docker had developed over four years: containerd (container runtime, donated by Docker to the CNCF in March 2017), runc (the OCI-compliant low-level runtime, originally submitted as the reference implementation when Docker co-founded the Open Container Initiative in June 2015), LinuxKit (a toolkit for building minimal, immutable Linux distributions optimized for container workloads), BuildKit (a next-generation image build backend with parallel layer execution and improved caching), SwarmKit (orchestration primitives), and Notary (content trust and signing). Docker simultaneously rebranded its products: what had been “Docker” (free) became “Docker CE” (Community Edition), and “Docker CS” (commercially supported) became “Docker EE” (Enterprise Edition), clarifying the commercial/open-source boundary. The docker/docker GitHub repository was renamed to moby/moby, which caused immediate confusion among the large number of contributors who had contributed to that repository expecting to contribute to the Docker product. Read more

Serverless Computing And The Idea Of Less Maintenance

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The word “serverless” is a little funny because the servers do not actually disappear. They are still there — running in AWS data centers in Virginia or Oregon or wherever the platform routes your traffic. The servers become less visible to the developer, which is different from not existing. Read more

AMD Launches Ryzen

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AMD launched Ryzen on March 2, 2017, with three models: Ryzen 7 1800X (8 cores/16 threads, 3.6 GHz base/4.0 GHz boost, $499), Ryzen 7 1700X ($399), and Ryzen 7 1700 ($329). All used AMD’s new AM4 socket and the X370 or B350 chipset. The Ryzen 7 1800X was positioned directly against Intel’s Core i7-6900K (8 cores, $1,089) — AMD offered the same core count at less than half the price. Geekbench multi-core scores placed the 1800X within 5% of the i7-6900K while costing $590 less. Read more

Cloudflare Discloses the Cloudbleed Bug

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Cloudflare disclosed Cloudbleed on February 23, 2017, after Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy reported the bug to Cloudflare five days earlier on February 17 and Cloudflare deployed a fix within hours. The vulnerability had existed in production since September 22, 2016 — 5 months before disclosure — and the worst-case period of highest data leakage ran from February 13 to 18, 2017. Cloudflare estimated it had leaked roughly 1 in every 3,300,000 HTTP responses over the worst period. Read more

GitLab Faces a Major Database Incident and Shares the Recovery Publicly

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On January 31, 2017 at approximately 5:20 PM UTC, a GitLab database administrator accidentally deleted 300 GB of production PostgreSQL data from db1.cluster.gitlab.com while attempting to remove a directory on a staging server. The error occurred while manually remediating a replication lag incident under time pressure: the administrator ran rm -rf targeting a directory path but was connected to the production server rather than staging. GitLab’s CEO Sid Sijbrandij and the engineering team made an unusual decision: they live-streamed the recovery effort on YouTube, opened a public Google Doc tracking the incident state, and posted updates in real time to Twitter — narrating the disaster as it unfolded rather than waiting until service was restored. Read more

About Semantic Web Technologies

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Tim Berners-Lee proposed the Semantic Web in a 2001 Scientific American article written with James Hendler and Ora Lassila. The vision was compelling: an extension of the existing web in which information would have explicit meaning, allowing software agents to reason across data from different sources, make connections automatically, and perform tasks that currently require human judgment to navigate. Read more

Amazon Opens Its First Checkout-Free Store Concept

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Amazon announced Amazon Go on December 5, 2016 via a public video, describing a 1,800 square-foot convenience store at 2131 7th Avenue in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood (Amazon’s corporate campus) where shoppers could scan a QR code in the Amazon Go mobile app at an entry gate, take items from shelves, and walk out — receiving an automatic receipt and charge to their Amazon account minutes later, with no checkout lines or cashiers required. The store opened to Amazon employees in December 2016 for internal testing; the public launch was delayed over a year to January 22, 2018, reportedly due to technical difficulties tracking large crowds (more than 20 shoppers at once in early tests created tracking accuracy problems) and disambiguating who had taken items in dense crowd scenarios. The underlying technology — which Amazon branded “Just Walk Out” — combined ceiling-mounted depth cameras (hundreds per store), weight sensors embedded in store shelves, computer vision deep learning models, and the Amazon app entry ID to build a real-time “virtual cart” for each shopper. Contrary to widespread speculation, the system did not use RFID tags on individual products; all tracking was camera and sensor fusion based. Read more

Why Two Factor Authentication Is Worth The Extra Step

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Passwords are structurally weak as the sole mechanism for account security, and the events of the past few years have made this concrete rather than theoretical. In 2012, LinkedIn suffered a breach that exposed 6.5 million password hashes; in 2016, it became clear that the actual number was 117 million. Yahoo’s 2013 breach, disclosed in 2016, exposed credentials for 500 million accounts. Adobe, Dropbox, and dozens of other services have had major breaches. The stolen credentials from these breaches are traded and combined into large credential lists that attackers use in automated “credential stuffing” attacks — testing username and password combinations across many services simultaneously. Read more

The Value Of Walking Away From The Screen

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Programmers have a particular relationship with difficult problems. When something does not work, the instinct is to stay. One more test. One more search. One more change to the configuration. An hour later the problem is unchanged, and the mind is worse equipped to solve it than it was when the session started. Read more

Google Home and Modern Voice Assistants Expand

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Google Home went on sale November 4, 2016 at $129, announced at Google I/O in May 2016 and launching four months after the Pixel phones introduced Google Assistant (October 4, 2016). The device competed directly with Amazon Echo (which had launched June 23, 2015 at $179.99 for Prime members) after Amazon had built a 1.5-year head start in the smart speaker market with Alexa. Google Home’s hardware included a 2-inch tweeter and passive bass radiator for audio output, a 7-microphone far-field array for voice pickup, and a 360° sound design with a fabric mesh exterior (replacing Amazon’s cylindrical black plastic aesthetic). The far-field microphone array performed beamforming — electronically steering the sensitive direction of the combined microphone pickup toward the detected voice source and suppressing the direction of the device’s own speaker output — to enable voice detection while music played at moderate volume from the same device. Always-on keyword detection (“Ok Google”) ran on-device using a small neural network model; the audio before and after keyword detection was streamed to Google’s servers for the full speech recognition and natural language processing to occur. Read more

About Social Network Analysis

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Social network analysis studies relationships rather than only individuals. That small shift in perspective — from nodes to edges, from people to the structure between them — can reveal things that individual-level data cannot. Read more

Google Announces the First Pixel Phones

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Google announced the Pixel and Pixel XL on October 4, 2016, with the Pixel (5-inch 1080p AMOLED) starting at $649 and the Pixel XL (5.5-inch 1440p AMOLED) starting at $769. Both ran on the Snapdragon 821 with 4GB RAM and a 12.3MP rear camera — the same sensor spec as Sony’s Xperia phones, since Sony manufactured the sensor. HTC manufactured the hardware under contract with Google owning the design. Unlike Nexus devices, Google retained the software experience entirely: no HTC UI overlay, no carrier bloatware from US carriers, and a commitment to three years of OS updates and security patches directly from Google. Read more

Chatbots Before The Hype

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In April 2016, Facebook opened the Messenger Platform to developers, allowing companies to build bots that could receive and send messages through Messenger’s API. In the weeks that followed, thousands of bots appeared — bots to order pizza, check weather, browse CNN headlines, get customer support, and more. Microsoft launched the Bot Framework in March 2016 with connectors for Skype, Slack, and other platforms. Amazon Alexa, which had launched with the Echo in November 2014, was drawing attention from developers building voice-driven skills for the device. Read more

Apple Removes the Headphone Jack from the iPhone

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Apple announced the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus on September 7, 2016, with both models conspicuously missing the 3.5mm headphone jack that had been on every iPhone since the original in 2007. Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller justified the removal on stage with the word “courage,” which became a widely mocked summary of the decision. In the box: a Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter (so existing wired headphones still worked with the included adapter plugged in, though simultaneously charging was then impossible) and EarPods with a Lightning connector. Separately, Apple introduced AirPods at $159 — its own wireless earbuds, not shipping until December 2016. Read more

Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2016?

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Choosing a university department means thinking about both the present and the future. In 2016, Computer Engineering is one of the fields where those two perspectives align better than in most others. Read more

Intel Announces More Details of Kaby Lake

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Intel officially announced Kaby Lake (7th generation Intel Core) at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco in August 2016, with mobile SKUs available in September 2016 and desktop processors launching in January 2017. The Kaby Lake announcement formalized Intel’s departure from the two-decade “tick-tock” strategy — alternating between process node shrinks (“tick”) and new microarchitecture designs (“tock”) every year — replacing it with a three-phase “Process-Architecture-Optimization” (PAO) model. Skylake (6th gen, 2015) was the architecture phase on 14nm; Kaby Lake was the optimization phase, also on 14nm (labeled “14nm+” internally, with improved fin geometry and higher drive current enabling higher clock frequencies at similar voltage). IPC (instructions per clock) was essentially unchanged from Skylake — the same Skylake microarchitecture, core design, L1/L2/L3 cache hierarchy, and ring bus topology — but clock speed improvements were meaningful: the desktop Core i7-7700K reached 4.2 GHz base / 4.5 GHz single-core turbo versus the Core i7-6700K’s 4.0 GHz / 4.2 GHz on the same 14nm process. The 14nm+ improvements that enabled higher clocks also reduced leakage current, contributing to slightly better power efficiency in mobile SKUs. Read more

How To Be A Good Software Developer

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Becoming a good software developer is not only about learning more programming languages. Languages matter. Tools matter. Frameworks matter. But after spending enough time around software, I think the deeper skills are more stable and harder to replace. Read more

Pokemon Go Brings Augmented Reality to the Mainstream

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Pokémon Go launched on July 6, 2016 in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, developed by Niantic (which had spun out from Google’s X division in 2015) in partnership with The Pokémon Company and Nintendo. Within two weeks it had expanded to Europe, Canada, and most major markets. The game used GPS location data and real-world map data to place 151 original-generation Pokémon at geographic coordinates in the physical world, requiring players to walk to those locations to encounter and catch them. PokéStops (where players collected in-game items) and Gyms (where players battled) were placed at real-world landmarks — museums, public art installations, parks, notable architecture, historic sites — derived from Niantic’s earlier game Ingress (2012), which had built a global database of “portals” at user-submitted real-world locations. The AR mode that became the game’s visual signature overlaid a rendered Pokémon on the smartphone’s live camera feed using the device’s gyroscope and accelerometer to track orientation, placing the creature in a fixed world-space position that the camera revealed as the player moved the phone. Most players turned off AR mode for the actual catching interaction because of battery drain and targeting difficulty; the GPS-driven exploration of the physical world was the game’s actual core mechanic. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2016

3 minute read

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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2016, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

Docker Announces Built-In Swarm Mode

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Docker announced built-in Swarm mode at DockerCon Seattle (June 19–21, 2016), integrating cluster orchestration directly into Docker Engine 1.12 rather than requiring the separate Docker Swarm standalone tool. The previous Docker Swarm (released November 2014) required a separate daemon, an external key-value store (etcd, Consul, or ZooKeeper) for cluster state, and manual TLS certificate management — significant operational complexity for teams that wanted basic multi-host container deployment. The new Swarm mode embedded all of this into the standard docker swarm init and docker service create commands. Read more

Containers Are Changing The Way Software Is Delivered

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Deployment problems are often environment problems. A program works correctly on a developer’s machine, then fails on a staging server because a library is a different version, a configuration file has a different path, or a system dependency is missing. Debugging these discrepancies is time-consuming and tedious because the mismatch can be anywhere in a large stack. Read more

Google Introduces the Tensor Processing Unit

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Google announced the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) at Google I/O on May 18, 2016, with Jeff Dean revealing that TPUs had already been deployed in Google’s data centers since 2013 — three years of silent production use. The TPU v1 was an inference-only ASIC built on a 28nm process, consuming 40 watts (roughly a quarter of an equivalent GPU), and connected to a host CPU via PCIe. It targeted deployed inference rather than training, focusing entirely on the matrix operations that dominate neural network forward passes during serving. Read more

Vim A Powerful Text Editor

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Vim is one of those tools that looks unfriendly before it starts to make sense. The first time someone opens it, even quitting the editor requires knowledge that is not obvious — :q to quit, :wq to save and quit, or :q! to quit without saving. That has become a standing joke among programmers, but it also explains something important about the editor. Vim does not try to behave like a normal graphical text editor. It is a modal editor with a grammar. Read more

Deep Learning Is Changing Computer Vision

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Computer vision has always fascinated me because the task sounds simple when we describe it in human language: “Find the object in this image.” “Recognize this face.” “Tell me what is happening in this picture.” Humans do these things before they can write. For computers, the same tasks have been among the hardest problems in artificial intelligence for decades. Read more

Microsoft Releases Ubuntu on Windows Preview

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Microsoft announced the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) at BUILD 2016 in San Francisco on March 30, 2016, and released the first public preview on April 6, 2016 as part of Windows 10 Insider Build 14316. The feature was developed in partnership with Canonical — Ubuntu’s creator — and debuted as “Bash on Ubuntu on Windows,” reflecting that the initial user-space environment was Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The announcement was notable in context: Microsoft had declared “Linux is a cancer” through then-CEO Steve Ballmer in 2001, and the company’s relationship with open-source software had been defined by opposition and IP disputes through much of the 2000s. Under CEO Satya Nadella (appointed February 2014) and developer tools head Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s position had reversed: the company had acquired developer tooling companies, open-sourced .NET Core, published Visual Studio Code, and introduced extensive Azure Linux support. WSL was the direct expression of that shift for developer tooling on the desktop. The architecture of WSL 1 was engineered by a small team within Microsoft’s kernel group: it used “pico processes” — a lightweight process model introduced in Windows 10 — combined with an NT kernel driver (lxss.sys and lxcore.sys) that intercepted Linux system calls (syscalls) made by Linux ELF binaries and translated them into equivalent NT kernel operations. This allowed unmodified Linux binaries compiled for x86-64 Ubuntu to execute within Windows without a virtual machine or kernel swap: bash, ssh, python, gcc, apt-get, grep, awk, sed, and most standard Unix command-line tools ran as native processes in the Windows process model. Read more

AlphaGo Defeats Lee Sedol

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AlphaGo, developed by DeepMind (acquired by Google in January 2014), defeated Lee Sedol — a 9-dan professional Go player widely considered the best active player of the 2010s — in a five-game match held March 9–15, 2016 in Seoul, South Korea, by a score of 4–1. The result shocked the professional Go community: Go’s enormous complexity (roughly 10^170 possible board positions versus chess’s estimated 10^44) had led experts to estimate that computers would not reach top-human level for another decade. AlphaGo had already defeated European Go champion Fan Hui 5–0 in October 2015, but Fan Hui was ranked approximately 700th in the world at the time; Lee Sedol was a fundamentally different caliber of opponent. The match was broadcast live on YouTube and watched by an estimated 200 million viewers in China and internationally. AlphaGo’s architecture combined two deep convolutional neural networks: a policy network (trained first by supervised learning on approximately 30 million positions from the KGS Go server, then refined by reinforcement learning through self-play) that predicted the probability distribution over next moves, and a value network (trained by self-play) that estimated the probability of winning from a given board position. These networks guided a Monte Carlo Tree Search that explored the game tree selectively, simulating future positions along the most promising branches rather than searching exhaustively. Read more

Google Announces Accelerated Mobile Pages

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Google announced the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project on October 7, 2015 and began rolling out AMP results in Google Search in February 2016. AMP was conceived as a response to the mobile web’s performance crisis: news and publishing sites serving rich HTML pages with large JavaScript bundles, advertisement scripts, and tracking pixels were taking 8-22 seconds to load on 3G connections — slow enough that users frequently abandoned pages before they finished loading, and that competing closed platforms (Facebook Instant Articles, announced May 2015; Apple News, announced June 2015) offered significantly faster reading experiences by serving content inside native apps rather than the mobile browser. AMP’s technical approach was a restricted HTML subset — AMP HTML — that banned arbitrary JavaScript entirely (replacing it with an AMP component library), required explicit size declarations on all external resources (images, iframes, ads) to prevent layout shifts as content loaded, and mandated asynchronous resource loading to ensure the page’s content was never blocked by an external script or stylesheet. AMP JS was the library that managed asynchronous resource loading, extension components (<amp-img>, <amp-video>, <amp-ad>, <amp-analytics>), and rendering optimization. The AMP specification was open-sourced on GitHub and positioned as a community project rather than a Google-proprietary format, though Google remained the primary contributor. Read more

Why Progressive Web Apps Are Interesting

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The term “Progressive Web App” was coined by Google engineer Alex Russell in a blog post in June 2015. The concept describes a web application that adopts a set of features progressively — it works for every user regardless of browser, but adds capabilities like offline access, installation, and push notifications for users whose browsers support them. Read more

AlphaGo Prepares for Its Match Against Lee Sedol

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On January 27, 2016, DeepMind published the Nature paper “Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search” describing the AlphaGo system and simultaneously announcing that AlphaGo would face Lee Sedol — 9-dan professional Go player, 18-time world champion, and widely considered the strongest player of the 2010s — in a five-game match in Seoul in March 2016. The paper disclosed that AlphaGo had already defeated Fan Hui, the European Go champion, 5–0 in a formal match held secretly at DeepMind’s London offices on October 5–9, 2015 — the first time a computer program had beaten a professional Go player in a formal match on a standard 19×19 board without handicap. Previous Go AIs, including Zen and Crazy Stone, used Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with handcrafted evaluation functions and required 4-stone or larger handicaps to compete with professional players. Fan Hui, a 2-dan professional and European champion, was ranked approximately 700th in the world — a professional level, but far below top-10 world ranking where Lee Sedol operated. Go’s complexity — a branching factor of approximately 250 legal moves per turn (versus chess’s 35), a game tree estimated at 10^170 positions, and position evaluation that defied the heuristic functions effective in chess — had led the AI community to expect computational professional-level Go was decades away. Read more

Let’s Encrypt Enters Public Beta

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Let’s Encrypt entered public beta on December 3, 2015, removing the invite requirement from its limited beta (started November 2015) and opening free TLS certificate issuance to any website operator. The certificate authority was founded in April 2014 by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, and IdenTrust — with IdenTrust cross-signing Let’s Encrypt’s intermediate certificate, which allowed browsers to trust Let’s Encrypt-issued certificates immediately without adding a new root CA to browser trust stores (a process taking years). The ACME protocol (Automatic Certificate Management Environment, finalized as RFC 8555 in 2019) allowed a server daemon to prove control of a domain through either an HTTP-01 challenge (placing a token at a specific URL path on the domain) or a DNS-01 challenge (adding a TXT record to the domain’s DNS zone), then receive a signed 90-day DV (Domain Validation) certificate. The 90-day lifetime was deliberately shorter than the 1–3 year certificates sold by commercial CAs: short-lived certificates reduced the window of exposure from key compromise, and the automation model made renewal every 60–90 days practical. Certbot, the EFF-developed command-line client, automated the challenge-response and certificate installation process for Apache and Nginx on Linux in a single command. Read more

HTTPS Is Becoming Everyones Problem

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For years, HTTPS was associated mainly with banks, shopping carts, and login pages — places where passwords and credit card numbers obviously needed protection. A simple personal website or blog routinely stayed on plain HTTP. Certificates cost money, expired annually, required configuration, and for a blog about recipes or software notes, the effort seemed disproportionate. Read more

Google Open-Sources TensorFlow

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Google open-sourced TensorFlow on November 9, 2015 under the Apache 2.0 license. The project emerged from DistBelief, Google’s internal first-generation distributed deep-learning system used to train the 2012 ImageNet model that sparked the deep-learning surge. TensorFlow was a complete rewrite, designed to be more flexible, faster on single machines, and easier to use outside Google. The initial release supported Python and C++ on Linux and Mac, with CUDA GPU acceleration available from day one. Read more

Microsoft Introduces the Surface Book

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Microsoft announced the Surface Book at a press event on October 6, 2015 — Panos Panay introduced it as “the ultimate laptop” — pricing it at $1,499 (Core i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, integrated GPU only) up to $2,699 (Core i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, discrete GPU). It was the first Microsoft Surface product with a clamshell laptop form factor (previous Surfaces were tablets with optional keyboard accessories). The Surface Book’s 13.5-inch display (3000×2000 resolution, 267 ppi, 3:2 aspect ratio) was mounted on a proprietary Dynamic Fulcrum Hinge — a curved hinge composed of rotating cylinders that kept the display and keyboard close together without touching the display when open, and which left a visible gap between the closed display and keyboard base. The hinge connected the display and keyboard base with four proprietary electrical contacts that carried USB 3.0 and a PCIe-like signal path, allowing the discrete GPU in the keyboard base to be accessed by the CPU and GPU in the display unit when the laptop was in clamshell mode. Read more

Apple Introduces the A9 and 3D Touch

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Apple announced the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus on September 9, 2015, introducing the A9 processor and 3D Touch. The A9 was co-manufactured by both TSMC (16nm FinFET) and Samsung (14nm FinFET) — an unusual dual-source arrangement that caused public concern about performance differences between the two variants, though Apple stated the real-world gap was within a few percent. The A9 carried approximately 2 billion transistors, two high-performance CPU cores clocked at 1.85 GHz, and a six-core PowerVR GT7600 GPU. Compared to the A8, Apple claimed 70% faster CPU performance and 90% faster GPU performance while using the same battery size. Read more

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

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Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was one of the people who helped turn programming from a practical craft into a serious intellectual discipline. He was born in Rotterdam in 1930. His parents were both highly educated, and Dijkstra initially studied theoretical physics at Leiden University. Read more

Google Becomes Part of Alphabet

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Larry Page published a blog post on August 10, 2015 announcing that Google was restructuring under a new holding company named Alphabet Inc. — the parent company of Google and a collection of separately managed subsidiaries. The restructuring took effect immediately: Sundar Pichai (who had been Google’s SVP of Products overseeing Search, Maps, Android, Chrome, and YouTube) became CEO of Google (the subsidiary), while Larry Page became CEO of Alphabet and Sergey Brin became President of Alphabet. Page explained the rationale in the announcement: Google had become “a bit uncomfortable” as a single entity encompassing both its highly profitable core businesses and long-term research projects that required different management cultures, time horizons, and capital allocation approaches. Keeping Waymo’s (then Google Self-Driving Car Project’s) multi-decade R&D investment lumped inside Google’s advertising revenue reporting made it difficult to assess the performance of either business on its own terms. Read more

Windows 10 Is Released

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Microsoft released Windows 10 on July 29, 2015 and offered it as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and 8.1 users for one year. The offer addressed Windows 8’s poor reception: launched in October 2012, Windows 8 removed the Start menu in favor of a touch-first tiled interface that laptop and desktop users largely rejected. Windows 8.1 in October 2013 partially reversed course. Windows 10 went further by restoring the Start menu and making the modern interface optional. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2015

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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2015, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

Microsoft Releases Visual Studio Code

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Microsoft announced Visual Studio Code at Build 2015 on April 29, 2015 and released it as a free public preview the same day, with VS Code 1.0 (the first stable release) shipping April 14, 2016. The project was led by Erich Gamma — one of the Gang of Four (co-author of Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, 1994) and the original creator of JUnit — who had joined Microsoft in 2011 specifically to build a new developer tool for the web era. VS Code was built on GitHub’s Electron framework (then called “Atom Shell,” renamed Electron in 2015), which wrapped Chromium’s rendering engine and Node.js in a single bundle, enabling a cross-platform desktop application built in TypeScript, HTML, and CSS — running on Windows, macOS, and Linux from the same codebase. The Monaco editor component (VS Code’s text editing core) was separately open-sourced and became the basis for browser-based code editing in Azure DevOps, GitHub’s web editor (., now github.dev), CodeSandbox, StackBlitz, and many other web IDEs. VS Code itself was published as open source under the MIT License on GitHub (github.com/microsoft/vscode) at launch. Read more

Google Photos Launches

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Google launched Google Photos at Google I/O on May 28, 2015, spinning it out from Google+ Photos as a standalone product with a simple and powerful offer: free unlimited photo storage for images up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p, with no storage quota against the user’s Google Drive or Gmail space. Google+ had been launched in June 2011 partly as a photo-sharing platform, and over four years it had accumulated enormous numbers of photos; by separating Google Photos from the declining Google+ social network, Google preserved the photo infrastructure and its 200+ million existing users without requiring them to maintain Google+ engagement. The pricing and capacity offer was immediately competitive: Apple’s iCloud offered 5 GB free (shared across photos, mail, and backups), Dropbox offered 2 GB free, and Amazon Prime Photos (November 2014) offered unlimited photo storage to Prime subscribers but only 5 GB for videos. Free unlimited storage for full-resolution photos — at a scale Google could afford because photo storage costs had declined and because Google’s use of the photo data for machine learning purposes provided indirect commercial value — positioned Google Photos as the primary cloud photo backup destination for Android users and a compelling alternative for iOS users. Read more

Apple Watch Reaches Consumers

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The first Apple Watch went on sale on April 24, 2015 in two sizes — 38mm and 42mm — and three collections: Sport starting at $349, Watch starting at $549, and Edition in 18-karat gold starting at $10,000. It used Apple’s S1 system-in-package, a small OLED display with Force Touch, heart-rate sensing, accelerometers, Taptic Engine haptic feedback, and a Digital Crown for scrolling. Watch required an iPhone 5 or later as a paired device and communication partner. Read more

USB Type-C Reaches New Consumer Devices

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USB Type-C arrived on major consumer devices in early 2015: the 12-inch MacBook (announced March 9, released April 10, $1,299) shipped with a single USB-C port as its only connector, and the second-generation Chromebook Pixel (announced March 11, $999) added two USB-C ports alongside standard USB-A. Both used USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) over the new connector. The MacBook’s single-port approach drew significant criticism because users needed a $79 USB-C to USB Adapter or a $79 USB-C to MagSafe adapter to connect legacy accessories or charge via existing cables. Read more

