RSS Bilingual Reader

After the acquisition by a much larger company, security became a top priority. Our company occupied three tall buildings, each at least 13 stories high. Key card readers were installed next to every entrance, every elevator car, and even at the parking lot entrance, which itself was eight stories tall. The parking lot system was activated first. If you wanted to park your car, you needed to scan your pass. It didn't take long for lines to start forming, but they were still manageable. Then the ...

Ten years ago, I was in a dark season. My first startup had cratered. Confidence, gone. I would walk for hours to clear my head, often through parts of the city we typically hurry past. One Tuesday, I saw a man sitting outside a boarded-up storefront. He was weathered, his eyes holding a quiet dignity. But I was fixated on a problem to solve. He only had one shoe. The right foot was wrapped in a frayed plastic bag. I approached, offering to buy him a pair. He smiled, a surprising, warm thing. "K...

After watching a Veritasium video, I feel a surge of intellectual confidence. I feel smarter. Whether it's a video on lasers or quantum physics, it seems like I have a better grasp on the subject. I finally get it. Derek and his crew just have a way of simplifying complex ideas, unraveling their mysteries, and lifting your confidence as each term is explained. Every video they release is logically sound. Almost as if I could have come to the same conclusion if I'd spent an equal amount of time a...

There's a strange contradiction happening in tech right now. Companies are forcing employees to integrate AI into their workflows, celebrating productivity gains and AI-assisted everything. Yet when job candidates use AI during interviews, they're treated like they've committed career suicide. Every colleague I talk to has a story. The candidate's eyes darting left and right, reading an answer as it generates in real-time. The awkward "could you repeat that?" while they discreetly type the quest...

From time to time, I'll hop on someone else's computer to browse the web and I feel an intense revulsion. Every page you visit is littered with ads. The top has ads, both left and right sidebars have ads, there are ads between paragraphs, there are ads at the bottom. And if you mentally ignore them, clicking at random places on the page will trigger a popup. How can you even read anything with all these distractions trying to grab your attention? I've been an avid user of ad blockers for a decad...

There was a question on Hacker News where a user asked how he could ensure his writing would endure for a hundred years . At first, I treated it as a technology problem. Storage, formats, domains, backups. If the goal is durability, then the best technology we've invented so far is still paper. Print it. Put it on a shelf. Problem solved. But that answer was too neat and it reminded me of a story a friend once told me. He found an old book in his basement, more than a hundred years old. The pape...

There was a time when building a good UI was really hard. My default Microsoft Word window had at least five