Docker And The Idea Of Portable Software

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One sentence has caused programmers pain for a very long time: “It works on my machine.” Docker, which released version 1.0 last June and has grown quickly since then, is the most practical answer I have seen to this problem. Read more

Raspberry Pi 2 Is Released

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The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B was released on February 2, 2015 at the same $35 price as the Pi 1 Model B+, replacing the BCM2835 SoC (single ARM11 core at 700 MHz) with the BCM2836 (quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 at 900 MHz). The Cortex-A7 delivered approximately 6× the raw compute performance of the ARM11 in multithreaded workloads, and the upgrade to 1 GB LPDDR2 RAM (from 512 MB) made concurrent processes, browser tabs, and compiled code workloads materially faster. Microsoft announced Windows 10 IoT Core support for the Pi 2 the same day as the hardware release — the first Raspberry Pi to support any version of Windows, enabled by the ARMv7-A instruction set that Windows requires (the Pi 1’s ARMv6 was incompatible with Windows Phone and Windows RT binary distributions). Read more

Microsoft Reveals More Details About Windows 10

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Microsoft held a “Windows 10: The Next Chapter” event on January 21, 2015 in Redmond, revealing major features of Windows 10 in detail for the first time since the Technical Preview had launched in October 2014. The most visible reversal of Windows 8’s decisions was the return of the Start menu — not the Windows 7 style menu (a list of programs), but a hybrid: a left panel listing recently used and all apps alphabetically, and a right panel with the Windows 8 live tiles resizable in a grid. Live tiles remained optional — users could remove them entirely or populate the right panel with a traditional app grid, giving both the visual dashboard of Windows 8 and the familiar Start menu feel of Windows 7. The Start button on the taskbar was restored as a permanent fixture (Windows 8 had removed it; Windows 8.1 had restored the button but sent it to the full-screen Start Screen). Read more

Docker Containers Move Deeper Into Production

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Docker had released version 1.0 in June 2014 — its first production-ready release — and by December 2014 adoption was accelerating past developer experimentation into actual production deployments. Docker Hub, the public registry, hosted over 60,000 images by the end of 2014. Major cloud providers were integrating Docker support: Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) launched in November 2014 as Amazon’s first managed container service, and Google Container Engine (later renamed GKE) launched in beta in November 2014 built on Kubernetes, which Google had open-sourced in June. Read more

Amazon Introduces the Echo

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Amazon announced the Echo in November 2014 as an invitation-only product, priced at $179 ($99 for Amazon Prime members). It went on general sale in June 2015. The device was a black cylinder 9.25 inches tall containing two speakers — a 2-inch tweeter and a 2.5-inch woofer — and a seven-microphone array with 360° sound pickup. The microphone array used beamforming to isolate the direction of the speaker’s voice and suppress background noise, allowing Alexa to hear commands from across a room while music was playing. Read more

HTML5 Becomes a W3C Recommendation

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HTML5 became an official W3C Recommendation on October 28, 2014, eight years after the WHATWG began drafting it in 2006 with Apple, Mozilla, and Opera as founding members after the W3C had chosen to pursue XHTML 2.0 instead. By 2014, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 11 had all shipped most of the specification, so the Recommendation ratified practice already in production rather than introducing new features. Read more

Apple Introduces the First Apple Watch

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Apple announced the Apple Watch at a September 9, 2014 event alongside the iPhone 6, with Tim Cook calling it “the most personal device we’ve ever created.” The watch went on sale April 24, 2015 in three collections — Apple Watch Sport (aluminum, starting at $349), Apple Watch (stainless steel, starting at $549), and Apple Watch Edition (18-karat gold, starting at $10,000) — in 38mm and 42mm case sizes with interchangeable bands across nine styles. Read more

IBM Announces a Major Investment in Cloud Computing

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IBM announced in January 2014 a $1.2 billion global cloud infrastructure investment, the largest single capital commitment to cloud expansion IBM had made, building on its June 2013 acquisition of SoftLayer Technologies for approximately $2 billion. SoftLayer, founded in 2005 and operating 13 data centers with approximately 25,000 customers at the time of acquisition, had built its platform around a hybrid bare-metal and virtual machine model connected through a private network backbone — a design that differentiated it from AWS, which offered only virtualized instances. IBM’s 2014 investment expanded SoftLayer’s data center footprint to include new locations in London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Amsterdam, Dallas, Washington D.C., Toronto, San Jose, Sydney, and Mexico City, bringing the total to over 40 data centers across six continents. IBM also launched IBM Bluemix in February 2014 (now IBM Cloud), a Platform-as-a-Service offering based on the open-source Cloud Foundry framework, providing hosted runtimes for Java, Node.js, Ruby, and Python applications alongside a growing catalog of IBM Watson APIs, IBM Cloudant (a CouchDB-compatible database service IBM acquired in February 2014 for approximately $150 million), and integrations with IBM’s existing enterprise software portfolio including DB2, WebSphere application server, and IBM MQ message queuing. IBM claimed a cloud revenue run rate exceeding $7 billion for 2014, though the definition included hybrid cloud managed services and software licenses hosted by customers, not only public cloud infrastructure. Read more

Google Announces Kubernetes

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Google announced Kubernetes as an open-source project on June 6, 2014 at DockerCon, and released version 0.1 in July 2014 under the Apache 2.0 license. The project was created by Joe Beda, Brendan Burns, and Craig McLuckie, who drew on Google’s decade of experience running its internal Borg cluster manager — which by 2014 was scheduling hundreds of thousands of jobs across Google’s data centers. Docker had popularized Linux containers in 2013, but it addressed packaging and running single containers, not orchestrating thousands of them across many machines. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2014

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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2014, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

Apple Announces Swift

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Apple announced Swift at WWDC on June 2, 2014 — a complete surprise to the developer community, as the project had been kept entirely secret. Chris Lattner, who had joined Apple in 2005 and created the LLVM compiler infrastructure and Clang C/C++ frontend, had been developing Swift in secret since July 2010 as a modern replacement for Objective-C. Objective-C had been Apple’s primary development language for iOS and macOS since NeXT’s acquisition in 1997, but it carried decades of C compatibility baggage: pointer arithmetic could produce undefined behavior, nil pointer dereferences silently returned 0 or nil (a common source of logic errors), string handling required manual bridging between NSString and C strings, and the square-bracket message-sending syntax ([object method:argument]) was unfamiliar to developers coming from any other modern language. Xcode 6 Beta (released the same day) included full Swift support and Playgrounds — an interactive REPL-like environment where code executed incrementally and results appeared inline alongside the code, enabling exploration of Swift syntax and API behavior without the compile-run-debug cycle. Read more

Microsoft Introduces the Surface Pro 3

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Microsoft announced the Surface Pro 3 on May 20, 2014, with retail availability beginning June 20, 2014 at prices from $799 (Intel Core i3, 64GB) through $1,949 (Core i7, 512GB). The device used a 12-inch display at 2160×1440 resolution (216 PPI, 3:2 aspect ratio) — a change from the 10.6-inch 16:9 display used on Surface Pro 1 and 2, motivated by the observation that 16:9 screens waste vertical space when displaying documents, making them awkward for productivity work while they’re optimized for video. The Surface Pen (256 pressure levels, AAA battery, magnetic attachment to the right edge) and the redesigned kickstand (adjustable to any angle from 22° to 150°, versus the Surface Pro 2’s two fixed positions) were positioned to make the device genuinely viable for handwriting, annotation, and note-taking workflows. Read more

Heartbleed Reveals a Serious OpenSSL Weakness

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Heartbleed (CVE-2014-0160) was publicly disclosed on April 7, 2014, simultaneously by Neel Mehta of Google Security and the Codenomicon research team. The vulnerability had existed in OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f since the Heartbeat extension was added on March 14, 2012 — meaning the flaw had been present for over two years before discovery. OpenSSL powered roughly 17 percent of all HTTPS-secured web servers at the time, running on Apache and nginx installations worldwide. The Heartbeat extension (RFC 6520) was designed to keep TLS sessions alive without a full handshake: a client sends a payload and declares its length, and the server echoes the same data back. OpenSSL’s implementation in tls1_process_heartbeat() failed to validate that the declared length matched the actual payload length provided. An attacker could send a 1-byte payload while claiming a length of 65,535 bytes, causing OpenSSL to copy 64 KB of process memory — whatever happened to reside adjacent to the buffer — directly into the heartbeat response. The attack required no authentication and left no log traces in standard server configurations. Read more

Heartbleed And The Fragile Trust Behind The Lock Icon

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On April 7, 2014, a security bug called Heartbleed was publicly disclosed, making a library most people had never heard of suddenly important to millions of people. The bug — CVE-2014-0160 — affected OpenSSL, the open-source cryptographic library used by the majority of servers to provide HTTPS connections. Read more

Responsive Web Design Is Becoming Necessary

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A few years ago, designing a website meant designing for a computer screen. The assumption was safe enough when the percentage of web traffic from phones was in single digits. In 2014, that assumption is becoming dangerous. Read more

Java 8 Is Released

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Java 8 (JDK 8) was released on March 18, 2014, under Oracle’s stewardship after completing development as Project Lambda (JSR 335), led primarily by Brian Goetz. The central addition was lambda expressions: anonymous functions passed as values, enabling code like list.stream().filter(x -> x.size() > 5).map(String::toUpperCase).collect(toList()) instead of a loop with anonymous Comparator or Runnable inner classes. Lambdas required a complementary language feature — functional interfaces (interfaces with exactly one abstract method, annotated optionally with @FunctionalInterface) — and a new syntax for method references (String::length, System.out::println, ArrayList::new), which allowed passing existing named methods where lambdas would otherwise be used. Read more

Wearable Computing Is Looking For A Purpose

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Computers have moved from desks to laps and then into pockets. The next suggested destination is the body, and in February 2014 several companies are in the middle of that experiment with mixed results. Read more

Facebook Acquires WhatsApp

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Facebook announced the acquisition of WhatsApp on February 19, 2014 for approximately $19 billion — $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook stock, and $3 billion in restricted stock units for WhatsApp employees. The price was remarkable for a company founded in 2009 by Jan Koum and Brian Acton, two former Yahoo engineers, with around 450 million active users and only about 55 employees at the time of the deal. Read more

Google Acquires DeepMind

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Google’s acquisition of DeepMind closed in January 2014 (announced January 26, 2014) for a reported price of approximately $500 million — the largest UK tech acquisition to that point and one of the largest AI company acquisitions ever. DeepMind had been founded in 2010 in London by Demis Hassabis (a former Cambridge University chess prodigy and game designer who had co-designed Theme Hospital at Bullfrog Productions in the 1990s, then completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCL), Shane Legg (a machine learning researcher who had studied under Marcus Hutter on universal AI theory), and Mustafa Suleyman (a co-founder without a technical research background but with policy and startup experience). The company had been working on combining deep neural networks with reinforcement learning — training agents through trial-and-error reward signals — a combination that had been theoretically understood for decades but was now computationally practical with GPUs and large datasets. Facebook had also attempted to acquire DeepMind; Google prevailed, and DeepMind’s acquisition agreement included an unusual condition: an ethics board would be established to oversee the use of DeepMind’s technology, a clause that reflected early concerns about AI safety at the company. Read more

Docker Reaches Its First Major Wave of Adoption

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Docker was released as an open-source project on March 20, 2013 by Solomon Hykes in a five-minute lightning talk at PyCon US, presented as an internal tool from dotCloud (a platform-as-a-service company). The GitHub repository went from 0 to 6,700 stars within six months, an unusually fast adoption curve for infrastructure tooling. By December 2013, Docker had attracted commitments from Red Hat (including Docker in RHEL), Google (integrating Docker with GCE), IBM, Rackspace, and Amazon Web Services (announcing Docker support on EC2), establishing it as the emerging standard for Linux container packaging even before version 1.0. Read more

JavaScript Frameworks And The Search For Order

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JavaScript applications have grown large enough that writing them as a collection of event handlers is no longer comfortable. Gmail, Google Maps, Trello, and similar applications live entirely in the browser and behave like desktop software: state changes without page loads, data synchronizes with a server in the background, and user interactions update multiple parts of the interface simultaneously. Managing this complexity in unstructured JavaScript produces code that becomes difficult to understand and modify after a certain size. Read more

The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One Launch

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Sony’s PlayStation 4 launched November 15, 2013 in North America at $399, followed by Microsoft’s Xbox One on November 22, 2013 at $499. Both used AMD’s “Jaguar” x86-64 CPU core architecture (8 cores at 1.6 GHz in PS4, 1.75 GHz in Xbox One) and AMD GCN (Graphics Core Next) GPU architectures, representing a sharp architectural departure from the previous generation: PS3 had used IBM’s Cell processor (a heterogeneous multi-core with 7 Synergistic Processing Elements running at 3.2 GHz) and PS4 replaced it entirely with x86-64 that any developer with PC experience could program directly. Xbox 360 had used a PowerPC-based IBM Xenon CPU. The x86-64 transition eliminated the platform-specific optimization work that had defined PS3 development (where Cell’s SPE parallelism required explicit task allocation), making initial multi-platform games significantly cheaper to develop and port. Read more

Windows 8.1 Is Released

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Windows 8.1 went on sale on October 17, 2013 as a free update from Windows 8, delivered through the Windows Store — the first time a major Windows upgrade was distributed this way. The update came less than a year after Windows 8 launched on October 26, 2012, an unusually fast response driven by poor reception: Windows 8 had been criticized for replacing the Start menu with a full-screen tile interface that made no accommodation for mouse-and-keyboard users on non-touch PCs. Read more

Online Courses And The Changing Classroom

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The New York Times called 2012 “The Year of the MOOC.” Massive open online courses arrived with enormous energy: Coursera launched in April 2012, founded by Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng; edX launched two months later as a nonprofit from MIT and Harvard; Udacity, founded by Sebastian Thrun after his Stanford AI course enrolled 160,000 students online in 2011, was already operating. By September 2013, millions of students worldwide have enrolled in courses on these platforms, often from institutions they could not have attended in person. Read more

Apple Introduces the 64-Bit A7 Processor

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Apple announced the iPhone 5s on September 10, 2013, introducing the A7 — which Apple described as the first 64-bit processor in a consumer smartphone. The A7 used Apple’s Cyclone CPU cores, designed in-house around the ARMv8 architecture, and contained 1 billion transistors manufactured on Samsung’s 28nm process. Cyclone’s dual high-performance cores ran at up to 1.3 GHz; Apple claimed 2× CPU and 2× GPU performance compared to the A6. The chip paired with 1GB of LPDDR3 RAM — the same as the iPhone 5, and nowhere near the 4GB minimum where a 64-bit address space provides a practical RAM benefit. Read more

Microsoft Finalizes Windows 8.1

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Microsoft released Windows 8.1 to manufacturing (RTM) on August 27, 2013, completing the build that would go to device makers and enterprise customers before the October 17 public release. RTM meant the code was final and ready for hardware certification — OEMs needed this lead time to preinstall 8.1 on new PCs shipped around the holiday season. The August milestone arrived less than ten months after Windows 8 launched on October 26, 2012, signaling how seriously Microsoft was treating user complaints. Read more

Google Chromecast Is Released

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Google announced and began selling the Chromecast on July 24, 2013 for $35, alongside a limited-time offer of three months of Netflix free — which effectively made the device free for existing Netflix subscribers. Google sold out of the first production run within hours. The dongle was 72mm long, plugged directly into a TV’s HDMI port, and drew power from a USB port (on the TV or via the included wall adapter), with no remote control, no standalone interface, and no local application storage beyond a small bootloader. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2013

3 minute read

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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2013, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

Apple Reveals iOS 7 and the New Mac Pro

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Apple’s WWDC 2013 keynote on June 10, 2013 featured two redesigns that signaled different directions: iOS 7 replaced the skeuomorphic visual language that had defined iPhone software since 2007, and the new Mac Pro abandoned the aluminum tower form factor that had served professional desktops since the Power Mac era. iOS 7 was led by Jony Ive following the departure of Scott Forstall in October 2012 — Forstall had championed the leather-and-wood textures, torn paper, and felt-covered stitching that Apple called skeuomorphic design. iOS 7 replaced all of it with flat, translucent surfaces, a system-wide blur effect (processing layers beneath the current view as frosted glass), a new thinner system font (Helvetica Neue Light), redesigned icons with a consistent rounded-rectangle grid, and physics-based animations using UIKit Dynamics. New features included Control Center (swipe up from any screen to reach brightness, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and media controls without leaving the current app), AirDrop for peer-to-peer file transfer over Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth LE, and iTunes Radio as a streaming music service competing with Pandora. iOS 7 shipped September 18, 2013 alongside the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c, and within four days Apple reported 74 percent of active devices had updated — the fastest adoption rate for any iOS version to that point. Read more

A Genius And Visionary Nicola Tesla

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Nikola Tesla is one of those historical figures whose real achievements are impressive enough without adding legends. He was born in 1856 in Smiljan, in what is now Croatia, and moved to the United States in 1884. His work in electrical engineering became especially important during the development of alternating-current power systems. Read more

Google Introduces Android Studio

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Google announced Android Studio at Google I/O on May 15, 2013 as a replacement for the Eclipse + ADT (Android Development Tools) plugin combination that had been the official Android development environment since Android’s first SDK release in 2008. The preview (version 0.1) was available immediately for download; Android Studio 1.0 stable shipped on December 8, 2014. The choice of JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition as the base was a departure from Eclipse, which Google had promoted since 2008 but which suffered well-known performance problems under heavy Android project loads — long startup times, memory pressure on projects with many modules, and frequent crashes under refactoring operations. Read more

Google Releases Blink as a New Browser Engine

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Google announced Blink on April 3, 2013 as a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit — the rendering engine Google had used in Chrome since its initial release on September 2, 2008. WebKit itself had origins in KHTML, the rendering engine developed by the KDE project for the Konqueror browser, which Apple forked in January 2003 to create Safari. Chrome had adopted WebKit because it was already mature, standards-compliant, and open-source, but Chrome immediately diverged from Safari’s architecture by using V8 (Google’s own JavaScript engine, developed separately) rather than WebKit’s JavaScriptCore, and by implementing a multi-process model in which each browser tab ran in a separate sandboxed renderer process. This multi-process architecture — fundamental to Chrome’s stability and security properties — created permanent architectural tension with WebKit, which had been designed for a single-process model. Chrome engineers working in the shared WebKit repository found themselves maintaining complex compatibility layers and workarounds to support Chrome’s multi-process design in a codebase whose primary consumers (Apple Safari) used a different architecture. Opera simultaneously announced it was also abandoning its long-running Presto rendering engine in favor of Blink, becoming the third major browser to share a Chromium-based engine alongside Chrome and the various Chromium-derived browsers already in existence. Read more

Raspberry Pi And The Joy Of Small Computers

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The Raspberry Pi is one year old. It launched in February 2012, and in the time since, about a million boards have been sold — far more than the Raspberry Pi Foundation expected when they planned the initial production run of ten thousand. Read more

Samsung Launches the Galaxy S4

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Samsung announced the Galaxy S4 on March 14, 2013, at a theatrical event at Radio City Music Hall in New York — 3,000 people attended — and launched it globally in April 2013, priced around $649 unlocked ($199–$249 on two-year contracts in the US). The S4 had a 5-inch Full HD (1920×1080) Super AMOLED display at 441 PPI, up from the Galaxy S3’s 4.8-inch 306 PPI display. Samsung shipped two different chipsets by region: a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 (quad-core 1.9 GHz) in North America, Europe with LTE, and several Asian markets, and a Samsung Exynos 5410 (octa-core, but only 4 active at once using big.LITTLE) in other markets. Both had 2GB RAM. Read more

Ubuntu Announces Its Phone Interface

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Canonical announced Ubuntu for Phones on January 2, 2013, with a promotional video and detailed specification document. The interface relied entirely on edge gestures: swiping right from the left edge revealed a launcher bar, swiping left from the right edge exposed a notifications panel, swiping up from the bottom edge revealed app controls, and swiping down from the top edge showed settings and quick toggles. There was no physical home button in the design; all navigation was gestural. Canonical intended to ship Ubuntu Phone on hardware in 2013 but the first commercially available devices — the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition and Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition — did not reach the market until February and November 2015 respectively. Read more

3D Printing And The Idea Of Downloading An Object

4 minute read

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For most of my life, a digital file and a physical object have belonged to different worlds. A document can become a printout. A photograph can become a print. But a bracket, a gear, a custom case, or a replacement part for something discontinued — these required a factory, a workshop, or a person with specialized tools. Read more

Facebook Introduces Graph Search

3 minute read

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Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Graph Search on January 15, 2013 at an event at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, releasing it in a limited US English beta. Graph Search was led by Tom Stocky and Lars Rasmussen — Rasmussen was the co-founder and original engineer of Google Maps (sold to Google 2004) and creator of Google Wave (launched 2009, discontinued 2010), who joined Facebook in 2010. The system accepted natural-language queries structured around Facebook’s Open Graph data model: “Photos of my friends taken in Paris,” “Friends of friends who work at Google who went to Harvard,” “Restaurants in New York my friends have visited,” and “People who like The Dark Knight and Star Wars.” The queries were parsed into structured graph traversals over Facebook’s social graph — nodes (people, pages, photos, places, events, groups) connected by typed edges (likes, tagged-in, lives-in, works-at, attended, friend-of) — rather than keyword-based text retrieval. Bing web search was integrated as a fallback when queries lacked sufficient social data to produce useful results. Read more

Google Compute Engine Expands Cloud Competition

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Google announced Google Compute Engine in preview at Google I/O in June 2012 and expanded it to a limited general availability in December 2012, removing the invitation requirement and allowing any Google account to create virtual machines. Compute Engine launched with standard Linux VM types (n1-standard-1 through n1-standard-16, up to 16 vCPUs and 60 GB RAM), persistent disks, and snapshots for backup and clone — directly comparable to Amazon EC2 instance types that Amazon had been selling since 2006. Google priced standard instances approximately 10% below Amazon’s equivalent pricing at launch. Read more

The First ARM-Based Windows RT Devices Arrive

3 minute read

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Windows RT devices went on sale October 26, 2012 alongside Windows 8, led by Microsoft’s Surface RT ($499 for 32GB, $599 for 64GB, with the Type Cover keyboard sold separately at $129). ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, and Samsung also launched Windows RT tablets the same day. All ran on ARM processors — primarily the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core at 1.3 GHz in most devices including Surface RT — rather than the x86 CPUs that had defined Windows PCs since the early 1980s. The ARM chips offered better power efficiency: Surface RT quoted ten hours of battery life vs. roughly five to six hours on contemporary x86 Windows 8 ultrabooks. Read more

Windows 8 Is Released

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Microsoft released Windows 8 on October 26, 2012 at $119.99 (Windows 8) and $199.99 (Windows 8 Pro) retail, with a $39.99 upgrade promotion for Windows XP/Vista/7 users available through January 31, 2013. The launch was the most radical Windows interface change since Windows 95: the Start menu was removed entirely and replaced by the Start Screen — a full-screen grid of live tiles that updated dynamically with app content (news headlines, weather conditions, email previews, calendar appointments). The Start Screen and all “Metro” (later “Modern UI”) apps ran in a full-screen tiled environment designed for touch input, contrasting with the traditional desktop environment that remained present as a separate mode. Switching between them required either a hot corner gesture, keyboard shortcut, or Start button click — on a non-touch laptop or desktop PC, this context switch felt unnatural, as the Start Screen’s large tile targets and swiping gestures were sized for finger input but controlled with a mouse cursor. Read more

The iPhone 5 Brings LTE to Apple Phones

4 minute read

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Apple announced the iPhone 5 on September 12, 2012 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, with units available for purchase September 21. It was the first iPhone to support LTE (4G Long Term Evolution) cellular connectivity, the first with a 4-inch display, and the first to use the Lightning connector. The hardware design was notably thin at 7.6 mm (versus iPhone 4S at 9.3 mm) and 112 grams — Apple’s marketing characterized it as “the thinnest and lightest iPhone ever.” The 4-inch Retina display (1136×640 at 326 ppi) maintained the same 326 ppi pixel density as the iPhone 4/4S while adding 176 rows of pixels, switching from a 3:2 to a 16:9 aspect ratio that matched the aspect ratio of widescreen video — meaning iPhone 5 could display 1080p HD video content without letterboxing on the sides. The Apple A6 SoC was Apple’s first processor using custom-designed CPU cores (codenamed Swift) rather than standard ARM Cortex implementations licensed from ARM Holdings, clocked at 1.3 GHz in a dual-core configuration, delivering approximately 2× CPU and 2× GPU performance versus the A5 in iPhone 4S. The A6 packaged 1 GB LPDDR2 RAM and a PowerVR SGX543MP3 GPU. LTE was supported through a Qualcomm MDM9615 modem, which for the first time combined GSM/UMTS and CDMA radio support in a single chip, enabling Apple to consolidate what had previously been separate hardware variants for AT&T and Verizon/Sprint into a smaller number of antenna configurations. Read more

Windows 8 Reaches RTM

3 minute read

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Windows 8 reached RTM (release-to-manufacturing) on August 1, 2012, and Microsoft made the final build available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers on August 15. OEM PC manufacturers received the RTM build on the same date to begin factory installation, with the public sale date set for October 26, 2012 — nearly three years after Windows 7 launched in October 2009. The RTM announcement at a BUILD developer conference session marked the last point developers could verify their applications before retail availability. Read more

OS X Mountain Lion Is Released

3 minute read

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Apple released OS X Mountain Lion (version 10.8) on July 25, 2012 at $19.99 — the first time a Mac OS X release had been priced below $29, and the lowest price Apple had charged for a Mac OS release. Mountain Lion was distributed exclusively through the Mac App Store, requiring OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.8) or later and an Apple ID, continuing the App Store-only OS distribution model Apple had introduced with Lion (10.7) in 2011. The release brought more than 200 features from iOS to the Mac, completing a deliberate convergence of the two operating system families that Apple had been pursuing since Lion. Messages replaced iChat: the new app combined the older AIM/Yahoo/Jabber protocols (iChat’s capabilities) with iMessage — Apple’s end-to-end encrypted messaging system introduced in iOS 5 (October 2011) — allowing Mac users to send messages to iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users over data rather than SMS, with message delivery and read receipts. Notification Center (pulled directly from iOS 5’s design) arrived in the top-right corner of the Mac desktop: applications registered notifications that appeared as banners or alerts, collected in a notification sidebar revealed by swiping from the right edge of the trackpad. Reminders and Notes (both iOS 5 additions) arrived as separate Mac applications, syncing via iCloud. Game Center, Airplay Mirroring (mirror the Mac screen wirelessly to an Apple TV 2nd generation or later), Twitter integration in system-wide share sheets, and Facebook integration followed. Read more

The Day Windows Cleaned Up After Me

10 minute read

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For years, I had been trained to respect Linux. At university, I had professors who loved it. Later, at work, I spent a great deal of time on embedded systems. So Linux was not some exotic operating system I occasionally installed out of curiosity — it was part of the technical world I knew. Windows development, on the other hand, was something I had done much less of. Then, in 2012, I had to use it, and because engineers are apparently incapable of simply using a new environment normally, I decided to experiment. Read more

What Should a Professional Chamber Actually Do?

17 minute read

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In July 2012, I wrote about the newly formed Chamber of Computer Engineers. My first reaction was not philosophical — it was financial. I wrote, roughly: I will love this chamber as long as nobody comes to my door saying, “hands in your pockets.” In other words: please do not ask me for dues. That was the joke. But underneath it was a more serious question: what exactly should a professional chamber do for a computer engineer? Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2012

4 minute read

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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2012, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

Microsoft Announces the Surface Tablet

3 minute read

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Microsoft announced the first Surface tablets at a secret event in Los Angeles on June 18, 2012, with Steve Ballmer personally unveiling two models. Surface RT carried an NVIDIA Tegra 3 ARM processor and ran Windows RT — a version of Windows 8 that could not install legacy x86 desktop applications. Surface Pro was planned around an Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge processor and full Windows 8, capable of running any existing Windows software. Both featured a 10.6-inch ClearType display at 1366×768, a built-in kickstand, and a magnetic cover attachment. The Touch Cover — a 3mm fabric slab with a touch-sensitive keyboard — and the Type Cover — a 5mm physical keyboard — were announced alongside the tablets, priced at $119 and $129 respectively. Read more

Google Introduces the Knowledge Graph

3 minute read

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Google introduced the Knowledge Graph on May 16, 2012 in a blog post by CEO Larry Page titled “Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings.” The system launched initially for US English searches, with international rollout following over subsequent months. At launch, the Knowledge Graph contained approximately 500 million objects and 3.5 billion facts connecting them — people, places, books, movies, music, companies, and scientific concepts sourced from Freebase (acquired by Google in 2010), Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook, and other structured databases. Read more

Google Drive Launches

3 minute read

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Google launched Drive on April 24, 2012, offering 5 GB of free storage with integration into Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. The service entered a cloud-storage market that Dropbox had pioneered in 2008 — Dropbox had approximately 50 million users by 2012 and offered 2 GB free — but Drive’s advantage was converting Google’s existing Docs user base and tying storage directly to a Google account that many people already owned for Gmail. Read more

NVIDIA Launches the Kepler GPU Architecture

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NVIDIA launched the Kepler architecture on March 22, 2012 with the GeForce GTX 680 at $499. The GK104 die at the heart of the GTX 680 contained 3.54 billion transistors on a 28nm TSMC process, delivering 3.09 TFLOPS of single-precision compute. The GTX 680 matched or outperformed AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 (launched January 2012 at $549) in most games while drawing significantly less power — 195W vs. 250W under load. NVIDIA followed with the GTX 670 in May 2012 at $399, using a cut-down GK104 that offered most of the GTX 680’s performance at lower cost. Read more

The Unexpected Hanging Paradox

3 minute read

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The Unexpected Hanging Paradox appears to prove that a judge’s announcement cannot be fulfilled — and then the announcement is immediately fulfilled. The contradiction is not in the judge’s statement. It is in the prisoner’s reasoning about knowledge. Read more

The Zenos Paradox

4 minute read

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Zeno of Elea, a Greek philosopher from the fifth century BCE, created several paradoxes about motion that troubled thinkers for two thousand years and ultimately demanded new mathematics to resolve. Read more

The Berrys Paradox

3 minute read

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Berry’s Paradox lives in the uncomfortable space between language and mathematics — the space where ordinary words meet formal definitions and produce results neither can handle alone. Read more

Raspberry Pi Goes on Sale

3 minute read

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The Raspberry Pi went on sale on February 29, 2012 (deliberately chosen as a leap-day launch) through two licensed distributors, RS Components and Farnell/Element14 — both UK-based electronics distributors that had agreed to handle manufacturing orders. Within minutes of the 6 AM UK launch, traffic overwhelmed both distributor websites, knocking them offline as tens of thousands of people tried to place orders simultaneously. Pre-registration lists ahead of the launch had exceeded 700,000 names, massively outstripping the initial production run of 10,000 boards. The Model B priced at $35 (£22) included a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC (700 MHz ARM1176JZF-S ARM11 core with 256 MB RAM co-packaged on the same SoC die — later upgraded to 512 MB in October 2012), VideoCore IV GPU (capable of 1080p30 H.264 hardware decode and OpenGL ES 2.0), HDMI output, composite video jack, 3.5mm audio, two USB 2.0 ports, 100 Mbps Ethernet, an SD card slot for the boot OS, and a 26-pin GPIO header. The cheaper Model A ($25) had one USB port and no Ethernet. The board was assembled at the Sony UK Technology Centre in Pencoed, Wales — a deliberate choice to keep manufacturing in the UK despite lower-cost options in China. Read more

The Hilberts Paradox

4 minute read

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Hilbert’s Hotel is one of my favourite ways to think about infinity. David Hilbert described the idea in a 1924 lecture in Göttingen; it was not published formally but was later popularised by the physicist George Gamow in his 1947 book One Two Three… Infinity. It remains the clearest illustration I know of why infinity does not behave like a very large finite number. Read more

The Birthday Paradox

3 minute read

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The Birthday Paradox is not a real contradiction. It is a collision between probability and intuition — and the gap between them is large enough that the result consistently surprises people even after they have heard the explanation before. Read more

The Banach-tarski Paradox

3 minute read

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The Banach-Tarski Paradox is a theorem in mathematics stating that a solid ball in three-dimensional space can be decomposed into a finite number of disjoint subsets, which can then be reassembled — using only rigid motions: rotations and translations — into two solid balls each identical in size to the original. One ball becomes two. No stretching, no scaling, no adding material. Read more

The Liar Paradox

3 minute read

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Consider the sentence: “This statement is false.” It is only four words, but it creates a problem that has troubled philosophers and logicians for more than two thousand years. Read more

The Barber Paradox

1 minute read

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The Barber Paradox is a simple story that carries the same logical problem as Russell’s Paradox. Imagine a village with one barber. The rule is this: The barber shaves all men in the village who do not shave themselves, and only those men. At first, the rule seems clear. Read more

Raspberry Pi Production Begins

3 minute read

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Raspberry Pi production began in January 2012 at the Sony UK Technology Centre in Pencoed, Wales, with the first batch of Model B boards going through SMT (surface-mount technology) assembly and automated optical inspection before shipment to distributors RS Components and Farnell/Element14. The Raspberry Pi Foundation had spent 2011 refining the design to hit the $35 price point: an early prototype used an Atmel ATmega644 microcontroller, but the decision shifted to the Broadcom BCM2835 SoC (a multimedia processor Broadcom designed for IPTV set-top boxes and mobile phones) after Eben Upton, working at Broadcom, arranged access to the chip at educational pricing. The BCM2835 integrated a 700 MHz ARM1176JZF-S core (ARM11 architecture, ARMv6 ISA), a VideoCore IV GPU (supporting 1080p30 H.264 hardware decode, OpenGL ES 2.0, and OpenVG), and 256 MB of LPDDR2 RAM in a package-on-package stack above the SoC — a single component rather than separate CPU, GPU, and memory chips. The GPU’s hardware H.264 decoder was critical for education use cases like media centers (XBMC ran acceptably on the Pi using GPU-accelerated video) and for making a $35 device feel useful. Read more

Russells Paradox

3 minute read

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Russell’s Paradox is one of those problems that looks harmless until one sentence turns mathematics against itself. Bertrand Russell discovered it around 1901 while reading Gottlob Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik — an attempt to derive all of arithmetic from pure logic. Russell noticed that Frege’s axiom allowing unrestricted set formation contained a contradiction, and he wrote a letter to Frege in June 1902 explaining it. Read more

Imaginary Numbers

3 minute read

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The name “imaginary number” sounds almost like a joke — how can a number be imaginary? The name reflects a history of suspicion. These numbers were useful before anyone was comfortable saying they were real. Read more

HTML5 Becomes the Center of Modern Web Development

4 minute read

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By December 2011, “HTML5” had become both a technical specification and a marketing term that redefined expectations for what the web could do. The W3C had published the first public working draft of the HTML5 specification in January 2008, and the final W3C Recommendation would not arrive until October 28, 2014; but browser vendors were implementing features incrementally without waiting for the specification to freeze. The practical trigger for accelerated HTML5 adoption had been Steve Jobs’s April 2010 “Thoughts on Flash” open letter, which explained why the iPhone and iPad would never support Adobe Flash and positioned HTML5 as the appropriate open standard for web video and interactive content. Flash had dominated rich internet applications since the late 1990s: at its peak in 2010, approximately 97 percent of web browsers had Flash installed and most video sites (including YouTube and Vimeo) delivered video through Flash players. HTML5’s <video> and <audio> elements offered native browser-level media playback, but the codec debates complicated adoption: Apple supported H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (proprietary, royalty-bearing via MPEG-LA, but hardware-accelerated in Apple devices); Mozilla and Opera refused to ship H.264 support and backed Ogg Theora (royalty-free); Google’s acquisition of On2 Technologies produced VP8, which Google open-sourced as WebM in May 2010. YouTube began offering an HTML5 video experiment in January 2010, but codec inconsistency meant developers still needed fallback Flash players for most of the following two years. Read more

Raspberry Pi Hardware Design Nears Production

4 minute read

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By November 2011, the Raspberry Pi Foundation — founded by Eben Upton, Rob Mullins, Jack Lang, and Alan Mycroft at the University of Cambridge — had finalized the hardware design of the Raspberry Pi Model B and contracted manufacturing. The project had grown from a 2006 idea about a cheap programmable computer to teach Python to children. The final spec: Broadcom BCM2835 SoC (ARM11 core at 700 MHz plus VideoCore IV GPU capable of 1080p H.264 decode), 256MB of LPDDR2 RAM, HDMI output, composite video, 3.5mm audio, two USB 2.0 ports, 100Mbps Ethernet, SD card for storage, and a 26-pin GPIO header — all for a target retail price of $35 (Model B) or $25 (Model A, without Ethernet, one USB port). Read more

Apple Introduces Siri on the iPhone 4S

4 minute read

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Apple introduced Siri as a headline feature of the iPhone 4S at an event on October 4, 2011 — the first Apple event presided over by Tim Cook as CEO, and the day before Steve Jobs died on October 5. Apple had acquired Siri Inc. on April 28, 2010 for approximately $200 million; the original Siri app had been released on the App Store on February 4, 2010 as a standalone application that used natural language to book restaurants, find movies, and access web services through third-party API integrations with OpenTable, Fandango, and others before Apple acquired the company and removed the app from the App Store four weeks later. The Siri built into the iPhone 4S was substantially redesigned for deeper iOS integration and marketed with the label “Beta” — the first time Apple had shipped a product feature explicitly marked as unfinished, acknowledging that the system would improve over time rather than being presented as complete at launch. Siri ran on the iPhone 4S’s Apple A5 SoC (the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor also used in iPad 2), with audio processing performed on-device but natural language understanding and response generation performed on Apple’s servers, requiring a data connection for most requests. Supported capabilities at launch included setting alarms and reminders, sending messages and emails, making calls, querying the weather, looking up restaurant information via Yelp, performing calculations, and answering factual questions through a Wolfram Alpha integration. Siri responded in synthesized speech and displayed text on screen simultaneously. Read more

When AltaVista Disappeared

9 minute read

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Some technologies disappear loudly: a company announces the end, people write long farewell articles, old users share screenshots, and someone makes a documentary. Then there are the technologies that simply stop answering. Read more

When Mounting a Disk Became a Linux Lesson

10 minute read

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There are technical problems that begin with a sentence so innocent that you already know the evening is lost. “I just need to write something to this disk.” That was more or less the situation. The disk was NTFS. The system was Linux. The tool involved was ntfs-3g. Nothing about this sounded dramatic — mount the disk, copy the files, continue with life. Instead, the computer gradually transformed into something that felt less like a workstation and more like a geological formation: slow, heavy, unresponsive. Every operation seemed to require negotiation. Read more

A Friday Night at IKEA Ankara

13 minute read

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Some places begin as stores and somehow become part of a city’s social life. That was the strange thing about IKEA Ankara. In September 2011, I wrote about it with the kind of confidence I often had then when observing other people’s habits. I had tried the famous meatballs, and my conclusion was that anyone going there only to eat them needed to reconsider their life choices. I had also heard — and partly observed — that Mamak’s nightlife seemed to be happening there; the place was crowded with people who did not fit any single category. And when people said it was the biggest IKEA in Turkey, I dismissed that too: of course it was big, I thought, half of it was pillows and duvets. That was the entry — short, mocking, very certain. Read more

Windows 8 Is Shown to Developers

3 minute read

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Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 at the BUILD developer conference September 13–16, 2011 in Anaheim, California, and gave all 5,000 attendees a Samsung Series 7 Slate tablet preloaded with a Windows 8 Developer Preview build. The conference was led by Steven Sinofsky (president of Windows division) and introduced the Metro interface publicly for the first time: a full-screen, tile-based Start screen designed for touch, replacing the Start menu that had been in Windows since Windows 95 in 1995. The tiles were live — updating dynamically with news, weather, email counts, and photos without opening the full application. Read more

Google Agrees to Acquire Motorola Mobility

4 minute read

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Google announced an agreement to acquire Motorola Mobility on August 15, 2011 for $12.5 billion in cash — $40 per share, a 63% premium to Motorola Mobility’s closing price the previous Friday. Motorola Mobility had been spun off from Motorola Solutions (the enterprise and government radio business) only seven months earlier, in January 2011. The deal’s stated rationale from Google CEO Larry Page was protecting Android from patent litigation: Motorola Mobility held approximately 17,000 granted patents and 7,500 pending applications covering cellular communications, wireless protocols, and mobile device design, accumulated over Motorola’s 83-year history as a pioneer in wireless technology. Read more

The Bar Hidden Inside an Office Building

14 minute read

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Some places feel strange before you even enter them — not because they are dangerous, not because they are beautiful, but because they are in the wrong building. In August 2011, I wrote a short entry about SSK İşhanı in Ankara. Years earlier, it had contained the second bar I had ever gone to, called Baraka. What I remembered most was not the music, not the drinks, not even the people — it was the fact that the bar was inside an office building. Read more

GitHub And The Social Side Of Code

3 minute read

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Source-code hosting used to feel like infrastructure — a necessary utility, not a social space. Sourceforge (launched 1999) and Google Code (launched 2006) provided repositories, bug trackers, and download pages. They were functional. You submitted a project, it hosted the files, other developers found it through search. Read more

OS X Lion Moves Software Distribution Toward App Stores

3 minute read

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Apple released OS X 10.7 Lion on July 20, 2011 through the Mac App Store for $29.99 — the first Mac operating system sold as a digital download only, with no DVD option at retail. Snow Leopard (2009) had been available as a $29 disc, itself a reduction from Leopard’s $129; Lion went further by eliminating physical media entirely for consumer upgrades. (A USB flash drive option was made available for machines without Mac App Store access, priced at $69, via Apple.com.) The Mac App Store had launched only seven months earlier, in January 2011. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2011

3 minute read

Published:

If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2011, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

Apple Announces iCloud

2 minute read

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced iCloud at WWDC on June 6, 2011, describing it as a replacement for MobileMe — Apple’s $99/year subscription sync service that had launched in 2008 to widespread criticism for reliability failures and data loss. Jobs called MobileMe’s execution “not our finest hour” and announced that iCloud’s core services would be free with 5 GB of storage. iCloud launched alongside iOS 5 (October 12, 2011) and OS X Lion (July 20, 2011), which were prerequisites. The service replaced the Mac-as-hub model that had defined Apple’s digital hub strategy since 2001 (the original iTunes philosophy where the Mac was the master copy of music, photos, and calendars, with devices syncing via USB cable). In iCloud’s model, the cloud was the hub: contacts, calendars, email, and purchased content would propagate to every device automatically, with no cable required. MobileMe transitioned to iCloud and was shut down on June 30, 2012. Read more

Google Introduces Chromebooks

3 minute read

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Google announced the first commercial Chromebooks at Google I/O on May 11, 2011, with two models going on sale June 15: the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook ($499 Wi-Fi / $549 3G) and the Acer Chromebook AC700 ($349). Both ran Chrome OS, a Linux-kernel operating system built around the Chrome browser as the exclusive application runtime, with no support for installing native Windows or Mac software. User accounts, bookmarks, apps, and settings synchronized to Google’s servers, meaning any Chromebook could be logged into and return the same environment within seconds. Read more

Ubuntu Introduces the Unity Desktop by Default

1 minute read

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Ubuntu introduced the Unity desktop by default in 2011, making one of the boldest user-interface changes in the distribution’s history. For years, Ubuntu had been associated with a relatively familiar GNOME 2 desktop. Unity moved the experience toward a custom shell with a launcher, global menu ideas, search-centered navigation, and a layout influenced by smaller screens as well as traditional PCs. Read more

Firefox Moves to a Faster Release Model

1 minute read

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Firefox’s move to a faster release model in 2011 was a major cultural change for one of the web’s most important browsers. Earlier browser releases often felt like large events separated by long waits. The web, however, was moving too quickly for that rhythm. New standards, security fixes, performance improvements, and developer needs demanded a shorter feedback loop. Read more

IBM Watson Defeats Jeopardy Champions

2 minute read

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IBM’s Watson competed against Ken Jennings (winner of a 74-game consecutive win streak in 2004) and Brad Rutter (highest all-time Jeopardy prize earnings) in a three-game match taped in January 2011 and broadcast February 14–16, 2011. Watson won with $77,147 in combined scores versus Rutter’s $21,600 and Jennings’ $24,000. The $1 million first prize was donated to charity; IBM had spent approximately four years and $900 million on the project. Watson’s hardware comprised 90 IBM POWER7 servers with 2,880 processor cores and 16 TB of RAM, occupying 10 racks. The system had no internet access during the match; all 200 million pages of content (Wikipedia, Britannica, literary works, newspapers, and databases) were stored locally. Watson could analyze 200 million pages per second. Read more

Intel Introduces the Sandy Bridge Architecture

1 minute read

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Intel introduced the Sandy Bridge architecture in 2011, and it quickly became one of the defining CPU generations of the early 2010s. For many desktop and laptop users, Sandy Bridge delivered the kind of improvement that could actually be felt: strong general performance, better efficiency, and integrated graphics that were becoming less of an afterthought. Read more

The Quiet Value Of Making Backups

4 minute read

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Backups are one of the least exciting parts of using a computer. Nothing new appears when a backup works. There is no faster program, no new feature, no visual change at all. We only create another copy of something we already have. Read more

Google Announces the Chrome Web Store

3 minute read

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Google opened the Chrome Web Store on December 7, 2010, simultaneously with the launch of Chrome OS and the Cr-48, a matte-black developer pilot Chromebook shipped to invited developers. The store distributed three categories of Chrome products: browser extensions (scripts and UI overlays that modified Chrome’s behavior, already available since Chrome 4 in January 2010), browser themes (visual customizations), and web applications (a new category that came in two variants). “Hosted apps” were essentially metadata packages pointing to an existing web URL — an icon, name, description, and a link — that placed a shortcut in Chrome’s New Tab page app launcher and could request additional permissions like offline storage or notification APIs. “Packaged apps” were downloaded to the user’s local Chrome profile and could use Chrome’s local storage APIs, background page capabilities, and hardware access APIs without requiring a network connection, running through Chrome’s own execution environment rather than a traditional OS process. The distinction between hosted and packaged apps was frequently confusing to users: a hosted app for Gmail looked identical in the store to a packaged app for a game, but their offline behavior, storage access, and execution models were completely different. Read more

The Kinect Sensor Reaches Consumers

3 minute read

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Microsoft launched Kinect for Xbox 360 on November 4, 2010 in North America, priced at $149.99 standalone or $299 bundled with an Xbox 360 and Kinect Adventures. It was the fastest-selling consumer electronics device at the time, selling 8 million units in 60 days according to Microsoft — faster than the iPhone or iPad had sold in comparable launch windows. The device sat below or beside a TV and required approximately 6 feet of clearance between the player and the sensor. Read more

Why I Keep Notes While Programming

5 minute read

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When I am deep inside a programming problem, I often believe I will remember everything. The reason for this strange function is obvious. I am certain I will recall why I changed that setting. The error message will surely stay in my mind — I spent three hours fighting it. Read more

Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7

3 minute read

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Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 on October 21, 2010 in the United States and Europe, introducing hardware from HTC (HD7, Surround), Samsung (Focus, Omnia 7), LG (Optimus 7), and Dell (Venue Pro). The launch was a complete architectural break from Windows Mobile 6.5 (released October 2009), which had attempted to put a desktop-like interface onto a touchscreen — using stylus-oriented menus, scroll bars, and desktop Windows conventions that were poorly suited to finger input. Windows Phone 7 instead adopted the Metro design language (later renamed Modern UI by Microsoft): a home screen of resizable Live Tiles that updated dynamically with current information (new emails, weather, news), horizontal panorama-scrolling UI sections within apps, large Helvetica Neue typography without frames or borders, and a consistent navigation model using three hardware buttons (Back, Start, Search) rather than on-screen navigation. The visual identity was derived partly from transit signage design and represented a deliberate departure from both iOS’s skeuomorphic icon grids and Android’s fragmented manufacturer skins. The user experience was praised by reviewers as distinctive and fluid; Windows Phone 7 was widely considered a genuinely good mobile operating system design at launch. Read more

Google Introduces Instant Search

4 minute read

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Google launched Instant Search on September 8, 2010, announced by Marissa Mayer (VP of Search Products and User Experience) at a San Francisco press event. The feature updated search results dynamically as users typed each character, with results appearing typically after 2–3 characters without requiring the user to press Enter or click Search. The visual effect was a continuously changing results page driven by AJAX (XMLHttpRequest calls returning JSON/HTML partial updates) — the same technique that had enabled Gmail’s interface in 2004, but applied to search at much greater scale. Read more

Oracle Completes Major Changes Around Java and Sun

2 minute read

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Oracle completed its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems on January 27, 2010, nine months after announcing the deal in April 2009 (delayed by EU antitrust review). Sun’s portfolio included Java (language, JVM, and OpenJDK), MySQL (then the world’s most widely used open-source database), Solaris OS, ZFS, VirtualBox, and SPARC server hardware. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison framed the acquisition as adding strategic technology assets to Oracle’s enterprise software and database stack; the most commercially sensitive asset was Java, given its ubiquity in enterprise applications, Android’s toolchain, and university education — and Oracle’s pending legal strategy. Read more

JavaScript Is Growing Up

3 minute read

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JavaScript once felt like the language used for small tricks inside a web page — validate a form, open a popup, change an image on hover. The serious programming happened on the server. JavaScript was often treated as a detail that backend developers delegated to someone else, or worked around entirely. Read more

Node.js Gains Attention as Server-Side JavaScript

3 minute read

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Ryan Dahl created Node.js and first presented it at JSConf EU on November 8, 2009, releasing version 0.1.100 that evening. By mid-2010, it had attracted significant developer attention following the release of Express.js (the first major web framework for Node, June 2010) and the creation of npm (Node Package Manager, January 2010) by Isaac Schlueter. Node 0.2 shipped in August 2010, stabilizing the API enough for production experiments. Microsoft, Joyent (which hired Dahl and was paying for the project), and Heroku were all actively supporting or evaluating Node deployments by late 2010. Read more

Before Likes Became Likes

18 minute read

Published:

Long before every platform put a heart, thumb, star, flame, clap, or reaction button under everything we wrote, people were already doing the same emotional mathematics: who liked this, who agreed, who noticed, who said something, and who said something but did not press the button. Read more

C Is a Manual Transmission

8 minute read

Published:

Years ago, I tried to explain the difference between C and Java with cars. C, I wrote, was like driving a manual transmission. Java was like driving an automatic. The comparison was not academically complete. It was not supposed to be. It was the kind of explanation you give when you have spent enough time with both languages to stop thinking only about syntax and start thinking about how they feel. Read more

The Day Everyone Became a Manager

5 minute read

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There are many ways to become a manager: promotion, experience, performance, politics, seniority, a carefully planned career path. And then there is the method we discovered one day at a small company — everyone above you disappears. Read more

The Gaming PC I Would Build in 2010

3 minute read

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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2010, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more

The Modem Restart That Gave Me More Upload Speed

12 minute read

Published:

There was a period when internet problems were not background annoyances. They were events. You noticed every kilobit, knew what speed you were supposed to have, knew what speed you actually had, stared at modem statistics, restarted hardware, and called customer support. And sometimes, after thirty minutes of explaining a technical problem, the recommended solution was the most universal instruction in the history of consumer electronics: turn it off and turn it on again. Read more

Apple Introduces the iPhone 4

4 minute read

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Apple announced the iPhone 4 at WWDC on June 7, 2010, with Steve Jobs calling the design the most beautiful thing Apple had ever made. It went on sale June 24 at $199 (16GB) and $299 (32GB) on two-year contracts. The phone replaced the iPhone 3GS’s plastic back with a glass-and-stainless-steel sandwich design: flat Corning Gorilla Glass on front and back, with a stainless-steel frame that doubled as the antenna system. The A4 processor — the same chip in the first iPad, manufactured by Samsung on a 45nm process — combined a 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU and PowerVR SGX535 GPU in Apple’s first in-house SoC design. Read more

Never Use a Floating-Point Loop Counter

6 minute read

Published:

There are programming mistakes you make once and remember forever. For me, one of them involved a for loop and a floating-point variable. Years ago, I wrote a very simple warning: do not use double or float as the loop variable, otherwise arithmetic may not behave the way you expect, and you may find yourself stuck halfway through the problem. The exact wording was a little dramatic. The lesson was not. Read more

The Algorithm for Asking Someone for Directions

7 minute read

Published:

There is a special kind of problem that exists only because you decided to think about it too much. Asking someone for directions is a good example. You are somewhere unfamiliar, you do not know where to go, and there are people around. The sensible solution is obvious: ask one of them. That should be the entire algorithm — input: lost person, process: ask nearby person, output: direction, complexity: almost constant. Read more

Google Open-Sources the VP8 Video Codec

2 minute read

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Google open-sourced the VP8 video codec on May 19, 2010 at Google I/O (May 19–20, 2010), alongside the announcement of the WebM media format, approximately three months after completing its $124.6 million acquisition of On2 Technologies (February 19, 2010). On2’s VP8 was the eighth-generation codec from the company; VP7 had been the video codec used in Skype calls. Google published the VP8 specification and reference encoder/decoder (libvpx) under a BSD-style license with an irrevocable royalty-free patent grant, making both the standard and the implementation free to use and implement without licensing fees or formal negotiations. WebM combined VP8 video with Vorbis audio (the royalty-free audio codec from Xiph.org) in a container derived from the Matroska (.mkv) container format, all under open, royalty-free terms. Mozilla, Google, and Opera committed immediately; Apple declined to add WebM to Safari, citing hardware H.264 decoder support in iOS devices and existing H.264 infrastructure; Microsoft announced it would support WebM in Internet Explorer 9 only if users installed the codec separately. Read more

The iPad And The Question Of What A Computer Is

3 minute read

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Apple announced the iPad on January 27, 2010 and began selling Wi-Fi models on April 3. The device starts at $499 for 16GB. It runs a version of iPhone OS 3.2 on an Apple A4 chip. It has a 9.7-inch multi-touch display at 1024×768 pixels. It has no camera, no USB port, no SD card slot, no Flash support. Applications are installed only through the App Store. Read more

Apple Releases the First iPad

3 minute read

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPad at a press event on January 27, 2010, introducing it as a device that filled “a third category between a laptop and a smartphone” for use cases including web browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, and e-books. The Wi-Fi-only models went on sale April 3, 2010; Wi-Fi + 3G models followed April 30, 2010. Pricing: $499 (16 GB Wi-Fi), $599 (32 GB), $629 (64 GB); Wi-Fi + AT&T 3G models added $130 to each tier. The 3G data plans were offered without contracts — $14.99/month for 250 MB or $29.99/month for unlimited, purchased directly from Apple — the first major smartphone-class device with month-to-month no-contract data. The iPad’s 9.7-inch IPS display at 1024×768 resolution (132 ppi) was the same aspect ratio as the original iPhone’s display but 7.8× larger in area. Apple’s A4 SoC (ARM Cortex-A8 at 1 GHz, PowerVR SGX535 GPU, 256 MB RAM) — designed by Apple’s chip team after its acquisition of PA Semi (April 2008, $278 million) — was the first chip Apple had designed in-house for a shipping product. The A4 was 9.56 mm thick, weighed 1.5 lb (Wi-Fi), achieved Apple’s claimed 10-hour battery life in typical use, and produced no audible fan noise (fanless thermal design inherited from iPhone). Read more

NVIDIA Announces Fermi GeForce GTX 480

4 minute read

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NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 480 on March 26, 2010 at $499, introducing the Fermi architecture (GF100 chip) as its first GPU designed explicitly to serve dual roles as a graphics processor and a general-purpose parallel computing platform. NVIDIA had first revealed Fermi at its GPU Technology Conference in September 2009 with a detailed architecture paper, generating anticipation for what appeared to be a significant compute-capability advance. The GF100 die was manufactured on TSMC’s 40nm process and contained 3.0 billion transistors across a 529 mm² die — more than double the GT200 chip (1.4 billion transistors, 470 mm²) used in the GTX 280 (2008). The GTX 480 shipped with 480 CUDA cores (15 Streaming Multiprocessors × 32 cores each) out of GF100’s full complement of 512 cores (16 SMs), with one SM disabled — a common yield management practice for complex dies. Each SM in Fermi was substantially redesigned from the GT200: it gained a configurable L1 cache (16 or 48 KB, shared with shared memory in a 48/16 or 16/48 KB split), connected to a 768 KB unified L2 cache shared across the entire chip — a conventional memory hierarchy absent from earlier CUDA architectures that had instead relied on purely programmer-managed shared memory and no L2. The GTX 480 offered 1.35 TFLOPS of single-precision and 168 GFLOPS of double-precision floating-point performance, with the 1:8 ratio between DP and SP reflecting a consumer-grade configuration (the professional Tesla C2050/C2070 cards, launched in 2010, offered 1:2 DP:SP ratio for scientific computing). Read more

The Browser Is Becoming A Platform

4 minute read

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For most of the web’s history, a browser was a program for reading documents. HTML was a document format. JavaScript was a scripting language for small interactive touches — form validation, a dropdown menu, an image that changes when you hover over it. Serious applications ran on the desktop. Read more

Microsoft Azure Becomes Commercially Available

1 minute read

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Microsoft Azure became commercially available in 2010, marking Microsoft’s serious entry into cloud computing as a public platform. At the time, the cloud conversation was often associated with Amazon Web Services and fast-moving startups. Azure showed that the shift was also becoming unavoidable for established enterprise software companies. Read more

Google Introduces the Nexus One

3 minute read

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Google unveiled the Nexus One at a press event on January 5, 2010, with the phone going on sale the same day at $179 with a T-Mobile contract or $529 unlocked — a price significantly higher than competitors expected from a carrier-free unlocked Android phone at the time. HTC manufactured the hardware; Google designed the software experience and sold the phone directly from google.com/phone without requiring a carrier store or contract. The phone ran Android 2.1 (Eclair) on a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 processor with 512MB RAM, a 3.7-inch 480×800 AMOLED display, and a 5MP camera. Read more

Google Public DNS Launches

4 minute read

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Google launched the public DNS resolvers at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 on December 3, 2009, offering a globally operated alternative to the DNS recursive resolvers that most users received automatically from their Internet Service Providers. DNS (Domain Name System) is the distributed hierarchical database that translates human-readable domain names like example.com into IP addresses that computers use for routing, resolving the mapping by querying a chain of authoritative name servers from the DNS root through top-level domain servers to the specific domain’s authoritative server, and caching responses to avoid repeated queries. Before Google Public DNS, the primary alternative to ISP DNS was OpenDNS (founded 2006, primary address 208.67.222.222), which offered faster resolution and optional content filtering but monetized NXDOMAIN responses (redirecting mistyped domain names to search/ad pages). ISP DNS resolvers varied dramatically in quality: some performed NXDOMAIN hijacking (redirecting failed domain lookups to ISP-branded search pages rather than returning NXDOMAIN responses), some had poor cache TTL compliance (serving stale records beyond their intended expiry), some lacked DNSSEC validation support, and many had higher latency than a globally anycast resolver could achieve. Google’s anycast deployment announced the same 8.8.8.8 IP address from data centers in multiple locations worldwide, routing each user’s query to the geographically or topologically nearest Google data center — reducing average query latency from typical ISP values of 30-60 ms to Google’s claimed 11-12 ms median. Read more

When Solid State Drives Start To Feel Real

4 minute read

Published:

Hard drives have always made computers feel mechanical. You can hear them spin up at startup, click during seeks, and spin down when idle. A significant part of the computer is electronic, but for decades storage has depended on a physical disk rotating at 5,400 or 7,200 RPM and a read/write head moving across its surface. The average seek time for a 7,200 RPM hard drive — the time required to physically position the head over the right track — is around 8–10 milliseconds. Read more

Google Announces the Go Programming Language

1 minute read

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Google announced Go as an open-source project on November 10, 2009, releasing the initial source code at golang.org. The language was created by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson — Pike and Thompson were the principal designers of Unix at Bell Labs in 1969 and Plan 9, and had strong opinions about language design informed by decades of systems programming. The project began September 21, 2007 as an internal Google effort motivated by frustration with C++ compilation times: a large Google service could take 30–45 minutes to compile in C++, making development iteration slow and build farms expensive. Go targeted C++-scale systems programming with compilation speeds measured in seconds. Read more

Windows 7 Is Released

3 minute read

Published:

Microsoft released Windows 7 on October 22, 2009, at retail prices of $119.99 (Home Premium), $199.99 (Professional), and $219.99 (Ultimate) — with launch edition upgrade pricing of $49.99 for Home Premium available through the summer pre-sale. Windows 7 RTM (Release to Manufacturing) had been signed off on July 22, 2009 as build 7600.16385, available to OEM partners in August and to MSDN/TechNet subscribers before the retail launch. The release came 34 months after Windows Vista’s consumer release (January 30, 2007), which had been criticized heavily: Vista’s User Account Control dialog appeared 4–6 times during a typical session (Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads dramatized this repeatedly), hardware requirements were high (1 GB RAM minimum, 2 GB practical), driver compatibility was poor at launch (printer and scanner drivers in particular broke badly), and early versions had performance regressions on the hardware typical at the time of release. Windows 7 kept Vista’s underlying architecture — NT 6.1 kernel (Vista was NT 6.0), WDDM 1.1 graphics driver model, BitLocker, Windows Defender — but fixed the UAC behavior to prompt far less frequently (background configuration changes by administrators no longer triggered prompts), reduced minimum memory requirements, and benefited from three years of Vista driver maturation in the hardware ecosystem. Read more

Windows 7 Reaches RTM

4 minute read

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Windows 7 reached RTM (Release to Manufacturing) on July 22, 2009, with build 7600.16385 signed as the final code. TechNet and MSDN subscribers could download the RTM build on August 6; OEM distribution — Dell, HP, Lenovo, Toshiba, and others receiving the build to preinstall on new PCs — began August 24. The public retail launch was October 22, 2009, with Home Premium priced at $119.99 upgrade / $199.99 full, Professional at $199.99 upgrade / $299.99 full. Microsoft also introduced a temporary three-license “Family Pack” at $149.99 for Home Premium to address household multi-PC licensing. Read more

Snow Leopard Reaches Gold Master Development

1 minute read

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Mac OS X Snow Leopard reached its gold master stage in 2009, signaling that Apple’s next Mac operating system was ready for final release. Unlike many operating-system launches, Snow Leopard was not remembered mainly for dramatic visual changes. Its reputation came from refinement. Read more

The Comfort Of Long Forum Conversations

4 minute read

Published:

Stack Overflow launched last September and has grown quickly. It does something that older technical forums often failed at: it surfaces the best answer efficiently, rewards clarity, and is designed for people who want a fast, correct response. I use it. It is genuinely useful. Read more

Google Chrome OS Is Publicly Announced

4 minute read

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Google publicly announced Chrome OS in a blog post on July 7, 2009, authored by Sundar Pichai (VP of Product Management) and Linus Upson (Engineering Director). The announcement came ten months after Google Chrome browser launched on September 2, 2008 — the OS would be the browser made into a full operating system. The post framed the project around the 2009 netbook market: millions of consumers were buying $299–$399 Windows XP or Windows 7 Starter laptops (Acer Aspire One, ASUS Eee PC) that were slow, prone to malware, and required constant maintenance. Chrome OS targeted that segment directly with a Linux-kernel OS in which the Chrome browser was the only execution environment — no native app installation, no file system users needed to manage. Read more

Microsoft Launches the Bing Search Engine

3 minute read

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Microsoft launched Bing on June 3, 2009 — replacing Live Search, which had itself replaced MSN Search in 2006. CEO Steve Ballmer had positioned it as a “decision engine” rather than a search engine, emphasizing structured results for specific high-value query categories: flight prices and schedules (Farecast acquisition, 2008), restaurant and business reviews, health conditions and drug information, and shopping comparison. The homepage featured a rotating scenic background photograph with mouse-over hotspots linking to related searches — a deliberate visual departure from Google’s sparse interface. Read more

Google Wave Is Revealed

2 minute read

Published:

Google revealed Wave at Google I/O on May 27–28, 2009, in an 80-minute live demo by Lars Rasmussen — the same engineer who had previously co-created Google Maps with his brother Jens at Where 2 Technologies before Google acquired it in 2004. A “wave” was a hybrid object combining a shared document, a conversation thread, and a live collaboration session. Every participant saw other users’ keystrokes appear character by character in real time as they typed, rather than waiting for messages to be sent. Waves were nestled: sub-conversations (wavelets) could branch inside a parent wave, and any participant could edit any message in the conversation’s history, unlike email’s immutable sent-message model. Read more

Oracle Announces Its Plan to Acquire Sun Microsystems

1 minute read

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Oracle announced its plan to acquire Sun Microsystems in 2009, and the news immediately felt larger than a normal enterprise acquisition. Sun had shaped major parts of computing culture: Java, Solaris, SPARC, NFS, workstations, servers, and important open-source projects all carried Sun’s influence. Read more

The Web Is Moving Into Our Pockets

3 minute read

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Browsing the web on a phone used to mean visiting a stripped-down WAP page — minimal text, no images, a navigation designed around a numeric keypad. That was the mobile web until recently: a simplified shadow of the real internet, tolerated rather than enjoyed. Read more

Intel Launches Xeon 5500 Nehalem-EP

3 minute read

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Intel launched the Xeon 5500 series (Nehalem-EP) on March 30, 2009, in a joint announcement with HP and Dell at their respective server events. The lineup ran from the Xeon E5504 (4 cores, 2.0 GHz, $188) to the Xeon X5570 (4 cores, 2.93 GHz, 8MB L3, $1,386), manufactured on Intel’s 45nm High-K metal-gate process. Nehalem-EP supported two-socket configurations — the “EP” designation indicated dual-processor capable — with quad-channel DDR3 memory per socket (up to 144GB per socket at launch). Read more

WhatsApp Is Founded

3 minute read

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Jan Koum and Brian Acton incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California on February 24, 2009. Both had recently left Yahoo — Koum after nine years as an infrastructure engineer, Acton after eleven years in various engineering and product roles. They had applied to Facebook in 2009 and been rejected. Koum’s initial concept was for an app that would show a short status beside each contact in your address book — not messaging, but presence: “at the gym,” “on a call,” “battery low.” Read more

Learning From Stack Overflow

3 minute read

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A new programming question-and-answer site called Stack Overflow has become one of the places I enjoy visiting. The idea is simple. A programmer asks a clear question. Other programmers answer it. Useful answers move upward through voting, and the discussion stays focused on solving the problem. This sounds small, but it feels different from searching through long forum threads. Read more

Windows 7 Beta Shows a New Direction for Microsoft

1 minute read

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Microsoft released the Windows 7 public beta on January 9, 2009 at CES, with Steve Ballmer announcing it on stage. Build 7000 downloaded 2.5 million times in the first week before Microsoft throttled access. The release came less than two years after Windows Vista’s January 30, 2007 launch, making it one of the fastest major Windows release cycles, driven by the need to recover from Vista’s poor reception: Vista’s UAC (User Account Control) generated constant prompts for routine tasks, it required 2+ GB RAM to run smoothly on hardware where XP used 512 MB, and driver compatibility failures at launch had left many users unable to use printers, scanners, and peripherals. Read more

Cloud Computing Becomes a Serious Industry Strategy

1 minute read

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By 2008, cloud computing had moved from a curious phrase into a serious industry strategy. The idea was still surrounded by marketing language, but the underlying shift was real: companies were beginning to treat computing resources as services that could be provisioned, scaled, and billed more flexibly than traditional infrastructure. Read more

Cloud Computing Still Feels Like A Strange Name

3 minute read

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The phrase “cloud computing” is appearing more often in December 2008, and I am still not sure I like the name. The cloud usually means somebody else’s computers, located somewhere I cannot see, providing storage or processing through a network connection. Calling this a cloud does not add clarity — it is a metaphor that obscures the physical infrastructure behind the word. Read more

Google Releases Android Source Code

1 minute read

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Google released the Android source code in 2008, shortly after the first commercial Android phone reached the market. The release mattered because Android was not presented only as a product; it was also framed as a platform that manufacturers, developers, and the wider industry could build around. Read more

Android 1.0 Arrives

2 minute read

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Android 1.0 launched on October 22, 2008 with the T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream) — the first commercial Android device, sold at $179 with a two-year T-Mobile contract or $399 unlocked. The hardware was built around a Qualcomm MSM7201A processor at 528 MHz with 192 MB RAM and 256 MB internal storage, a 3.17-inch 320×480 touchscreen, and a physical QWERTY keyboard that slid out from beneath the display (Android 1.0 had no virtual keyboard). The Android Market launched the same day with approximately 50 available applications, using a 70/30 revenue split (developer/Google) matching the App Store’s model. Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube, and Google Talk were preinstalled, with native Google Calendar and Contacts sync through Google’s servers. Read more

A Personal Website Feels Like A Notebook

5 minute read

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A personal website is not a very practical object. It needs time and occasional maintenance. Pages break. Links go dead. Designs become outdated. Sometimes you spend an hour on a change that almost nobody will notice. None of this is a good use of an evening, rationally speaking. Read more

Google Launches the Chrome Browser

1 minute read

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Google launched Chrome in 2008 into a browser market that already seemed crowded. Internet Explorer still held enormous share, Firefox had become the favorite of many power users, and Safari was important on Apple’s platforms. Chrome’s argument was different: the browser was no longer just a document viewer. It was becoming the runtime for applications. Read more

Intel Introduces the First Mainstream SSDs

2 minute read

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Intel announced the X25-M (M for Mainstream) solid-state drive in August 2008, with retail availability beginning in September 2008 at $595 for 80GB and $945 for 160GB. The X25-M used 50nm multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash manufactured by the Intel-Micron joint venture IMFT (IM Flash Technologies), with an Intel-designed proprietary controller. Specifications: sequential read 250 MB/s, sequential write 70 MB/s, and — most significantly — 35,000 random 4KB read IOPS. Contemporary 7,200 RPM hard drives delivered approximately 80–120 MB/s sequential with about 80–100 random IOPS, constrained by the physical seek time (averaging 8–12 milliseconds) required to move the read head to a new location. The SSD’s NAND flash had no moving parts; a read operation completed in microseconds rather than milliseconds, making the 35,000 IOPS figure roughly 400× better than HDD random access. Read more

Apple Opens the App Store

4 minute read

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Apple opened the iPhone App Store on July 10, 2008 alongside iPhone OS 2.0, launching with approximately 500 applications — roughly 200 free and 300 paid — after Apple had announced the iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit) on March 6, 2008. The announcement reversed Steve Jobs’s original iPhone software strategy: at iPhone’s launch on January 9, 2007, Jobs had said the way to deliver third-party applications on iPhone was through web apps accessed in Safari, stating “the full Safari engine is inside of iPhone, and it runs on the Objective-C run-time, so you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps.” Developer community pressure and the commercial opportunity of a native application platform led Apple to reverse course; the SDK was announced eight months after the original iPhone launch. The iPhone OS 2.0 SDK required Xcode (Mac only) and used Objective-C with Apple’s UIKit framework — the same framework used for Apple’s own iPhone applications — giving third-party developers access to the same UI components, animation APIs, multitouch gesture recognizers, and hardware interfaces (camera, accelerometer, GPS, Bluetooth) that Apple’s own engineers used. Apple provided code signing certificates through its iPhone Developer Program ($99/year for individuals, $299/year for enterprise), and all App Store applications had to pass Apple’s review process before being listed — the first time a mobile platform had implemented systematic pre-distribution review of applications. Read more

Git And The Strange Idea Of Distributed Version Control

3 minute read

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Version control becomes important the first time a project grows large enough that “final”, “final2”, and “really-final” stop being funny file names. A proper system keeps the history of changes and allows us to return to an older version when something goes wrong. Read more

Mozilla Releases Firefox 3

3 minute read

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Mozilla released Firefox 3 on June 17, 2008, accompanied by a “Download Day” campaign that set a Guinness World Record for most software downloads in a single 24-hour period: 8,002,530 downloads. Firefox 3 had been in development for nearly two years since Firefox 2 shipped in October 2006 and incorporated a rebuilt Gecko 1.9 rendering engine with full compliance for CSS 2.1, SVG, and Canvas, a new Places bookmarking system storing history and bookmarks in SQLite rather than flat MRK files, and the Awesome Bar (formally the Location Bar) — an autocomplete field that searched URLs, page titles, and tags simultaneously, presenting results by frecency (a combination of frequency and recency) rather than only alphabetically. Read more

Multi-Function Display

3 minute read

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A Multi-Function Display, usually called an MFD, is one of the cockpit systems that interests me because it brings many different kinds of information onto a single screen. Instead of giving every function its own instrument, the display can change according to what the pilot needs at that moment. Read more

Microsoft Releases Windows XP Service Pack 3

3 minute read

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Microsoft released Windows XP Service Pack 3 on May 6, 2008 via Windows Update — more than six and a half years after Windows XP RTM (released to manufacturing August 24, 2001) and fifteen months after Windows Vista had launched on January 30, 2007. SP3 bundled approximately 1,174 previously released hotfixes and security patches, including every update released from Windows XP SP2 (August 10, 2004) through early 2008. Several capabilities from Vista and the Windows Server 2008 codebase were backported: Network Access Protection (NAP) client support, which allowed enterprise networks to verify the security state of connecting machines and deny access to unpatched systems; Black Hole Router Detection, improving TCP reliability on networks with Path MTU Discovery problems; and updated cryptographic components including support for later TLS cipher suites. SP3 did not include Internet Explorer 7 (available separately since October 2006) or Windows Media Player 11 (available separately since November 2006) as mandatory updates, nor did it add Vista’s visual shell features — Aero Glass, the Sidebar, or User Account Control. This was by design: SP3 was a security and reliability update for the existing XP user base, not an attempt to bridge to Vista’s feature set. The service pack weighed approximately 316 MB as a standalone download, making it one of the largest service packs Microsoft had released. Read more

Google App Engine Opens to Developers

3 minute read

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Google announced App Engine on April 7, 2008, opening a preview beta limited to 10,000 developers who could apply for access. The initial release supported Python 2.5 applications running in a sandboxed runtime with specific API access: the Datastore (a schemaless distributed database built on Google’s Bigtable), Memcache (distributed caching), URLFetch (for making HTTP requests to external services), and the Users service (authenticating users via Google accounts). Applications could not open raw sockets, write to the local filesystem, or spawn threads — restrictions that forced a specific application architecture while enabling Google to run many customers on the same underlying machines without isolation failures. Read more

Open Source Changed How I Learn

4 minute read

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One of the nicest things about programming is that sometimes we can look inside the thing we use. With a textbook example, the code exists to illustrate a concept and has been cleaned and simplified for that purpose. With open-source software, the code exists to solve a real problem and carries the marks of that: old decisions left in place because changing them is risky, variable names chosen in 2003 that nobody has renamed since, workarounds for bugs in other people’s software, patches contributed by people who never met each other. Read more

Apple Releases the iPhone SDK

3 minute read

Published:

Apple released the iPhone SDK on March 6, 2008, at a press event where Steve Jobs presented it alongside the announcement of the App Store. The original iPhone had launched in June 2007 with no SDK; Jobs had told developers at WWDC 2007 that the way to build iPhone applications was to create web apps in Safari, arguing that iPhone’s full Safari browser meant web apps could be “as good as any native application.” Third-party developers found this inadequate — web apps had no access to the camera, microphone, accelerometer, GPS, contacts, or phone, and had no presence on the home screen. Read more

Microsoft Opens More of Its Server Protocol Documentation

1 minute read

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On February 21, 2008, Microsoft announced that it would publish technical specifications for more than 30,000 pages of Windows client and server protocol documentation, committing to make these specifications freely available online. The announcement directly responded to the European Commission’s 2004 antitrust ruling, which had ordered Microsoft to provide “complete and accurate” interoperability documentation for its server protocols to allow competing server and workgroup software to interoperate with Windows clients. Microsoft had been slow to comply: the Commission fined Microsoft €280.5 million in July 2006 and €899 million in February 2008 for insufficient compliance — the €899 million fine was one of the largest EU antitrust penalties at the time, announced the same week as the documentation commitment. Read more

Netbooks And The Return Of The Small Computer

3 minute read

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Personal computers have spent most of their history growing more powerful. Faster processors, larger screens, more RAM, stronger graphics: these improvements have been easy to understand and easy to market. The ASUS Eee PC, which launched in October 2007 at $299, is suggesting that another direction can be valuable: a computer that becomes useful by becoming smaller, cheaper, and simpler. Read more

MacBook Air Redefines the Thin Laptop

4 minute read

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Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air at Macworld on January 15, 2008, sliding it out of a manila envelope to illustrate its thinness. The MacBook Air was 0.16 inches at its thinnest edge and 0.76 inches at its thickest, 3 lb (1.36 kg), with a 13.3-inch 1280×800 display. It launched at $1,799 with a 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (a custom LV — low voltage — version using a 45nm die in a smaller package than standard laptops), 2GB RAM soldered to the board, an 80GB 4200 RPM PATA hard drive, or optionally a 64GB SSD for $999 more. Ports: one USB-A, one Micro-DVI, one 3.5mm headphone jack. No Ethernet, no optical drive, no removable battery. Read more

Amazon Expands the Idea of Cloud Computing

4 minute read

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Amazon Web Services launched Amazon S3 on March 14, 2006 ($0.15 per GB stored, $0.20 per GB transferred out) and EC2 public beta on October 25, 2006, at $0.10/hour for the smallest (m1.small: 1 vCPU, 1.7 GB RAM) through $0.80/hour for m1.xlarge (4 vCPUs, 15 GB RAM). Both ran on Xen hypervisors in Amazon’s data centers, exposing infrastructure that Amazon had built for its own retail operations. In November 2007, Amazon added SimpleDB (a schemaless, eventually-consistent key-value store) as AWS’s first managed database service. By the end of 2007, S3 was storing tens of billions of objects, and notable startups including Dropbox (which launched in April 2007 with S3 as its storage backend), SmugMug, Reddit, and Animoto had built their core infrastructure on AWS. Read more

Google Announces Android

1 minute read

Published:

Google announced Android in 2007 as part of the Open Handset Alliance, and the announcement immediately changed the shape of the mobile software conversation. The iPhone had already shown that the phone could become a general-purpose computing device. Android suggested that this new world would not belong to a single hardware maker or a single closed ecosystem. Read more

Ubuntu 7.10 Expands Desktop Linux

3 minute read

Published:

Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” was released on October 18, 2007, shipping Compiz desktop compositing effects enabled by default for systems with supported graphics hardware — the first Ubuntu release to make GPU-accelerated desktop effects standard rather than optional. Compiz on Gutsy required a compatible NVIDIA or ATI driver; the Restricted Drivers Manager (introduced in Ubuntu 7.04) simplified installing these proprietary drivers through a GUI dialog, eliminating the manual xorg.conf editing that had previously required technical knowledge. With Compiz enabled, Ubuntu 7.10 offered the rotating desktop cube, wobbly window animations, and the Expo plugin showing all workspaces simultaneously — effects that had attracted significant attention when Novell demonstrated them via Xgl in early 2006. Read more

Wikipedia And The Changing Habit Of Looking Things Up

3 minute read

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When I was younger, looking something up usually meant finding the right book. A home encyclopedia — Britannica, Larousse, or whatever the household owned — had weight, order, and roughly 120,000 articles. If the information was not there, the search had to continue elsewhere. The library. A teacher. A more specialized reference. Read more

Apple Introduces the iPod Touch

3 minute read

Published:

Apple announced the iPod touch at “The Beat Goes On” event on September 5, 2007, with the first units available September 14, 2007 at $299 (8 GB) and $399 (16 GB). The iPod touch used the same Samsung S5L8900 ARM1176JZF-S processor at 412 MHz, the same 3.5-inch 320×480 multi-touch display, and the same Safari mobile browser as the original iPhone (launched June 29, 2007), but omitted the cellular radio, microphone (added in the 2nd generation September 2008), earpiece speaker, camera (first appeared in 4th generation September 2010), and GPS. Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) was retained, enabling Safari, YouTube, Google Maps, and the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store — Apple’s feature allowing direct music purchase over Wi-Fi without connecting to a computer, first enabled on iPod touch at launch. The device was thinner than the iPhone at 8.0 mm versus 11.6 mm, because the cellular hardware occupied a significant portion of the iPhone’s internal volume. The iPod classic (announced the same day) continued as a hard drive-based music player, and a new thinner iPod nano was also announced, but the iPod touch represented Apple’s bet that the touchscreen interface would replace the click-wheel-and-physical-button paradigm for the premium iPod. Read more

VMware Fusion Brings Virtualization to Intel Macs

1 minute read

Published:

VMware Fusion brought VMware’s virtualization experience to Intel-based Macs in 2007, arriving at a moment when the Mac platform was changing quickly. Apple’s move from PowerPC to Intel processors made it far easier to run x86 operating systems on Mac hardware, and virtualization turned that capability into a practical daily workflow. Read more

Tactical Environment Software

4 minute read

Published:

Tactical environment software is an interesting example of software that must work with a large amount of changing information. In a military or operational environment, a user may need maps, weather data, positions, communication information, surveillance reports, and mission plans at the same time. The important problem is not only collecting this information. It is presenting the right part of it clearly enough to support a decision. Read more

Intel and the Industry Push Multi-Core Computing

2 minute read

Published:

Intel’s Core 2 Duo launched July 27, 2006, marking the mainstream shift to dual-core x86 desktop processors. By mid-2007, Intel expanded to quad-core with the Core 2 Quad Q6600 (January 2007, $851 initially, reduced to $266 by July 2007) and the Core 2 Extreme QX6850 at 3.0 GHz ($999 at launch, July 2007). AMD had been first to mainstream dual-core with the Athlon 64 X2 in May 2005, but Intel’s Core 2 microarchitecture (Conroe, 65nm) reclaimed performance leadership, and the move to quad-core in 2007 extended Intel’s lead as AMD’s Phenom quad-core didn’t ship until November 2007. The clock-frequency race that had defined the PC industry since the 1980s had effectively ended: Intel’s Pentium 4 Prescott (90nm, 2004) reached 3.8 GHz but generated over 100 watts of heat in high-performance configurations, making 4+ GHz architecturally untenable. Adding cores was the only remaining path to increased throughput within thermal limits — Steve Ballmer summarized this publicly: “core counts will double every two years” in place of clock frequency. Read more

The Phone Is Becoming a Computer

4 minute read

Published:

Two days ago, Apple began selling the iPhone in the United States. I have been reading everything written about it and trying to understand whether this is a genuinely different kind of device or only a well-designed version of things that already existed. Read more

The First iPhone Goes on Sale

4 minute read

Published:

The first iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007 at 6 PM local time in each timezone. Steve Jobs had introduced it at Macworld on January 9, 2007, describing it as “an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator” — three products in one. The original iPhone had a 3.5-inch 320×480 capacitive multi-touch screen (163 PPI), a 2MP camera, Samsung-manufactured ARM 11 processor running at 412 MHz, 128MB RAM, and either 4GB or 8GB of storage, priced at $499 and $599 respectively on a two-year AT&T exclusive contract. AT&T was the only US carrier; GSM-only, operating on EDGE (2.5G) data rather than 3G. Read more

Google Street View Appears

4 minute read

Published:

Google launched Street View on May 25, 2007 with panoramic street-level imagery from five US cities: San Francisco, New York City, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver. The feature integrated into Google Maps as an alternative to the top-down satellite/map view, allowing users to navigate a 360-degree photograph taken from street level at specific addresses. The initial imagery was captured using cars equipped with camera systems from Immersive Media — their Dodeca 2360 spherical camera array captured images in 11 directions simultaneously — combined with GPS, inertial measurement units, and laser rangefinders to record the precise position and orientation of each photograph. Processing the raw camera output into Street View panoramas required multiple pipeline stages: synchronizing images from multiple cameras taken at slightly different times, lens distortion correction, color calibration across cameras, photographic stitching into equirectangular panoramas (2D projections of the full sphere), GPS/IMU fusion to place each panorama at an accurate geographic coordinate, and compression for web delivery. The initial Street View cars were Chevrolet Cobalt sedans with the camera assembly mounted on the roof; Google subsequently developed its own Street View camera generations, reaching 15 cameras plus additional sensors by later versions. Read more

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Is Released

1 minute read

Published:

Ubuntu 7.04, known as Feisty Fawn, was released in April 2007 during a period when desktop Linux was becoming more approachable for curious PC users. Ubuntu had already built a reputation for taking Debian’s strengths and presenting them through a friendlier installation and update experience. Feisty continued that work. Read more

Adobe Announces Creative Suite 3

1 minute read

Published:

Adobe announced Creative Suite 3 in 2007, and the release represented more than another bundle of design applications. It arrived at a moment when print design, web design, photography, video, and interactive media were converging inside the same professional workflows. Designers increasingly needed to move between formats rather than live inside one tool. Read more

History of Early Personal Computers and Gaming Consoles

5 minute read

Published:

When I look at today’s computers, it is easy to forget how young personal computing really is. Many of the machines that helped shape home computing and video games appeared only a few decades ago. They had tiny amounts of memory and very limited processors compared with modern systems, but they created a new relationship between people and computers. Read more

Virtualization Becomes a Mainstream PC Topic

2 minute read

Published:

Intel shipped VT-x (Vanderpool Technology) in mainstream processors beginning with the Pentium 4 600 series in June 2005, and AMD shipped AMD-V (Pacifica) with Athlon 64 X2 processors beginning in May 2006. By February 2007, both Intel Core 2 and AMD Athlon 64 processors sold in standard retail configurations included hardware virtualization support, making the technology available to any developer or power user who bought a modern PC. Before hardware virtualization, VMware had used binary translation — rewriting x86 privileged instructions in real time to safe equivalents — and achieved surprisingly good performance, but at significant engineering complexity. Intel VT-x and AMD-V added a new CPU execution mode (VMX/SVM mode) in which the hypervisor ran at a higher privilege level than ring 0, so guest OS code could execute native privileged instructions that would trap to the hypervisor for emulation rather than causing system failures. Read more

Learning Linux From A Live CD

3 minute read

Published:

Trying another operating system used to feel like a significant commitment. Installing it meant repartitioning a drive, potentially overwriting the existing system, configuring a bootloader, and accepting some risk that something would go wrong. For a curious user, the barrier was technical and emotional at once. Read more

Windows Vista Reaches Consumers

2 minute read

Published:

Windows Vista launched at retail for consumers on January 30, 2007, following a November 30, 2006 release for volume-license business customers. Retail editions: Home Basic ($199 upgrade), Home Premium ($239 upgrade), Business ($299 upgrade), and Ultimate ($399 upgrade). Vista “Premium Ready” hardware required a 1 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, 128 MB dedicated VRAM, and a DirectX 9-capable GPU with WDDM driver support for Aero Glass transparency effects — specifications that exceeded the average PC sold in 2005–2006, when many machines shipped with 512 MB RAM and integrated graphics. Read more

AMD Moves Desktop Processors to 65 Nanometers

2 minute read

Published:

AMD’s move to 65 nanometer desktop processors in 2006 was not the kind of launch that instantly changed what users saw on the screen. There was no new operating system, no dramatic interface, and no single feature that made a computer feel transformed overnight. Still, process transitions like this are part of the quiet machinery behind every generation of faster and more efficient hardware. Read more

The Last Days Of The Floppy Disk

3 minute read

Published:

For most of my computing life, the floppy disk was one of the most normal objects in the room. Documents, homework, small programs, configuration files: these moved between computers on a square piece of plastic small enough to disappear into a pocket. The 1.44 MB capacity of the 3.5-inch high-density disk — the format that became standard in 1987 — felt reasonable because many of the things we wanted to move were small enough to fit. Read more

Windows Vista Launches for Business Customers

2 minute read

Published:

Microsoft released Windows Vista to volume-license business customers on November 30, 2006 (build 6000.16386 RTM), allowing enterprises to begin testing and deployment before the January 30, 2007 retail consumer launch. The release concluded a five-year development cycle that began as “Longhorn” in 2001 and was reset in August 2004 after the WinFS transactional filesystem — intended to make all Windows data addressable through a unified query interface — proved undeliverable. The reset moved Vista’s codebase onto Windows Server 2003 SP1, trading the ambitious WinFS vision for a more conservative but shippable release. Read more

Firefox 2 Arrives

4 minute read

Published:

Mozilla released Firefox 2 on October 24, 2006, approximately two years after Firefox 1.0 (November 9, 2004) and one year after Firefox 1.5 (November 29, 2005). Firefox 2 ran on the Gecko 1.8.1 rendering engine and introduced features that addressed the practical experience of heavy browser users: session restore (automatically recovering all open tabs after a browser crash, the first major browser to offer this as a built-in feature), inline spell checking for text fields and text areas using the same red-underline convention as desktop word processors (checking as users typed in web forms and comment boxes), a redesigned tab bar with a close button on each individual tab (earlier Firefox versions had a single close button at the far right of the tab bar, requiring users to select a tab before closing it), a search plugins list in the search box dropdown allowing one-click installation of new search engines from any website, and enhanced phishing protection using Google’s Safe Browsing API to warn users before loading known phishing URLs. The anti-phishing feature was significant: IE 7 (released October 18, 2006, just six days before Firefox 2) also added phishing filtering as a response to the same threat, revealing that both browsers were tracking the same security problem simultaneously. Read more

Facebook Opens Registration Beyond Colleges

2 minute read

Published:

Facebook opened registration to anyone aged 13 or older with a valid email address on September 26, 2006. At that moment, the service had approximately 9.5 million registered users, almost entirely university and high school students. Myspace had approximately 100 million registered users at the same time and was the dominant social network; Friendster had peaked and was declining; LinkedIn served professionals. The open-registration decision came three weeks after a product change that would define Facebook’s growth: the News Feed, launched September 5, 2006, which displayed a continuous stream of friends’ activity (status updates, photo uploads, relationship changes, group joins) on the home page — replacing the model of navigating to individual profiles to discover activity. Read more

SPEC CPU2006 Redefines Processor Benchmarking

4 minute read

Published:

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) released SPEC CPU2006 in August 2006, replacing SPEC CPU2000 (released August 2000). The six-year gap between releases reflected how dramatically hardware had changed: CPU2000’s workloads fit comfortably in cache and DRAM configurations typical of 2000, making results in 2006 more reflective of L2 cache performance and compiler optimization than real-world application behavior. CPU2006 contained two suites: CINT2006 (12 integer workloads) and CFP2006 (17 floating-point workloads), all substantial programs compiled from source and run to completion rather than synthetic microbenchmarks. Workloads included gcc (compiler), bzip2 (compression), h264ref (H.264 video encoding), perlbench (Perl interpreter), namd (molecular dynamics simulation), milc (quantum chromodynamics lattice simulation), and astar (path-finding algorithm) — programs with diverse memory access patterns and instruction mix characteristics. Read more

RSS And The Quiet Pleasure Of Following The Web

3 minute read

Published:

The web is becoming larger faster than anyone can follow by visiting sites individually. Technorati, which tracks blog growth, estimates that a new blog is created every second in 2006 and that the blogosphere doubles roughly every six months. Technology sites, news pages, personal journals, project logs: the volume is growing faster than reading time. Read more

Intel Launches the Core 2 Duo

4 minute read

Published:

Intel launched the Core 2 Duo desktop processor family on July 27, 2006 under the codename Conroe, simultaneously releasing the Core 2 Extreme X6800 ($999, 2.93 GHz), Core 2 Duo E6700 ($530, 2.67 GHz), E6600 ($316, 2.4 GHz), and E6400 ($224, 2.13 GHz). The launch ended Intel’s four-year pursuit of the NetBurst microarchitecture that had defined Pentium 4 (launched November 2000) and Pentium D (launched May 2005). NetBurst had relied on very long pipeline stages — up to 31 stages in Prescott (2004) — to achieve high clock frequencies, reaching 3.8 GHz, but the deep pipeline imposed penalties on branch mispredictions, reduced instructions-per-clock efficiency, and generated substantial heat: Prescott-based Pentium 4 chips at 3.6–3.8 GHz consumed 84–115W TDP and required elaborate cooling solutions. Intel’s own engineers had begun calling the Prescott thermal situation “the burning building.” The Core microarchitecture Intel introduced in Core 2 derived instead from the Pentium M (Banias/Dothan) lineage — the laptop processor Intel Israel had designed in 2003 based on the P6 architecture of the Pentium Pro (1995) and Pentium III. Core used a 14-stage pipeline (versus Prescott’s 31), executed up to 4 instructions per clock cycle (versus Pentium 4’s 3-wide issue), and shared a single 4 MB L2 cache between both cores (versus the Pentium D’s two separate L2 caches with no direct inter-core communication path). The 65nm manufacturing process (Intel P1264 node) allowed higher transistor density and lower leakage versus the previous 90nm Prescott. Read more

Blu-ray Enters the Consumer Market

3 minute read

Published:

Blu-ray Disc reached consumers on June 20, 2006, when Samsung launched the BD-P1000 player in the United States at $999. Sony, Pioneer, and Panasonic shipped additional players in July and August 2006, priced between $799 and $1,299. Blu-ray’s 405nm blue-violet laser (from which the format took its name) allowed the pit size on disc to shrink to 0.32 micrometers, versus 0.74 micrometers for DVD’s 650nm red laser — producing 25 GB per layer versus DVD’s 4.7 GB. Dual-layer Blu-ray stored 50 GB, enabling 1080p video at 40+ Mbps bitrates alongside lossless Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio tracks, compared to DVD’s standard 9 Mbps MPEG-2 video. Read more

The Web Is Becoming More Social

4 minute read

Published:

The web feels different lately. A few years ago, most websites were closer to digital brochures. You visited, read something, and left. The website belonged to whoever built it, and visitors were an audience, not participants. Read more

Windows Vista Beta 2 Reaches the Public

2 minute read

Published:

Windows Vista Beta 2 reached a broad public audience in 2006 and gave many PC users their first serious look at Microsoft’s next desktop operating system. After the long life of Windows XP, expectations were high. Vista promised a more modern interface, stronger security boundaries, better search, and a platform prepared for newer hardware. Read more

Apple Introduces Boot Camp for Intel Macs

3 minute read

Published:

Apple released Boot Camp as a public beta on April 5, 2006, three months after the first Intel Macs shipped in January 2006. The software was a free download including a startup disk partition assistant, a Windows driver disc creator (packaging Apple’s drivers for the GPU, audio, keyboard, trackpad, iSight camera, and Bluetooth onto a CD for installation inside Windows), and firmware updates enabling a dual-boot menu at startup. Read more

Amazon S3 Launches and Changes Web Infrastructure

2 minute read

Published:

Amazon launched Simple Storage Service, better known as S3, in March 2006. At first glance it looked like a simple storage product: put files somewhere on the internet, retrieve them later, and pay for what you use. The deeper change was that storage stopped being something every small team had to buy, rack, monitor, replace, and over-plan before a product had even found its audience. Read more

XGL Brings 3D Effects to the Linux Desktop

2 minute read

Published:

Novell engineer David Reveman demonstrated Xgl and the Compiz window manager at a Linux conference in January 2006, and a video of the demo spread rapidly on the early internet through February 2006 — showing Linux desktop effects that looked more advanced than what Windows XP offered: windows that wobbled like jelly when moved, a rotating cube exposing four virtual desktops, transparent window decorations, and smooth minimizing animations that collapsed windows into the taskbar with a fire effect. The demo reached millions of viewers through Google Video and early YouTube, generating significant attention for desktop Linux among users who had never seen 3D compositing in any OS. Read more

AJAX And The Web Without Reloading

3 minute read

Published:

For a long time, using a website has followed a familiar rhythm. I click a link or submit a form, the browser waits, and then the whole page appears again. It works, but it often reminds me that I am moving from one document to another. Recently, some websites have started to feel different. Read more

Apple Begins the Intel Mac Era

4 minute read

Published:

Steve Jobs opened Macworld Expo 2006 on January 10, 2006 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco with the announcement that Apple had shipped its first Intel-based Macs — available for purchase that day: an updated iMac with Intel Core Duo at 1.83 and 2.0 GHz (17-inch at $1,299; 20-inch at $1,699) and the MacBook Pro, a new name replacing the PowerBook G4 line, at 1.67 and 1.83 GHz ($1,999 and $2,499). Jobs had announced the intention to switch from PowerPC to Intel at WWDC on June 6, 2005, setting a two-year transition timeline; the actual transition completed in 14 months. The processors were Intel’s dual-core Core Duo (codename Yonah) built on Intel’s 65nm process — the same platform used in Centrino laptop processors — with a shared 2 MB L2 cache and a 31W TDP, making it suitable for the iMac’s all-in-one thermal design and the thin MacBook Pro chassis. The Core Duo delivered substantially better performance per watt than the PowerPC G5 IBM had supplied for the Power Mac and the PowerPC G4 Freescale had supplied for the PowerBook; the G5’s heat output had prevented Apple from shipping a G5-based laptop, leaving the PowerBook G4 at 1.67 GHz as the maximum while Intel laptops had advanced significantly. Jobs demonstrated the iMac Core Duo running a video transcode “four to five times faster” than the Power Mac G5 iMac it replaced. Read more

fun

Saving Private Ryan

2 minute read

Published:

I watched Saving Private Ryan on television expecting a war film and discovered, during the opening battle, that I had confused war films with war. Read more

Braveheart

3 minute read

Published:

I first saw Braveheart on television on an evening that seemed to grow longer with the film. Dinner ended, tea arrived, somebody left the room and returned, the windows turned black, and still the story continued across hills, castles and battlefields. By the final scenes, the room had the peculiar silence produced when several people have watched the same thing for so long that talking would feel like breaking a spell. Read more

The Lord of the Rings

2 minute read

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I first watched The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on a winter evening with friends. We had food on the table and enough conversation during the opening minutes to suggest that nobody expected to become solemn about hobbits. Read more

American Beauty

3 minute read

Published:

I watched American Beauty at an age when adulthood still seemed to be a destination rather than a condition. From far away, the route looked conventional enough: finish school, find work, earn money, build a home, perhaps raise a family, and eventually arrive at that stable country called being grown up. Read more

Memento

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Memento with a notebook beside me. Read more

In July: Sometimes the Destination Is Beside You

11 minute read

Published:

There are films we remember because they are great films, and there are others we remember because they entered our lives at the right moment. In July belongs to the second group for me. I do not remember it mainly because of technique, structure, or cinematic perfection. What remained was a feeling: summer, movement, coincidence, uncertainty, and the strange experience of traveling toward something important without fully understanding what it is. Read more

The Usual Suspects

2 minute read

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I watched The Usual Suspects knowing one thing I would have preferred not to know. Read more

The Green Mile

2 minute read

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I watched The Green Mile on a rainy evening expecting a prison story. Read more

Léon: The Professional

2 minute read

Published:

I watched Léon: The Professional on television during a hot summer night. The windows were open, and in the quiet scenes I could hear traffic below the apartment. That ordinary sound made Léon’s life seem even more sealed. Read more

Fight Club

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Fight Club on a small computer monitor in a student room containing nearly everything a student room is expected to contain: an inexpensive desk, cables in permanent negotiation with one another, books stacked horizontally because the shelf was full, CDs, clothes waiting to become laundry, and several objects I had bought because owning them had briefly seemed like progress. Read more

The Pianist

2 minute read

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I watched The Pianist alone on a Sunday evening and expected music to be the thing I remembered. Read more

GoodFellas

3 minute read

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Someone recommended GoodFellas to me with the fatal phrase “one of those films you have to see,” which usually transforms pleasure into homework. Read more

The Incredibles

2 minute read

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I watched The Incredibles expecting a children’s film and found myself thinking about office work. Read more

Life Is Beautiful

2 minute read

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I watched Life Is Beautiful with several other people, and the room changed with the film. Read more

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind after a relationship had ended, which was not a neutral condition in which to encounter a film about deleting someone from memory. Read more

Forrest Gump

3 minute read

Published:

I first watched Forrest Gump on an afternoon when I had nowhere to go, which may be the ideal condition for a film that begins with a man sitting on a bench and talking to whoever happens to sit beside him. Read more

Oldboy

2 minute read

Published:

A friend told me to watch Oldboy without reading anything about it. Read more

Age of Empires II

3 minute read

Published:

There was a period when I could sit down to play Age of Empires II after dinner, promise myself that I would stop after one match, and discover that the room had gone quiet and the clock had moved far beyond what I had intended. The game was never especially mysterious about what it wanted from me. Gather food, wood, gold, and stone. Build. Scout. Defend. Attack. The difficulty came from the fact that every sensible decision damaged another sensible possibility. Read more

Hamurabi

3 minute read

Published:

Long before anyone thought of a computer game, Hammurabi ruled Babylon. His name survived through one of history’s best-known law codes, a record of a society trying to make trade, property, debt, agriculture, family and punishment legible through rules. Read more

Pulp Fiction

2 minute read

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I watched Pulp Fiction on a night when I was too tired for a complicated film. Read more

V for Vendetta

2 minute read

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I watched V for Vendetta during a period when I was reading far too much news online. Read more

Kill Bill, Revisited

2 minute read

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The second time I watched Kill Bill, I paid much less attention to who was going to die. Read more

The Prestige

2 minute read

Published:

I watched The Prestige because I thought I was going to see a film about magicians. Read more

Denize Doğru: Before Winter Comes

5 minute read

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Some songs remind me of a person. Others remind me of a period of life. Denize Doğru does something slightly different: it reminds me of the desire to leave. Read more

Denge: Please Do Not Disturb My Beautiful Disorder

4 minute read

Published:

There are songs about finding balance. Denge makes me think that perhaps balance is not something we find at all. Perhaps it is the small private arrangement we build inside ourselves and then spend half our lives protecting from other people. Read more

Kalbim Yaralı: When Someone Takes Tomorrow with Them

4 minute read

Published:

There are love songs about separation, and then there are songs about what remains after separation. Murat Göğebakan’s Yaralı belongs to the second kind. Its pain does not come only from the fact that someone has left. The deeper wound is that the person who leaves takes a part of the future with them. Read more

Revolution OS

3 minute read

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I watched Revolution OS during a period when I was reinstalling operating systems more often than any stable adult should. Read more

The Dark Knight

2 minute read

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I watched The Dark Knight in a crowded cinema a few weeks after it opened. Before the film, the room behaved like any summer blockbuster audience: popcorn, conversation, people searching for seats, someone arriving after the lights had dimmed. Read more

Brief Encounter

3 minute read

Published:

There are sentences we regret saying and sentences we regret withholding. Brief Encounter belongs almost entirely to the second category. Read more

When FarmVille Made Loneliness Visible

3 minute read

Published:

There was a particular kind of loneliness in the early social-web years: you could be connected to almost everyone you had ever known and still spend the evening entirely alone. Read more

How to Listen to Space-Dye Vest

3 minute read

Published:

Some songs tolerate almost any kind of listening. They survive kitchens, traffic, conversation, cheap speakers and the distracted half-attention we now give to enormous amounts of music. Read more

Unforgiven

3 minute read

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At the entrance of our apartment building, someone had written one word on the wall in red paint: Read more

Inception

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Inception in a cinema and spent the walk home explaining it to myself. Read more

The Intouchables

2 minute read

Published:

I watched The Intouchables on an evening when I wanted something light. Read more

Indie Game: The Movie

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Indie Game: The Movie on a Sunday afternoon when I was supposed to be doing something productive. Read more

Experience: Suddenly My Walk Has a Soundtrack

9 minute read

Published:

There are songs you listen to while doing something, and then there is Ludovico Einaudi’s Experience, which immediately convinces you that whatever you are doing must be extremely important. You may only be walking to the supermarket, but once the piano begins and the strings slowly enter, you are no longer a person going to buy yogurt. You are a man carrying the emotional history of Europe through the streets. A plastic bag may be waiting for you ten minutes later, but for now you clearly have a destiny. Read more

Interstellar

3 minute read

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I watched Interstellar in a cinema large enough to make the blackness around the spacecraft feel physical. The sound had weight. Space was not picturesque; it seemed capable of swallowing the screen and the audience together. Read more

The Imitation Game

2 minute read

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I watched The Imitation Game on a cold Saturday evening in a cinema that was nearly empty by the time the credits appeared. Read more

Summer Wine

2 minute read

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Lana Del Rey’s Summer Wine does not remind me of summer. It reminds me of the moment when summer is already ending. Read more

Hidden Figures

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Hidden Figures at a kitchen table late at night. I had intended to watch twenty minutes and go to bed, but somewhere in the middle I made tea and accepted that the next morning would be less efficient. Read more

Parasite

3 minute read

Published:

I watched Parasite in a cinema without reading a review, which is increasingly difficult to achieve with a film everyone is discussing. Read more

Unutulacak Dünler: There Are Still Days to Live

4 minute read

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Some songs stay with me because of their melody. Others stay because they say something I have felt but never managed to explain clearly. Gazapizm’s Unutulacak Dünler belongs to the second group. Read more

Gülpembe: Some People Stay After They Are Gone

3 minute read

Published:

Some people make a house feel warmer just by being there. The table is the same, the tea is the same, and the rooms are the same, but everything feels different when that person is around. Then one day they are gone, and you understand that a home is not made only of walls and furniture. Read more

Moonlight Sonata: What the Night Keeps for Us

8 minute read

Published:

Some music seems to change the room before we fully notice it. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata has this effect on me. It begins quietly, almost without asking for attention, yet after a short time everything around it feels slower. The room is still the same, but somehow the silence has become deeper. Read more

Ay Tenli Kadın

2 minute read

Published:

Late at night, certain things become easier to feel than to explain. Read more

Beni Hatırla

2 minute read

Published:

There are people we miss quietly, and there are people we want to suffer a little because they miss us too. Read more

El Adamı

4 minute read

Published:

Some people leave your life quietly. Others have to be cut out. Read more

Fırtınam

4 minute read

Published:

There are songs I like, songs I remember, and songs that somehow become part of me. Fırtınam belongs to the last group. Read more

Herkes Gibisin

2 minute read

Published:

There is a moment, after some relationships end, when you discover that your body has stopped answering first. Read more

Kırmış Kalbini

4 minute read

Published:

Some songs speak about heartbreak. Kırmış Kalbini speaks about what happens after the heartbreak, when somebody still decides to stay beside you. Read more

Nereye Böyle

2 minute read

Published:

Some words become heavy when they have nowhere to go. Read more

Sevmemeliyiz

2 minute read

Published:

Being loved is not always the same as being seen. Read more

Sonuna Kadar

2 minute read

Published:

There is a particular kind of waiting that stops being about the person. Read more

Üzgünüm

3 minute read

Published:

Some goodbyes are not born from anger. They come after anger is already gone. Read more

Yeniden Sev

3 minute read

Published:

There are relationships we want to leave behind, and there are others we secretly wish we could begin again. Read more

Eyşan Unutamıyorum

3 minute read

Published:

There is a soundtrack from Ezel called “Eyşan – Unutamıyorum.” The title is already dramatic enough on its own. It feels like the kind of music you listen to late at night and then suddenly wonder why your life feels more complicated than it actually is. Read more

humanity

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

5 minute read

Published:

Before humanity had a history, before Earth had oceans, before there were stars to look at, there was already a question waiting for minds capable of asking it: why is there something rather than nothing? Read more

The Birth of the Universe

4 minute read

Published:

The universe did not begin with stars, planets, or empty black space. It began in a state so hot and dense that the structures we now take for granted could not yet exist. Read more

How Earth Became Habitable

4 minute read

Published:

Earth is often described as a habitable planet, as though habitability were a property it possessed from the beginning. Read more

The Great Extinctions

5 minute read

Published:

Life on Earth has never advanced along a smooth upward path. It has expanded, diversified, collapsed, recovered, and changed direction repeatedly. Entire ecosystems that once seemed permanent disappeared. Species that dominated the planet for millions of years vanished. New groups inherited ecological opportunities created by destruction. Read more

The End of the Dinosaurs and the Rise of Mammals

4 minute read

Published:

For more than 150 million years, dinosaurs dominated many terrestrial ecosystems. Then, in geological terms, everything changed quickly. About 66 million years ago, an asteroid struck Earth near what is now the Yucatán Peninsula. The impact released enormous energy, triggered fires and tsunamis, injected dust and aerosols into the atmosphere, and disrupted climate and photosynthesis. Read more

Why Primates Became Different

4 minute read

Published:

Primates did not evolve in order to produce humans. They evolved because particular traits helped their ancestors live in particular environments. That simple statement protects us from one of the most persistent errors in human evolutionary thinking: the belief that earlier primates were incomplete versions of us. They were not. Read more

The First Hominins

4 minute read

Published:

There was no morning on which an ape gave birth to a human. Evolution does not work in jumps between the categories we use today. Populations change gradually. Lineages diverge. Traits accumulate at different rates. Only much later do scientists look backward and draw names around parts of the branching tree. Read more

Why Our Ancestors Stood Upright

4 minute read

Published:

Walking on two legs seems so ordinary that we rarely notice how strange it is. Among mammals, habitual upright bipedalism is unusual. Humans balance a large body on two relatively small points of contact, repeatedly falling forward and catching ourselves with each step. Our skeleton has been reshaped around this mode of movement. Read more

The Growing Human Brain

5 minute read

Published:

The human brain is expensive. It consumes a large share of the body’s energy despite representing only a small fraction of total body mass. It develops slowly. It requires years of care before reaching adult competence. Its large size contributes to difficult childbirth. From a purely mechanical perspective, it is a costly organ. Read more

Fire: Humanity’s First Great Technology

4 minute read

Published:

Fire existed long before humans. Lightning ignited forests. Volcanoes released heat. Wildfires reshaped ecosystems. The human innovation was not creating fire from nothing. It was learning to control, preserve, transport, and eventually produce it deliberately. That changed our relationship with nature. Read more

The First Stone Tools

4 minute read

Published:

A broken stone can be sharp. An intentionally broken stone is something more. It contains evidence of a mind acting on material. The earliest known stone-tool traditions are millions of years old, and some predate the genus Homo. This fact immediately weakens a simple equation between tools and humanity. Read more

The Rise of Homo Sapiens

4 minute read

Published:

Homo sapiens is young. Our species emerged in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, although the process was not a single event occurring in one isolated population at one precise moment. Human origins increasingly appear to involve populations distributed across parts of Africa, interacting and changing over time. Read more

Neanderthals Were Not Primitive

3 minute read

Published:

For a long time, Neanderthals were used as an insult. The word became shorthand for stupidity, brutality, and evolutionary failure. That image tells us more about modern human arrogance than about Neanderthals. Read more

Why Homo Sapiens Survived

4 minute read

Published:

Homo sapiens survived. That is obvious only because we are here. It is also one of the most dangerous facts to interpret. Survival tempts the survivor to invent a flattering explanation. Read more

The Cognitive Revolution

5 minute read

Published:

At some point, humans became capable of living inside realities that did not exist physically. A tribe. A god. A debt. A law. A future marriage. A border. A promise. A shared ancestor. None of these can be held like a stone. Yet they can organize behavior more powerfully than stone. Read more

When Humans Learned to Speak

4 minute read

Published:

No one knows the first sentence ever spoken. There may never have been one. Language probably emerged gradually from earlier forms of vocal and gestural communication. That makes its origin difficult to date. Read more

Why Language Changed Everything

4 minute read

Published:

Language did not merely help humans communicate better. It changed what a human group could be. Without language, cooperation is bounded by what can be demonstrated, signaled, or remembered individually. With language, knowledge becomes portable. One person can explain what another person has not seen. A group can coordinate around a future that does not yet exist. A generation can inherit the experiences of people who are already dead. This is the beginning of cultural acceleration. Read more

The Birth of Imagination

4 minute read

Published:

Imagination is the ability to experience what is not currently present. That sounds simple. It is not. Read more

Why Humans Tell Stories

4 minute read

Published:

Humans do not merely remember events. We arrange them. Beginning. Conflict. Cause. Choice. Consequence. Ending. That arrangement is a story. Read more

The First Art

4 minute read

Published:

A hand pressed against a cave wall can survive longer than a civilization. The person disappears. The language disappears. The group disappears. The hand remains as pigment around an absence. Read more

The First Music

4 minute read

Published:

Music disappears faster than almost anything humans make. A stone tool can survive for millions of years. A song can vanish in seconds. This makes the origins of music unusually difficult to study. Read more

When Humans First Buried Their Dead

4 minute read

Published:

Death is biological. Burial is cultural. Every organism dies. Only some species respond to death in ways that suggest prolonged social attention. Humans transformed death into one of the central problems of culture. Read more

What Is Consciousness?

4 minute read

Published:

Consciousness is the most familiar thing we possess and one of the hardest things to explain. We know what pain feels like because we experience it. We know what red looks like because we see it. We know what fear feels like because it changes the entire texture of a moment. Read more

When Did Humans Become Self-Aware?

4 minute read

Published:

At what point did an animal look inward and recognize itself as a self? The question sounds as though there must have been a first moment. There probably was not. Read more

Why Do We Know That We Will Die?

4 minute read

Published:

Every living organism dies. Very few appear capable of turning that biological fact into an abstract personal future. Humans can. Read more

The Human Fear of Death

4 minute read

Published:

Fear of death is not one fear. It contains several. Fear of pain. Fear of losing control. Fear of leaving people behind. Fear of what happens after death. Fear that nothing happens. Fear of an unfinished life. Fear of being forgotten. Fear of no longer being a self. Read more

Why Humans Search for Meaning

4 minute read

Published:

Humans do not seem satisfied with survival. Food, safety, and reproduction matter. Yet people who possess all three can still ask: Read more

Why Humans Create Myths

4 minute read

Published:

A myth is not simply a false story. That modern use of the word hides its older cultural function. Myths are narratives that organize reality. Read more

The Birth of the Sacred

4 minute read

Published:

At some point, humans began treating certain places, objects, times, and actions as fundamentally different from ordinary life. A stone could become sacred. A mountain. A grave. A tree. A season. A word. Read more

Why Humans Need Rituals

4 minute read

Published:

A ritual is an action that means more than the action itself. Lighting a candle. Standing for a song. Shaking hands. Wearing black at a funeral. Blowing out birthday candles. Graduating in a robe. Repeating a prayer. Read more

Are Humans Really Different from Other Animals?

4 minute read

Published:

Humans are animals. Biologically, there is no serious ambiguity. We are mammals. Primates. Great apes. Our anatomy, genes, development, and evolutionary history place us inside the animal kingdom. Read more

Life as a Hunter-Gatherer

3 minute read

Published:

For most of human history, there were no farms. No cities. No governments in the modern sense. No written laws. No supermarkets. No permanent office hours. Read more

How Humans Conquered the Planet

3 minute read

Published:

Humans are tropical primates. Yet we live in deserts, mountains, rainforests, islands, tundra, and cities near the polar regions. Read more

The First Migration Out of Africa

4 minute read

Published:

Humanity is African in origin. This is not metaphor. Our species evolved in Africa. The deepest branches of modern human genetic diversity are found there. Every population outside Africa descends largely from ancestors who left the continent relatively recently in the history of Homo sapiens. Read more

Humans Reach the Americas

3 minute read

Published:

The settlement of the Americas was one of humanity’s last great continental expansions. For much of the Ice Age, lower sea levels exposed Beringia, a broad region connecting northeastern Asia and northwestern North America. Read more

Why Megafauna Disappeared

3 minute read

Published:

Imagine walking through a landscape where giant ground sloths, mammoths, mastodons, enormous marsupials, and other large animals are ordinary. For much of human prehistory, such worlds existed. Read more

How Cooperation Made Us Powerful

3 minute read

Published:

A single human is physically unimpressive. We are not especially fast. We have no claws. Our teeth are weak compared with large predators. Our skin offers little protection. Read more

Why Humans Started Farming

3 minute read

Published:

For most of human history, people did not farm. Then, in several parts of the world, agriculture emerged independently. Read more

The Birth of Property

3 minute read

Published:

Ownership seems natural because modern life is saturated with it. My house. My phone. My land. My account. My idea. Read more

The Invention of Wealth

3 minute read

Published:

Wealth is stored possibility. Food in a granary. Animals in a herd. Land that produces crops. Metal that can be exchanged. Money in an account. Read more

The Beginning of Social Classes

3 minute read

Published:

A difference becomes a class when it persists. One person may be temporarily richer than another. A class system appears when social position becomes durable, inherited, or institutionally reinforced. Read more

Ancient Egypt and the Dream of Eternity

3 minute read

Published:

Ancient Egypt turned mortality into architecture. The Nile created agricultural abundance, the state organized labor, religion connected kingship to cosmic order, and the dead became part of political life. Read more

Ancient China and the Birth of a Continuous Civilization

3 minute read

Published:

China presents one of history’s most remarkable examples of civilizational continuity. Dynasties rose and fell, borders changed, languages evolved, and wars shattered political unity. Yet institutions, writing traditions, cultural memory, and ideas of political order repeatedly reassembled into recognizable forms. Read more

The Invention of Writing

3 minute read

Published:

Writing is memory that no longer needs a living brain. That makes it one of humanity’s most important inventions. Read more

Why Humans Invented Money

3 minute read

Published:

Money is one of humanity’s most successful shared beliefs. A coin has material value, but usually less than its purchasing power. A banknote is paper, and a digital balance may have no physical form at all. Yet people exchange labor, food, houses, and years of life for numbers in accounts. Read more

The Birth of Law

3 minute read

Published:

Small groups can regulate behavior through reputation, but large societies need something more formal. Read more

The Birth of the State

3 minute read

Published:

A state is an organization that claims authority over people and territory. That sounds abstract, but in practice it means officials, taxes, rules, military force, records, boundaries, and infrastructure. Read more

Why Did Humans Create Gods?

3 minute read

Published:

Humans did not invent one idea of God. They created, inherited, transformed, rejected, and defended thousands of different ideas about invisible agents, ancestors, spirits, divine powers, and ultimate reality. Read more

The First Organized Religions

3 minute read

Published:

Belief becomes organized religion when it acquires institutions: priests, temples, calendars, ritual roles, sacred texts, property, rules, and hierarchy. Read more

Why Humans Made Sacrifices

3 minute read

Published:

Sacrifice is one of the strangest recurring human practices: food destroyed instead of eaten, animals killed for ritual, valuable objects buried, possessions burned, and, in some societies, humans killed. Read more

The Idea of an Afterlife

3 minute read

Published:

Death creates a problem imagination cannot leave alone. A person was here, and then they are not. The body remains for a time, while the social relationship remains in memory. Read more

The Birth of Monotheism

3 minute read

Published:

Many ancient societies imagined divine worlds populated by multiple gods, with different gods governing storms, fertility, war, rivers, cities, or households. Read more

Judaism and the One God

3 minute read

Published:

Judaism is one of the most historically influential religious traditions in human history, and its importance cannot be reduced simply to being “the religion before Christianity.” It developed its own rich traditions of law, interpretation, worship, identity, philosophy, and communal life. Read more

Christianity and the Transformation of the Ancient World

3 minute read

Published:

Christianity began as a small movement in the eastern Roman world, but it became one of the largest religions in history. That transformation changed politics, morality, art, philosophy, law, and concepts of personhood across enormous regions. Read more

The Rise of Islam

3 minute read

Published:

Islam emerged in seventh-century Arabia and transformed a vast region within a remarkably short period. Its central claim was uncompromising monotheism: there is one God, and Muhammad is his messenger. Read more

Why Religions Survive

3 minute read

Published:

Religions survive because they are rarely only beliefs. They are communities, calendars, families, stories, rituals, moral systems, music, architecture, food rules, names, funerals, festivals, and identity. Read more

Buddha and the Problem of Suffering

3 minute read

Published:

The Buddha began with a problem almost everyone recognizes: life contains suffering. Pain, loss, aging, illness, death, and disappointment are unavoidable, and even pleasure becomes unstable because it passes. Read more

Why Humans Build Empires

3 minute read

Published:

An empire is a political system that rules over different peoples, territories, and communities from a center of power. Read more

Alexander and the First Cosmopolitan World

3 minute read

Published:

Alexander the Great conquered astonishing territory in a short life. From Macedonia, his armies moved through the Persian Empire and reached as far as parts of the Indian subcontinent. Read more

Rome and the Architecture of Power

3 minute read

Published:

Rome was not powerful because of one emperor. It was powerful because it built systems: roads, law, taxation, citizenship, military organization, urban infrastructure, provincial administration, and political symbolism. Read more

The Silk Road: The First Global Network

3 minute read

Published:

The Silk Road was not one road. It was a network of caravan routes, cities, ports, mountain passes, desert crossings, markets, political agreements, and local intermediaries. Read more

India and the Exchange of Ideas

3 minute read

Published:

India has never been one simple civilization. Its history contains multiple languages, kingdoms, religions, philosophical schools, trade networks, and social systems. Read more

China and the Imperial Model

3 minute read

Published:

The Chinese imperial model achieved something politically remarkable: it repeatedly rebuilt centralized rule after fragmentation. Read more

The Islamic Golden Age

3 minute read

Published:

Civilizations become intellectually powerful when they create places where knowledge can meet. The Islamic Golden Age was one such period. Read more

The Middle Ages Were Not Dark

3 minute read

Published:

The phrase “Dark Ages” is useful if the goal is to simplify history, but it is misleading if the goal is to understand it. Read more

The Black Death and the World It Changed

3 minute read

Published:

The Black Death killed on a scale difficult to imagine. In the fourteenth century, plague devastated populations across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia, and in some regions enormous fractions of the population died within a few years. Read more

The Age of Exploration

2 minute read

Published:

The phrase “Age of Exploration” reflects a European viewpoint. The lands Europeans reached were already inhabited, and many were connected through existing trade networks. They were not waiting to be discovered. Read more

The Scientific Revolution

3 minute read

Published:

The Scientific Revolution changed what counted as trustworthy knowledge. Tradition and authority remained important, but observation, experiment, mathematics, and reproducibility gained new status. Read more

The Enlightenment

3 minute read

Published:

The Enlightenment was not one movement with one doctrine. It was a family of arguments about reason, liberty, authority, religion, science, and human improvement. Read more

The Birth of the Modern Individual

3 minute read

Published:

The individual did not suddenly appear in modern Europe. Humans always had personal desires, conflicts, identities, and inner lives. What changed was the social importance given to individual autonomy. Read more

The Idea of Human Rights

3 minute read

Published:

Human rights are strange. You cannot see a right; it has no mass, no color, and no biological organ produces it. Yet rights can stop governments, invalidate laws, protect speech, free prisoners, and reshape institutions. Read more

The American Revolution

3 minute read

Published:

The American Revolution turned Enlightenment language into political rebellion. Taxation, representation, natural rights, and consent of the governed became more than colonial grievances; they became a broader claim that government requires legitimacy from the people. Read more

The French Revolution

2 minute read

Published:

The French Revolution began by attacking privilege. It ended by teaching humanity how terrifying political purification can become. Read more

The Industrial Revolution

3 minute read

Published:

For most of human history, economic production depended on human and animal muscle, along with wind and water. Fire provided heat, but not large-scale mechanical power in the modern sense. Read more

When Time Became Money

3 minute read

Published:

Humans always understood time through day and night, season and age, birth and death. But industrial society changed what time meant economically. Read more

Nietzsche and the Death of God

3 minute read

Published:

“God is dead” is one of philosophy’s most misunderstood statements. Nietzsche was not reporting a biological event; he was diagnosing a cultural one. Read more

Why Modern Humans Became Individuals

3 minute read

Published:

Modern societies tell people to become themselves. The instruction sounds liberating, but it would have sounded strange in many earlier social worlds. Read more

The First World War and the Death of Optimism

2 minute read

Published:

Before 1914, parts of Europe had reasons for confidence. Science advanced, industry expanded, railways connected cities, telegraphy accelerated communication, medicine improved, and trade grew. Many intellectuals believed civilization was becoming more rational. Read more

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

3 minute read

Published:

In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The document begins from a radical premise: human dignity does not depend on government permission. Read more

The Birth of the Internet

3 minute read

Published:

The internet turned computers into a civilization-scale nervous system. A computer alone processes information; a networked computer exchanges it. Read more

The Smartphone and the End of Solitude

3 minute read

Published:

The smartphone is one of the most intimate machines humans have ever built. It sleeps beside us, wakes us, guides us, remembers for us, entertains us, photographs us, connects us, and tracks us. Read more

Does Life Need a Purpose at All?

3 minute read

Published:

We ask what life is for because tools are for things. A knife is for cutting, a bridge is for crossing, and a clock is for measuring time. Read more

Can We Defeat Aging and Death?

3 minute read

Published:

Humanity has always wanted more time. Medicine has already delivered it through sanitation, vaccination, antibiotics, surgery, public health, and better nutrition. Read more

How Could Humanity End?

3 minute read

Published:

Every species eventually disappears or changes beyond recognition. Homo sapiens is unlikely to be an exception. Read more

memory

One More Link

1 minute read

Published:

After midnight, the computer became a different machine. Read more

1,500

1 minute read

Published:

When I started university, I heard that a newly graduated engineer earned about 1,500 lira. University still looked enormous from where I stood: years of courses, projects, exams, and technical subjects I had not yet encountered. It seemed obvious that by the time I finished, the number would have changed. Read more

The Pack in My Pocket

3 minute read

Published:

One winter night, I discovered that I had no cigarettes. It was late, snow had covered the streets, and the nearest place where I might find an open shop was not close. A reasonable person could have looked outside, looked at the hour, and decided to sleep. I put on my coat and walked through the snow for almost half an hour to buy a pack. Read more

Four Dirty Plates

2 minute read

Published:

Dinner was over, and four dirty plates remained on the table. Under normal circumstances, this would have been the least interesting moment of the evening. Instead, someone took out a phone and told everyone not to move anything. Read more

291 Names

1 minute read

Published:

One evening, a small argument about my first name sent me to Facebook. I had always heard the name as unmistakably male, but apparently not everyone did. The disagreement was too minor to matter and just irritating enough to investigate. Read more

The Minibus Would Not Move

1 minute read

Published:

Our hiking trips usually followed a familiar order. We left Ankara, ate something in the morning, walked for hours, reached the end of the route, and sometimes stopped at a local market before heading home. By late afternoon, everyone knew roughly what remained in the day. Read more

One More Mussel

1 minute read

Published:

During my student years, I had eaten enough questionable food to develop an unreasonable confidence in my stomach. Read more

Annual Procurement

2 minute read

Published:

I had a problem with buying toilet paper. Not using it—carrying it home. The package was too large to hide in a bag, and walking through the street with it made me strangely self-conscious. Everyone needed toilet paper, and everyone knew everyone else needed toilet paper. None of this helped. Read more

Mechanical Thinking

1 minute read

Published:

I became interested in the phrase “mechanical thinking” because it gave a respectable name to something much simpler. Read more

A Face From Another Life

2 minute read

Published:

I was in Montreal for only a short visit, so the city still felt temporary to me. I had no routine there, no familiar streets, and no place that truly belonged to my daily life. Every door led into a world I would probably never see again. Read more

The Man Who Invented the Balcony Break

1 minute read

Published:

About once an hour, he would get up and take us to the balcony. The strange part was that he did not smoke. Smokers already had a recognized reason to leave the desk for five minutes, but he seemed to understand that the break mattered even without the cigarette. Read more

Tea and Engineering

1 minute read

Published:

My old theory about scientists and engineers was simple: the scientist drinks tea while the engineer works. There was another version too. The scientist discovers something, and the engineer turns it into money. These were not serious definitions; they were professional jokes produced by someone who was already tired enough to believe that engineering had received the harder part of the bargain. Read more

Twenty Good Minutes

1 minute read

Published:

People were complaining that a sitcom they watched was no longer giving them what they expected. I remember wondering what, exactly, a twenty-minute television comedy was supposed to provide. Read more

Sold Yesterday

1 minute read

Published:

During one month, I found four used cars I genuinely wanted to see. Read more

Still Running

2 minute read

Published:

The traffic light turned red on a hill, and I stopped. A car pulled up behind me, much closer than I would have preferred. I looked in the mirror, then at the gear, and prepared for the kind of moment in which my driving skills usually became public entertainment. Read more

After Three and a Half Years

2 minute read

Published:

We had known each other for three and a half years before I told her that I wanted something more than friendship. Read more

Among the Players

1 minute read

Published:

My brother’s university team won an American football game in Eskişehir, and the celebration lasted well beyond the final whistle. I was not certain enough about the exact score to record it like a journalist. What mattered to me was that his team had won and that he was among the players. Read more

For Ninety Minutes

1 minute read

Published:

We were in Eskişehir for work when our manager produced football tickets and announced what we were doing that evening. There had been no discussion. He had already bought them, so the plan arrived complete. Read more

170

1 minute read

Published:

The first time I played bowling, I scored 170. Read more

Downstairs

2 minute read

Published:

The bar was full when we arrived. It was Thursday, a local band was playing, and the downstairs room was small enough to feel crowded before the night had properly started. There was nowhere sensible to sit, so we stayed outside and waited. Read more

Too Clean

1 minute read

Published:

The first thing I noticed was that the food places were on the entrance floor. At the time, this seemed unusual enough to mention. Shopping malls had already created their own grammar in my head, and this one had moved one part of the sentence. Read more

The House Before Memory

2 minute read

Published:

I found the photograph in an old family album. A small child was standing in front of a building, and the child was me. I knew this because everyone said so, not because anything in the picture felt familiar. Read more

Move Over

1 minute read

Published:

There was a kind of driver on a major Ankara road who could make me angry before I saw the face behind the wheel. Read more

The Older Brother Pays

2 minute read

Published:

My younger brother had discovered an economic system that worked with remarkable consistency. Whenever we planned something together, money somehow came out of my pocket. At first the process was simple: he needed something, he asked, I complained, and then I paid. Over time, however, the method seemed to become more advanced, as if he were quietly improving the system after every successful transaction. Read more

The Plate

1 minute read

Published:

When I stayed with my family again after living away, my mother seemed to move through the house with a plate in her hand. Cake, fruit, pastry, something small to eat — there was always another offer. My father had his own quiet habits. If I was lying on the couch, he brought the remote. If I fell asleep with my glasses on, he removed them and covered me. Read more

Cooked

1 minute read

Published:

The assignment was a programming version of Pişti, the Turkish card game. Read more

The Quietest Roommate

1 minute read

Published:

Living alone was peaceful in a way that sometimes felt suspicious. The toothpaste stayed where I left it, the refrigerator remained full, and no one made noise in the next room. At first, I enjoyed that order. After a while, though, the apartment began to feel too still. Read more

A Name from the Stage

1 minute read

Published:

At a university spring festival, the singer on stage encouraged people in the crowd to confess their feelings before the night ended. Notes began traveling toward the stage, and she read some of them aloud between songs. Read more

I Was Already Going Somewhere Else

2 minute read

Published:

I asked a friend if he wanted to come somewhere with me one evening. He said he was going home, so I made other plans and thought nothing more about it. Later I learned that he had called a woman I liked, someone he knew I liked, and arranged to see her. Read more

Two Wrong Questions

2 minute read

Published:

By the time I took that Calculus final, the course already felt less like a subject and more like unfinished business. I had repeated enough mathematics courses with the same professor to know the classrooms, the books, and the familiar feeling of seeing material I had once failed to understand. This time I decided there would be no excuse. I worked through every problem in the red-covered book until I no longer wanted to see the book again. Read more

Velvet

1 minute read

Published:

When I was tense and could not sleep, I used to put on the same singer. Read more

The Hidden Sentence

1 minute read

Published:

She suggested going for a walk, and I agreed even though I did not really feel like going. Read more

Friday at Noon

2 minute read

Published:

The first thing that stayed with me was not the software. It was the workday. Read more

The Building

3 minute read

Published:

For the first few days, I could not find anything without thinking about the route. Read more

Shoulder Height

1 minute read

Published:

There was a wall from my childhood that I remembered as enormous. On the other side stood a mulberry tree, and reaching the fruit required planning. We gathered stones, stacked them carefully, tested the pile, and took turns climbing while somebody held the base. Read more

Minus Two

1 minute read

Published:

My mathematics teacher cost me two points on my school achievement score. Read more

Whatever Was Left

1 minute read

Published:

Someone once described a student breakfast with sesame bread, cheese, cherry tomatoes, roasted peppers, and tea. Read more

One Word Too Many

1 minute read

Published:

There was a rule on an online community I used: if a title was written as a question, you were not supposed to write an entry that merely answered it. Read more

Half Eskişehirli

1 minute read

Published:

On one of our early work trips to Eskişehir, somebody handed us local bottled water and told us it was famous. We drank it, and they laughed. Read more

No Photograph

2 minute read

Published:

My mother wanted one photograph: me in a graduation gown. That should have been easy because I had finished university. I had passed the courses, completed the paperwork, and received the document that said I was a graduate. Read more

Another Famous Sweet

2 minute read

Published:

When I was younger, my hometown had one famous sweet. At least that was how I understood the situation. One famous sweet seemed reasonable for a city. Read more

Can I Pass?

2 minute read

Published:

I was walking through a television building when a familiar face appeared in front of me. Read more

What Else Do You Want?

2 minute read

Published:

A large engineering company announced that it was moving to flexible working hours. I read the news and immediately ignored the important part. I did not think about productivity, policy, or company culture. I thought, very simply: please hire me. Read more

The Heavy Document

1 minute read

Published:

A document arrived, and before anyone understood what was inside it, its size had already made an impression. Read more

Terms and Conditions

2 minute read

Published:

By 2010, my laptop no longer behaved like a machine that could simply be switched on and used. It had conditions. Read more

Who Is That?

1 minute read

Published:

My father and I were watching television when an old clip of Sezen Aksu appeared. She was young enough in the footage that I did not recognize her immediately, so I asked the room, “Who is that?” Read more

Before Lunch

1 minute read

Published:

I left home at about half past eight with several tasks that normally had enough power to destroy an entire day. There was military paperwork, a telephone and internet account to close, water to cancel, electricity to cancel, and a friend to reach afterward. Read more

Obarey

1 minute read

Published:

I had a system for celebrating success. Read more

Come Here, Man

2 minute read

Published:

We were sitting together after dinner when I noticed that something had changed between us. I cannot remember what we were talking about, and that is probably important. The subject was ordinary enough to disappear, but the feeling stayed. Read more

One Poğaça

1 minute read

Published:

Near the end of July, an announcement appeared in the office: starting in August, breakfast would no longer be allowed. I read it twice because the word “breakfast” sounded much larger than what actually happened every morning. On my desk there was a paper bag, and inside it was one poğaça. Read more

Come On

1 minute read

Published:

After three months in Canada, I should have been able to invite someone into a room. Read more

Entry 1000

1 minute read

Published:

When my thousandth entry arrived, I could have written about the number. Read more

The Bang

1 minute read

Published:

I was driving on a straight road when the passenger airbag exploded. Read more

Number 285

1 minute read

Published:

At 5:55 in the morning, I was already number 285. Read more

Friday

1 minute read

Published:

On Tuesday, the service center gave me an appointment for Friday. Read more

I Have Change

1 minute read

Published:

Three people were in a car leaving a parking lot. The driver had one hand on the wheel and the other in a pocket, searching for coins. Read more

Sixty-Two

1 minute read

Published:

The night was cold and very quiet outside. Inside the room, large fans kept turning with the same heavy sound. Music came faintly from somewhere nearby, but no one else was awake with me. Read more

Turn the Other Way

1 minute read

Published:

The place felt almost like a house, which made the objects inside it more suspicious. Read more

Seven Functions

2 minute read

Published:

I opened the documentation for an audio library expecting the usual ceremony. Read more

The Cafeteria

1 minute read

Published:

I asked an intern if she wanted to eat lunch, and she agreed. When I suggested the cafeteria, however, she looked surprised. “The cafeteria? The tray meals? Like the workers?” That was the sentence I remembered. Read more

Ten Minutes

2 minute read

Published:

I opened an anonymous-chat website and decided to see what would happen. Read more

He Knew Chess

2 minute read

Published:

My friend liked to say that he did not know how to play chess. Read more

Before the Offer

1 minute read

Published:

The interview went so well that I left the building thinking about how I would resign from my current job. Read more

Nice Car

1 minute read

Published:

I had built a very good argument against a certain car. Read more

Ten Meters of Freedom

1 minute read

Published:

My headphones had a cable so long that I could leave the computer and continue walking through the house. Read more

Six Hours

1 minute read

Published:

I decided I was getting older when I noticed that six hours of sleep had become enough to wake me up. Read more

The Blisters

1 minute read

Published:

Fitness gloves looked ridiculous to me at first. They seemed like the gym version of wearing sunglasses at night: an accessory designed to make an ordinary activity look more serious than it was. Read more

Trust Me

1 minute read

Published:

A friend was certain that Italy would win. Read more

Closing Doors

1 minute read

Published:

The warning sound had already started when I reached the platform. Read more

Four Places in a Row

1 minute read

Published:

When I thought of Eskişehir, I did not first think of anything a travel guide would have chosen. Read more

The Lawn

1 minute read

Published:

I came to the campus for registration and saw couples sitting on the grass. Read more

His Voice in the Film

2 minute read

Published:

I was watching a film when the father character began speaking to his son, and for a few seconds I stopped hearing the actor. Read more

The Wrong Cup

1 minute read

Published:

I woke in the middle of the night because the baby needed feeding. I went to the kitchen, prepared something with the confidence of a person who had repeated the same movement many times, and returned carrying a cup of coffee. Read more

629 - 579

2 minute read

Published:

The watch was advertised at 579 lira. Read more

Ticket Open

2 minute read

Published:

The task should have taken a few minutes. I wanted a domain name to point somewhere else. The site was ready, the destination was ready, and only the address needed to be told where to go. Read more

The Bottle

1 minute read

Published:

By 2020, I was no longer new. I knew the corridors, the rooms, the habits, and some of the people well enough to speak without measuring every sentence. Read more

Please Come In to Sign

1 minute read

Published:

Classes had moved online. Meetings had moved online. Documents traveled by email, and electronic signatures already existed. Read more

Hair Grows Back

1 minute read

Published:

During the pandemic, my wife learned how to cut my hair, and the training material was me. The first attempts were not especially successful. I described the results at the time by saying she had repeatedly turned me into a monkey, which was unfair to monkeys but accurate enough about my confidence when I looked in the mirror. Read more

One Week Before

1 minute read

Published:

My middle-school crush added me on Facebook about a week before getting married. Read more

Second Coffee

1 minute read

Published:

During the quarantine months, the coffee machine became part of the clock. Read more

What Stayed From the Year

2 minute read

Published:

At the end of 2025, I tried to remember the year and discovered that the important parts did not return in order. There were things that could have gone on a list—work completed, pages made, small tools finished, problems solved. I could have arranged them by month and made the year look organized. That would have been accurate, but it would not have been how the year felt. Read more

A Folder from Another Time

2 minute read

Published:

I opened an old folder and found a small piece of code I had written many years earlier. The file had not aged visibly. Its letters were as sharp as anything created that morning, and for a second that made the date beside it look like a mistake. Read more

The Dido DVD

3 minute read

Published:

I once bought the Dido: Live at Brixton Academy DVD as a gift for someone I had met through Ekşi Sözlük. I paid good money for it too. At the time, buying a DVD still felt like buying something real. You did not send a link and say, “Watch this when you have time.” You went somewhere, found the edition you wanted, paid for it, carried it home, and imagined the other person opening it. Read more

nature

What Is Nature?

11 minute read

Published:

Nature seems like one of the easiest words to understand until we try to say exactly what it includes. Read more

What Is Reality?

15 minute read

Published:

Reality is one of those words that becomes less obvious the more seriously we take it. Read more

The Atomists and the Discovery of the Void

3 minute read

Published:

Parmenides had made the void almost impossible. If non-being cannot be, then empty space cannot exist; if empty space cannot exist, motion and plurality become difficult to explain. Read more

The Big Bang

9 minute read

Published:

The Big Bang is one of the most famous ideas in science. Read more

Cosmic Inflation

7 minute read

Published:

Cosmic inflation is one of the most influential ideas in modern cosmology. Read more

Experiment

9 minute read

Published:

An experiment asks nature a question by changing something. Read more

Prediction

9 minute read

Published:

A scientific theory becomes powerful when it tells us what we should observe before we look. Read more

Chaos

7 minute read

Published:

Chaos does not mean disorder without rules. Read more

What Is Logic?

6 minute read

Published:

Logic is often described as the study of correct reasoning. Read more

Contradictions

7 minute read

Published:

A contradiction occurs when a claim and its negation are both accepted. Read more

Fallacies

8 minute read

Published:

A fallacy is a pattern of reasoning that appears stronger than it really is. Read more

Paradoxes

8 minute read

Published:

A paradox is a puzzle in which apparently reasonable assumptions or reasoning lead to a surprising, impossible, or contradictory result. Read more

Identity

6 minute read

Published:

What makes a thing the same thing over time? Read more

Vagueness

6 minute read

Published:

Some concepts have sharp boundaries. Read more

Modal Logic

6 minute read

Published:

Classical propositional logic asks whether propositions are: Read more

Temporal Logic

5 minute read

Published:

Ordinary logic treats propositions as if their truth does not change with time. Read more

Consistency

7 minute read

Published:

A formal system is useful only if its conclusions do not collapse into chaos. Read more

Decidability

7 minute read

Published:

A mathematical problem may have a correct answer for every input. Read more

Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem

6 minute read

Published:

Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem says that a sufficiently strong, effectively axiomatized, consistent formal theory cannot decide every arithmetic statement. Read more

The Halting Problem

7 minute read

Published:

One of the most important questions in computer science sounds almost trivial: Read more

Memory

8 minute read

Published:

Memory connects the present to the past. Read more

Emotion

8 minute read

Published:

Emotion is often treated as the opposite of reason. Read more

Reasoning

8 minute read

Published:

Reasoning connects what we know to what we conclude. Read more

Context

8 minute read

Published:

Nothing is interpreted in isolation. Read more

Frames

9 minute read

Published:

Context tells us how to interpret a situation. Read more

Expert Systems

7 minute read

Published:

What if intelligence is not mainly about general reasoning? Read more

Machine Learning

9 minute read

Published:

Traditional programming tells a machine exactly what procedure to follow. Read more

Qualia

10 minute read

Published:

What does coffee taste like? Read more

Dennett and Chalmers

8 minute read

Published:

Few disagreements in contemporary philosophy of mind are as revealing as the contrast between: Read more

Panpsychism

9 minute read

Published:

If consciousness cannot be derived from completely nonconscious matter, perhaps the starting assumption is wrong. Read more

Determinism

10 minute read

Published:

If the complete state of the universe were known at one moment, would the future already be fixed? Read more

nejat-isler

Beden İblisleri

13 minute read

Published:

Originally published in Picus — exact date unknown
Archived by Egoist Okur — 13 January 2016
Interview by Tolga Meriç Read more

Sorumlu Bir Herifim

11 minute read

Published:

L’Officiel Hommes Türkiye — January 2017
Habertürk reproduction — 17 January 2017 Read more

pencils

The Smell of a Freshly Sharpened Pencil

9 minute read

Published:

Smell is one of the least discussed parts of the wooden-pencil experience, yet it is often the part people remember most clearly. A newly sharpened pencil does more than reveal graphite and wood. It exposes fresh material that has been sealed beneath lacquer, paint, and the outer surface of the barrel, allowing volatile compounds from the wood to reach the air. Read more

How I Test a New Pencil

11 minute read

Published:

When a new pencil enters my collection, I try not to judge it from a single scribble. A first impression is useful, but it is also easy to distort. A freshly sharpened point feels different from a worn point, smooth paper can hide weaknesses that rough paper exposes, and one unusually good sample can make an inconsistent product look better than it really is. Read more

The No. 2 Pencil

9 minute read

Published:

In the United States, the phrase “No. 2 pencil” became so familiar that it sounds less like a technical grade and more like the default definition of a pencil. It appears on school-supply lists, standardized-test instructions, office-store shelves, and boxes of inexpensive yellow pencils. The designation is simple, but the history behind it connects grading systems, education, machine-readable forms, manufacturing conventions, and one of the strongest visual stereotypes in stationery. Read more

Faber-Castell Castell 9000

10 minute read

Published:

The dark green Castell 9000 is one of the easiest pencils to recognize from across a desk. Its appearance is restrained, but the model carries more than a century of history and remains one of the clearest examples of a pencil designed as a graded technical system rather than a single writing tool. Read more

Eraser-Tipped vs Untipped Pencils

10 minute read

Published:

One of the clearest divisions in wooden-pencil design is whether the back end carries an eraser. The difference looks simple, but it affects manufacturing, balance, price, regional identity, aging, and even the way a pencil is used. An eraser-tipped pencil is a small composite object made from wood, graphite, metal, and rubber or synthetic eraser material. An untipped pencil removes two of those components and presents a more mechanically simple design. Read more

How to Start a Pencil Collection

13 minute read

Published:

A pencil collection does not need to begin with rare or expensive pieces. In fact, the best beginning is usually a small group of ordinary pencils that are different enough to teach you what to notice. Read more

Cheap Pencils Can Be Fascinating

7 minute read

Published:

Collectors often begin by looking for premium pencils, famous models, or discontinued brands with strong reputations. That makes sense, but it can create a blind spot. Some of the most revealing pencils are ordinary school and office pencils that were produced in enormous quantities, sold cheaply, used hard, and discarded without ceremony. Their low price does not make them historically uninteresting. In many cases, it makes them better evidence of everyday manufacturing and use. Read more

Reading the Imprint on an Old Pencil

12 minute read

Published:

The printed line on an old pencil barrel can be the most information-dense part of the object. A few centimeters of foil or paint may contain manufacturer, model, grade, country, trademark status, corporate identity, and clues to when the pencil was made. Read more

Foil Stamping and Pencil Typography

7 minute read

Published:

A pencil gives a manufacturer almost no room to communicate. The usable printing area is long but extremely narrow, and the barrel is often only a few millimeters across each face. Brand name, model, hardness grade, country of manufacture, trademark, certification mark, and sometimes a slogan or product claim must fit into a space that is smaller than the label on most everyday objects. Pencil typography is therefore not decoration added at the end of production; it is a design problem shaped by severe geometric limits. Read more

Colored Pencils Are Not Graphite Pencils

12 minute read

Published:

Colored pencils share the wooden form of graphite pencils, but the resemblance can be misleading. A graphite pencil and a colored pencil may use similar slats, similar lacquer, and similar sharpening geometry, yet the material inside is solving a different problem. Read more

What HB, B and H Really Mean

11 minute read

Published:

The letters printed near the end of a pencil look simple, but they describe one of the most useful classification systems in drawing and writing. H marks the harder side of a graphite range. B marks the softer and generally darker side. HB sits near the practical middle. F is another middle grade found in many traditional ranges. Read more

Why Core Centering Matters

7 minute read

Published:

Cut across a well-made wooden pencil and the graphite core should sit close to the geometric center of the barrel. That sounds like a minor visual detail, but centering is one of the clearest signs that several manufacturing stages worked together correctly. The grooves in the wooden slats must be milled consistently, the core must be placed accurately, the two slats must align when they are glued, and the finished sandwich must then be shaped without shifting the core relative to the outer barrel. Read more

The Case for Writing in 2B

7 minute read

Published:

HB is treated as the default writing grade in many places, but 2B deserves to be considered as a serious everyday writing option rather than simply a drawing pencil. The attraction is easy to understand: a good 2B produces a dark, readable line with less pressure than a typical HB, and that changes the physical experience of handwriting. Read more

School Pencils From Different Countries

9 minute read

Published:

School pencils are one of the easiest ways to see how a supposedly standardized object changes from country to country. The basic technology is similar almost everywhere: a graphite core inside a wooden barrel, sharpened to a point and used for writing or drawing. Yet the details around that core—grade, eraser, color, shape, packaging, branding, and even how children are taught to use the pencil—can vary noticeably between markets. Read more

How to Photograph a Pencil Collection

11 minute read

Published:

Good photographs turn a pencil collection into a searchable visual archive. Once a collection grows beyond a few dozen pieces, memory becomes unreliable. Images begin to serve as identification records, condition reports, variant references, and evidence of how an object looked at a particular moment in time. Read more

Building a Pencil Catalog

13 minute read

Published:

A pencil collection becomes much more useful when it is cataloged. Without a catalog, a drawer full of pencils is still enjoyable, but comparison depends on memory. Once the collection reaches dozens or hundreds of objects, memory becomes unreliable. Small differences in ferrules, imprints, grade marks, packaging, and country statements begin to blur together. Read more

Why Graphite Shines

7 minute read

Published:

Graphite has a visual behavior that surprises anyone who first notices it closely: a dark pencil line can suddenly flash silver or gray when the paper is tilted toward a light source. The mark has not changed color, but its surface is reflecting light in a different way. This “graphite shine” is not a defect in the pencil. It comes from the physical structure of graphite and from the way microscopic particles become arranged on paper during writing or drawing. Read more

Why 4B Feels Like a Different Tool

8 minute read

Published:

Moving from HB to 4B does more than make a line darker. The pencil begins to behave differently in the hand because the core is formulated for a different balance of graphite, clay, binders, and lubricants. A softer grade releases material more readily, wears faster, responds more dramatically to pressure, and changes point geometry sooner. The result is a tool that can feel less like a precise writing instrument and more like a compact drawing stick. Read more

Why Pencil Lacquer Matters

7 minute read

Published:

The colored surface of a wooden pencil is easy to dismiss as decoration, but lacquer is part of the pencil’s construction. It changes how the barrel feels in the hand, how easily the wood absorbs moisture and dirt, how well printed markings adhere, how the pencil survives repeated handling, and how the object ages in a collection. Two pencils made from similar wood and graphite can feel surprisingly different because their finishes were built in different ways. Read more

When Is a Pencil Vintage?

12 minute read

Published:

Collectors use the word “vintage” constantly, but it is not a precise technical category. A seller may apply it to a pencil from the 1960s, another may use it for something made in the 1990s, and a third may call a ten-year-old discontinued model vintage simply because it is no longer available. The word is useful as a broad signal of age, but serious collecting requires more exact language. Read more

Staedtler Mars Lumograph

10 minute read

Published:

The blue barrel of the STAEDTLER Mars Lumograph has become one of the most recognizable forms in professional graphite drawing. It is not simply a blue pencil available in many grades. It belongs to a product line that helped make graded drawing pencils into a systematic professional tool. Read more

Knife Sharpening a Pencil

11 minute read

Published:

Sharpening a pencil with a knife looks old-fashioned, but it offers control that a conventional sharpener cannot match. A standard sharpener gives the pencil a predetermined cone. A knife lets the user decide how much wood to remove, how much core to expose, and what final geometry the point should have. Read more

Tombow MONO 100: Precision in Black and Gold

3 minute read

Published:

Some pencils are remembered because they changed shape, introduced a new mechanism, or became inexpensive enough to appear everywhere. The Tombow MONO 100 is interesting for a different reason: it represents an attempt to perfect a familiar object without changing what that object fundamentally is. Read more

Paper Changes How a Pencil Feels

10 minute read

Published:

A pencil review that ignores paper is incomplete. The same pencil can feel smooth, dry, dark, pale, fast-wearing, or unusually controlled depending on the sheet beneath it. Graphite performance is never produced by the pencil alone. It is the result of contact between a moving core and a surface made from fibers, fillers, sizing agents, coatings, and microscopic irregularities. Read more

Ferrules: The Tiny Metal Part Collectors Notice

9 minute read

Published:

The ferrule is one of the smallest parts of a wooden pencil and one of the easiest to underestimate. It is usually treated as a simple metal sleeve that holds an eraser, but its shape, finish, crimp pattern, proportions, and aging behavior can reveal a surprising amount about how a pencil was designed and when it was made. For collectors, the ferrule often becomes useful only after the obvious features—the imprint, lacquer, and grade marking—have already been examined. Read more

Why Hexagonal Pencils Became a Classic

11 minute read

Published:

The hexagonal pencil is so familiar that its shape rarely receives attention. Yet six flat sides solve several practical problems at once: the pencil resists rolling, presents printable surfaces, can be shaped efficiently from glued wooden slats, and gives the hand a stable tool without forcing a highly specialized grip. Read more

American School Pencils as Design Objects

9 minute read

Published:

The ordinary American school pencil is easy to dismiss because it is so familiar: yellow barrel, pink eraser, metal ferrule, No. 2 marking. But familiarity is exactly what makes it culturally interesting. The design became so stable that it stopped looking designed at all. Read more

Why Pencil Leads Are Bonded to Wood

7 minute read

Published:

A graphite core is fragile. Enclosing it in wood protects it from direct impact, but modern pencil construction usually goes further by bonding the core to the wooden casing along its length. This hidden adhesive connection is one of the reasons a well-made pencil can survive drops, sharpen repeatedly, and continue writing even after the barrel has taken significant abuse. Read more

Inside a Pencil: Graphite, Clay and Wax

12 minute read

Published:

A wooden pencil looks like a piece of painted wood with a dark center, but the core is a carefully engineered ceramic-like composite. Calling it “lead” is traditional shorthand; ordinary graphite pencils do not use metallic lead in the writing core. Read more

Graphite vs Charcoal

12 minute read

Published:

Graphite and charcoal are both carbon-based drawing materials, but they behave very differently on paper. They can both make black marks, both can be sold in wooden pencils, and both can be blended or erased to some degree. Yet their internal structure, particle behavior, sheen, value range, and interaction with paper make them distinct tools rather than interchangeable versions of the same medium. Read more

Why Pencil Wood Matters

11 minute read

Published:

The wood around a pencil core is easy to overlook until sharpening goes badly. Then grain direction, density, machining, moisture, glue, and centering become impossible to ignore. Read more

German Pencil Making Tradition

11 minute read

Published:

Germany occupies a central place in pencil history, especially the area around Nuremberg and nearby Stein. The importance of the region is not simply that several famous brands happened to begin there. It developed a durable industrial ecosystem around pencil making: woodworking, graphite processing, pigments, machinery, printing, trade, and skilled labor reinforced one another over centuries. Read more

Advertising Pencils: Tiny Corporate Archives

10 minute read

Published:

Advertising pencils were made to be ordinary. They were handed across bank counters, left beside hotel telephones, packed into trade-show bags, given to schoolchildren, mailed by insurance agents, and distributed by thousands of local businesses that expected the recipient to sharpen them, use them, and eventually throw them away. That disposable purpose is exactly what makes surviving examples so useful to collectors. A pencil carrying the name of a hardware store, radio station, restaurant, political campaign, baseball team, or regional manufacturer can preserve a fragment of commercial history that is difficult to find anywhere else. Read more

Pencil Point Retention Explained

12 minute read

Published:

Darkness is easy to notice in a pencil test, but point retention often matters more during real writing. It describes how well a sharpened point keeps a useful geometry as graphite is transferred to paper. Read more

A Pencil Is a Consumable Measuring Stick

6 minute read

Published:

A wooden pencil records use in a way that most writing tools do not. Every sharpening removes part of the object itself, so the pencil gradually becomes a physical measure of the work done with it. The change is visible: the barrel gets shorter, the imprint moves closer to the fingers, the balance shifts, and eventually the pencil reaches a length at which it is no longer comfortable to hold. A mechanical pencil can consume many leads while its body remains almost unchanged. A wood-cased pencil cannot hide its history so easily. Read more

The Quiet Precision of H Pencils

9 minute read

Published:

Soft graphite gets most of the attention because dark marks are visually dramatic, but hard grades solve a different problem. An H pencil is not trying to produce the richest black. Its strengths are point retention, controlled deposition, narrow lines, and the ability to build structure without immediately filling the page with graphite. Those qualities made hard pencils important in drafting rooms, map work, technical illustration, and any task where precision mattered more than expressive darkness. Read more

The Anatomy of a Wooden Pencil

11 minute read

Published:

A wooden pencil can be read almost like a small machine. Start at the point and move backward: core, wood, adhesive, lacquer, imprint, barrel geometry, end treatment, ferrule, and eraser. Each part has a job, and each part gives a collector something different to inspect. Read more

Sharpeners Change the Pencil

13 minute read

Published:

A wooden pencil does not have one fixed writing geometry. Every sharpening changes the ratio of exposed wood to exposed core, the length of the graphite point, the angle at which the core meets the paper, and the amount of support the wood provides behind it. Change the sharpener and the same pencil can behave like a different instrument. Read more

Mitsubishi Hi-Uni: The Pencil That Tried to Be Perfect

2 minute read

Published:

Some pencils become classics because they are inexpensive and everywhere. The Mitsubishi Hi-Uni followed almost the opposite path. It was created as a premium pencil, with the ambition of pushing an ordinary wooden pencil as far as manufacturing could reasonably take it. Read more

Why Pencils Break When Sharpening

10 minute read

Published:

Few pencil problems are more frustrating than a point that breaks every time it emerges from the sharpener. The visible break happens at the tip, but the actual cause may be somewhere else: inside the core, in the wood, at the glue line, in the sharpener, or in the user’s technique. Read more

Why Vintage Pencil Boxes Matter

13 minute read

Published:

A single vintage pencil can be beautiful, but an original box can explain the pencil in ways the barrel cannot. Packaging preserves the commercial context around the object: how it was named, graded, priced, grouped, exported, advertised, and presented to the buyer. Read more

A Short History of the Modern Pencil

14 minute read

Published:

The modern pencil is the result of several technologies meeting over centuries: graphite mining, wood working, ceramic-like core manufacture, precision cutting, adhesives, coatings, printing, and mass production. Its familiar form looks inevitable only because it has been refined for so long. Read more

Round, Hexagonal or Triangular?

11 minute read

Published:

Barrel shape changes a pencil more than photographs suggest. The core may be identical, the wood may come from the same slats, and the lacquer may use the same chemistry, yet a round, hexagonal, and triangular pencil can feel like three different tools. Read more

Discontinued Pencils and Collector Psychology

8 minute read

Published:

A perfectly ordinary pencil can become psychologically different the moment production stops. Before discontinuation, sharpening is routine because another dozen can be bought. After discontinuation, the same action begins to feel like consumption of a finite resource. Nothing about the graphite has changed, yet the user’s relationship with the object has. Read more

Why Pencils Still Matter

13 minute read

Published:

A pencil is one of the simplest tools on a desk, yet it offers something that many modern writing instruments do not: visible change. The point becomes shorter, the paint acquires scratches, the lettering slowly disappears under the fingers, and every page removes a little more of the object. Read more

Using Pencils Without Destroying a Collection

12 minute read

Published:

Collectors face a contradiction built into the object itself: pencils are designed to disappear through use, while a collection is designed to preserve them. Every sharpening removes wood, lacquer, imprint length, and graphite. Every written page shortens the artifact. Read more

How to Store Vintage Pencils

11 minute read

Published:

Vintage pencils are relatively robust objects, but careless storage can slowly damage the details that make them historically useful. A pencil may survive decades in a drawer, yet lacquer can fade, ferrules can corrode, erasers can harden, boxes can crush, and adhesives can fail. Preservation is mostly about slowing those changes. Read more

What Makes a Pencil ‘Premium’?

11 minute read

Published:

“Premium” is one of the vaguest words in stationery. It can describe materials, manufacturing precision, brand position, packaging, scarcity, or simply price. A pencil in an elegant box may still have an off-center core and mediocre wood, while an inexpensive school pencil may sharpen cleanly and write with excellent consistency. The label becomes useful only when it is broken into measurable qualities. Read more

Japanese Pencils and the Pursuit of Finish

12 minute read

Published:

Japanese pencils attract collectors for reasons that go beyond writing darkness. The appeal often comes from the complete object: core formulation, lacquer, typography, barrel geometry, end treatment, packaging, and the consistency with which those details are executed. Read more

Smoothness Is Not the Same as Quality

11 minute read

Published:

Pencil reviews often treat smoothness as the final score. A pencil that feels “buttery,” “creamy,” or “glassy” is praised immediately, while a pencil with noticeable feedback is often judged as inferior. That shortcut misses much of what makes a pencil useful. Read more

The End Cap Is Not an Afterthought

6 minute read

Published:

Turn an untipped pencil around and the last few millimeters often reveal more design work than expected. The writing end receives most of the attention because it changes with every sharpening, yet the opposite end is usually the most stable visual element on the barrel. It may carry a flat paint finish, a contrasting dip, a ring, a colored band, a metal cap, exposed wood, or a multi-step decorative treatment. On some models, the end is one of the easiest ways to identify the pencil from a distance. Read more

What a Pencil Eraser Is Actually Made Of

5 minute read

Published:

A pencil eraser looks like a single piece of soft material, but its job depends on a carefully balanced mixture of elasticity, friction, filler, and controlled wear. Read more

The Crank Pencil Sharpener: How Spiral Cutters Took Over the Desk

4 minute read

Published:

Before the familiar desk-mounted crank sharpener became ordinary, sharpening was still a manual skill. Knives and simple handheld sharpeners worked, but the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned sharpening into a machine problem: cut wood and graphite evenly, center the point, avoid breakage, collect shavings, and repeat the result consistently. Read more

Dong-A Pencil: The Company That Opened Korea’s Stationery Industry

5 minute read

Published:

South Korea is famous for electronics, automobiles, and modern design, but its stationery industry has a much older industrial story than many collectors realize. Dong-A Pencil sits near the beginning of that story. Founded in 1946, the company is described by the Korean government as the country’s first stationery company, and pencil manufacturing was its starting point. Read more

Nataraj 621: India’s School Pencil at Industrial Scale

6 minute read

Published:

A pencil collection can become geographically distorted very quickly. Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and the United States have famous models that are easy to document and easy to buy. India deserves a place beside them, and the Nataraj 621 is a good point of entry. Read more

Viking Pencil Factory: Denmark’s National Pencil

5 minute read

Published:

Denmark is not usually the first country named in histories of pencil manufacturing. Germany, the Czech lands, Switzerland, Britain, Japan, and the United States tend to dominate the story. Yet Copenhagen once had its own large pencil factory, and its history is unusually tied to national identity. Read more

Adel Kalemcilik: Turkey’s Modern Pencil Manufacturer

4 minute read

Published:

A pencil collection can become international while still circling the same familiar countries. Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and the United States dominate many collections. Turkey deserves a place on that map as well, and Adel Kalemcilik provides the clearest entry point. Read more

From Prata to São Carlos: Brazil’s Two-Billion-Pencil Supply Chain

4 minute read

Published:

A pencil can look like a local object even when its production depends on a landscape hundreds of kilometers away. Faber-Castell’s Brazilian operation makes that relationship unusually visible. Its wood begins in managed forests near Prata, Minas Gerais, while large-scale pencil production takes place in São Carlos, São Paulo. Read more

Pencil Slats: The Hidden Wooden Component Between Forest and Pencil

5 minute read

Published:

A wooden pencil does not normally arrive at the pencil factory as a log. In modern production, the wood often arrives as a slat: a thin, accurately machined board that will be grooved, filled with cores, glued to a matching slat, and cut into individual pencils. The slat disappears inside the finished barrel, so collectors rarely think about it as a separate object, yet it is one of the most important standardized intermediate products in the pencil industry. Read more

Tomsk Pencil Factory: Siberian Cedar and Soviet Pencil Production

5 minute read

Published:

Most histories of pencil making move quickly from Germany to the United States and Japan. Tomsk adds a very different route: a Siberian factory built around access to local timber, expanded under Soviet industrial planning, damaged during the Second World War, rebuilt, and eventually capable of producing hundreds of millions of pencils a year. Read more

The Pencil Clip: Turning a Wooden Pencil Into a Pocket Tool

5 minute read

Published:

A wooden pencil is easy to carry until it is placed in a shirt pocket. It can slide downward or fall out when the wearer bends over. Fountain pens solved that problem with built-in clips, but most wooden pencils did not. Instead, removable metal clips turned an ordinary pencil into a pocket tool. Read more

Borrowdale Graphite: The Deposit That Made Keswick a Pencil Town

5 minute read

Published:

Long before graphite was mixed with clay and fired into engineered cores, one English valley had access to unusually pure natural graphite that could be cut and used almost directly as a marking material. The deposit lay at Seathwaite in Borrowdale, in the Lake District of north-west England, and eventually helped turn nearby Keswick into a major pencil-making center. Read more

poems

Akrep gibisin kardeşim

less than 1 minute read

Published:

akrep gibisin kardeşim,
korkak bir karanlık içindesin akrep gibi.
serçe gibisin kardeşim,
serçenin telaşı içindesin.
midye gibisin kardeşim,
midye gibi kapalı, rahat.
ve sönmüş bir yanardağ ağzı gibi korkunçsun, kardeşim.
bir değil,
beş değil,
yüz milyonlarlasın maalesef.
koyun gibisin kardeşim,
gocuklu celep kaldırınca sopasını
sürüye katılıverirsin hemen
ve âdeta mağrur, koşarsın salhaneye.
dünyanın en tuhaf mahlukusun yani,
hani şu derya içre olup
deryayı bilmiyen balıktan da tuhaf.
ve bu dünyada, bu zulüm
senin sayende.
ve açsak, yorgunsak, alkan içindeysek eğer
ve hâlâ şarabımızı vermek için üzüm gibi eziliyorsak
kabahat senin,
demeğe de dilim varmıyor ama
kabahatın çoğu senin, canım kardeşim! Read more

Anlayamadım

less than 1 minute read

Published:

ben mi anlayamadım, sonbahar mı götürdü
yıldırım mı düşmüş bahçeme
tomurcuk güllerim mi yanmış
önce yapraklar mı tutuşmuş
anlayamadım
saçlarım mı ağarmış, düşüyor muyum
öl diyorsunuz, ölmüyor muyum
beni anladınız mı
anlayamadım Read more

Aşk

less than 1 minute read

Published:

içerimde üç kişi,
ben, asker ve bir çocuk. Read more

Ben içeri düştüğümden beri

1 minute read

Published:

Ben içeri düştüğümden beri, güneşin etrafında on kere döndü dünya
Ona sorarsanız, lâfı bile edilmez, mikroskobik bir zaman
Bana sorarsanız, on senesi ömrümün
Bir kurşun kalemim vardı, ben içeri düştüğüm sene
Bir haftada yaza yaza tükeniverdi
Ona sorarsanız, bütün bir hayat
Bana sorarsanız, adam sen de, biriki hafta
Katillikten yatan Osman
Ben içeri düştüğümden beri, yedi buçuğu doldurup çıktı
Dolaştı dışarda bir vakit
Sonra kaçakçılıktan düştü içeri, altı ayı doldurup çıktı tekrar
Dün mektup geldi, evlenmiş, bir çocuğu doğacakmış baharda
Şimdi on yaşına bastı
Ben içeri düştüğüm sene ana rahmine düşen çocuklar
Ve o yılın titrek, ince, uzun bacaklı tayları
Rahat, geniş sağrılı birer kısrak oldular çoktan
Fakat zeytin fidanları hâlâ fidan, hâlâ çocuktur
Yeni yeni meydanlar açılmış uzaktaki şehrimde
Ben içeri düştüğümden beri
Ve bizim hane halkı
Bilmediğim bir sokakta, görmediğim bir evde oturuyor
Pamuk gibiydi, bembeyazdı ekmek, ben içeri düştüğüm sene
Sonra vesikaya bindi, bizim burada içeride
Birbirini vurdu millet yumruk kadar, simsiyah bir tayın için
Şimdi serbestledi yine, fakat esmer ve tatsız
Ben içeri düştüğüm sene, ikincisi başlamamıştı henüz
Daha kampında fırınlar yakılmamış
Atom bombası atılmamıştı Hiroşima’ya
Boğazlanan bir çocuğun kanı gibi aktı zaman
Sonra kapandı resmen o fasıl
Şimdi üçüncüden bahsediyor Amerikan doları
Fakat gün ışıdı her şeye rağmen, ben içeri düştüğümden beri
Ve karanlığın kenarından onlar
Ağır ellerini toprağa basıp doğruldular yarı yarıya
Ben içeri düştüğümden beri, güneşin etrafında on kere döndü dünya
Ve aynı ihtirasla ediyorum yine
Ben içeri düştüğüm sene onlar için yazdığımı
Onlar ki toprakta karınca
Suda balık
Havada kuş kadar çokturlar
Korkak, cesur, cahil, hakim ve çocukturlar
Ve kahreden yaratan ki onlardır
Destanımızda yalnız onların mâceraları vardır
Ve gayrısı
Mesela, benim on sene yatmam
Laf’ı güzaf Read more

Bence Şimdi Sen De Herkes Gibisin

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Gözlerim gözünde aşkı seçmiyor
Onlardan kalbime sevda geçmiyor
Ben yordum ruhumu biraz da sen yor
Çünkü bence şimdi herkes gibisin Read more

Böyle bir sevmek

less than 1 minute read

Published:

ne kadınlar sevdim zaten yoktular
yağmur giyerlerdi sonbaharla bir
azıcık okşasam sanki çocuktular
bıraksam korkudan gözleri sislenir Read more

Güzel Havalar

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Beni bu güzel havalar mahvetti,
Böyle havada istifa ettim
Evkaftaki memuriyetimden.
Tütüne böyle havada alıştım,
Böyle havada aşık oldum;
Eve ekmekle tuz götürmeyi
Böyle havalarda unuttum;
Şiir yazma hastalığım
Hep böyle havalarda nüksetti;
Beni bu güzel havalar mahvetti. Read more

Hüzzam

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Mehtab, ruhumla meşk diler belli.
Makamı bir garib Hüzzam… Read more

Japon Balıkçısı

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Denizde bir bulutun öldürdüğü
Japon balıkçısı genç bir adamdı.
Dostlarından dinledim bu türküyü
Pasifik’te sapsarı bir akşamdı. Read more

Dumanlar Arasında Sensiz

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Kalmadı avuntu geceden hiç
Ve sessizlik sabaha kadar
Sızı var dumanında sigaramın
Ve yalnızlık odamın duvarlarında Read more

Seni Düşünmek

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Seni düşünmek güzel şey,
ümitli şey,
dünyanın en güzel sesinden
en güzel şarkıyı dinlemek gibi birşey…
Fakat artık ümit yetmiyor bana,
ben artık şarkı dinlemek değil,
şarkı söylemek istiyorum… Read more

Sevgi Duvarı

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Sen miydin o, yalnızlığın mıydı yoksa
Kör karanlıkta açardık paslı gözlerimizi
Dilimizde akşamdan kalma bir küfür
Salonlar piyasalar sanat-sevicileri
Derdim günüm insan arasına çıkarmaktı seni
Yakanda bir amonyak çiçeği
Yalnızlığım benim sidikli kontesim
Ne kadar rezil olursak o kadar iyi Read more

publications

teaching

Microprocessors

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Electrical Electronics Engineering, 2024

microprocessor Microprocessors execute instructions, process data, and coordinate the operations of modern computing systems. The 8086 architecture provides a useful foundation for studying processor organization, registers, memory access, instruction execution, and low-level programming. The 8086 is an early member of the x86 family. Although modern x86-64 processors are substantially more complex, the 8086 remains useful for introducing registers, segmentation, instruction execution, addressing modes, interrupts, and assembly programming. Read more

Programming with C

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Computer Engineering, 2024

procedural programming with c C is a general-purpose programming language widely used in systems programming, embedded software, operating systems, compilers, and performance-sensitive applications. It combines portable high-level constructs with low-level access to memory and hardware-related operations. C gives programmers substantial control over data representation, memory allocation, and program execution. This control can enable efficient software, but it also requires careful handling of memory, types, and undefined behavior. Read more

Object Oriented Programming with Java

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Electrical Electronics Engineering, 2026

object oriented programming Java is one of the most popular programming languages, extensively used in various fields such as web development, mobile app development, and game development. It encompasses key concepts like classes, objects, inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, and abstraction, which form the foundation of its Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm. These principles enable developers to create modular, reusable, and efficient code, fostering better software design and maintainability. Java’s platform independence, achieved through the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), allows applications to run on any device equipped with a JVM, making it a versatile choice for cross-platform development. Additionally, Java’s extensive standard library provides a wide range of tools and functionalities, simplifying many common programming tasks and enhancing productivity. Read more

Operating Systems

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Computer Engineering, 2026

operating systems Operating systems are a fundamental part of modern computing. Operating systems manage hardware resources and provide abstractions and services for application software. They coordinate processor time, memory, storage, devices, and communication while supporting protection, isolation, and controlled resource sharing. An operating system provides a platform for programs to run. It acts as a bridge between hardware and software applications. This ensures that applications can interact with hardware using a standardized interface. The operating system handles tasks like memory management, process scheduling, and input/output operations. Without it, a computer is just a collection of hardware components. Read more

Algorithms

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Computer Engineering, 2026

algorithms An algorithm is a finite and well-defined sequence of steps for solving a problem or performing a computation. Algorithms form the foundation of software systems and are used in tasks ranging from sorting and searching to graph processing, optimization, text analysis, and scientific computing. This course examines fundamental algorithm-design techniques, correctness, time and space complexity, and the practical trade-offs between alternative solutions. Read more

Algorithmic Game Theory

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Computer Engineering, 2026

algorithmic game theory Algorithmic game theory studies strategic interaction through the lens of computation. It combines game-theoretic models with algorithms and complexity analysis to examine equilibria, auctions, market mechanisms, routing, online platforms, fairness, and the behavior of self-interested agents. Read more

Computer Fundamentals and Introduction to Programming

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Electrical Electronics Engineering, 2026

computer and programming Modern computing encompasses a vast ecosystem of interconnected technologies and tools that have become integral to our daily lives. Computers are sophisticated electronic devices managed by operating systems, which serve as the interface between hardware and software. The Internet has transformed these individual machines into a global network, enabling instantaneous communication and access to unlimited information and services. In our professional lives, we regularly interact with office programs such as word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software, which have digitized and streamlined workplace tasks. Behind all these tools lies the art of programming - the fundamental skill of creating software by writing instructions in various programming languages. Read more

Data Structures

Undergraduate, Giresun University, Computer Engineering, 2026

data structure Data structures provide systematic ways to organize, store, and access data. Choosing an appropriate structure directly affects the efficiency of operations such as searching, insertion, deletion, and traversal. This course examines arrays, linked structures, stacks, queues, trees, hash tables, graphs, and sets, with an emphasis on their implementations, complexity, and practical applications. Read more

teoman

thoughts

Manuals Teach the Questions I Did Not Know to Ask

2 minute read

Published:

When I start using a new program or programming language, my first instinct is usually to search for the exact thing I need. The method is efficient: find an example, adapt it, make the immediate problem disappear. It is also a good way to remain unaware of everything I did not know to search for. Read more

Sometimes Distance Is Not Bitterness, It Is Structure

5 minute read

Published:

People often say it is mature to stay friends with an ex. Maybe sometimes it is. Maybe sometimes it works perfectly. But there is a version of this arrangement that looks much better in theory than it feels in real life. Read more

When ‘I’m Not Ready for a Relationship’ Means ‘Not with You’

5 minute read

Published:

There are sentences that sound more complicated than they really are. One of them is: “I’m not looking for a serious relationship right now.” At first, it sounds reasonable. Maybe the timing is bad. Maybe work is difficult. Maybe life is complicated. Maybe the person genuinely needs space. Read more

Replacement Is Not Neutral

5 minute read

Published:

As a child, an old school bag could feel like a problem. Your friends had replaced theirs. Yours was worn, and every scratch seemed visible. You wanted the new one so that you could stop being the person carrying last year’s version. Read more

A Feeling Does Not Require a Category

5 minute read

Published:

In April 2010, I wrote about a woman whose place in my life I could not quite name. She had a boyfriend. We had become close, she trusted me, and I felt that she gave me more attention than she gave many of the other men around us. Read more

Silence Collects Its Own Evidence

5 minute read

Published:

Some problems begin with something that was never said. Others begin with something that was said and understood completely differently. I think the second kind can sometimes be worse, especially when two people cannot talk face to face. Read more

You Do Not Choose to Forget

4 minute read

Published:

Years ago, I wrote a single sentence about forgetting: Forgetting is not something a person can do. It is something that happens to a person. I still think there is truth in that. Read more

Waiting for Company Can Become Waiting for Permission

6 minute read

Published:

There was a time when going to the cinema alone felt like something that needed an explanation. Not a legal explanation, a social one. Why are you here alone? Could you not find anyone? Are you all right? Nobody necessarily asked these questions aloud, which was almost worse because you could imagine them. Read more

Why I Finally Understood Gym Gloves

7 minute read

Published:

Some things look ridiculous until the exact moment you need them. Gym gloves were one of those things for me. At first they seemed unnecessary, almost theatrical, like wearing sunglasses at night. You are in a gym, you lift weights, your hands touch metal. Surely hands are already designed for holding things. Read more

Patience Is Not Waiting

1 minute read

Published:

Some work has a delay built into it. A skill needs practice before the movement becomes familiar. Trust needs repeated behavior after an apology. A draft sometimes needs distance before its weak argument becomes visible. Read more

Discipline Is Mostly Removing Decisions

1 minute read

Published:

Starting work can involve more decisions than the work itself seems to require. When should I begin? Which task first? Where is the file? Should I answer that message before settling down? Read more

Convenience Can Narrow a Life

2 minute read

Published:

A recommendation that saves me ten minutes seems harmless. Most of the time, it is. The interesting question begins when thousands of small conveniences start choosing the shape of a life. Read more

Distraction Is Often a Way of Avoiding Ourselves

1 minute read

Published:

Sometimes I reach for a distraction at a very precise moment: a task has become uncertain, a difficult conversation has come to mind, or the room has gone quiet enough for an uncomfortable question to return. Read more

Discomfort Is Not a Verdict

2 minute read

Published:

I have noticed that difficult things often make their strongest argument for quitting at exactly the wrong moment. Read more

Curiosity Has Room to Grow Older

1 minute read

Published:

Age arrives gradually, but awareness of it can arrive in flashes. A photograph looks older than expected. Someone remembered as a child is an adult. A familiar task takes longer to recover from. A birthday number begins to feel less abstract. Read more

Giving Ordinary Days Some Attention

1 minute read

Published:

A month can be full and still be difficult to remember. Work was done, messages were answered, meals were cooked. Asked what happened, I can sometimes produce only a deadline and the impression of being busy. Read more

Small Projects Close the Loop

2 minute read

Published:

I used to think a project had to be large to deserve attention. Large projects looked serious. Small ones looked temporary, almost like exercises. Over time, I began to suspect that scale and seriousness are not the same thing. Read more

A Personal Blog Lets Ideas Stay

3 minute read

Published:

Writing on the internet now feels increasingly temporary. Most platforms are built around movement: a post appears, receives attention for a short time, and is pushed downward by newer material. The system rewards arrival more than permanence. Read more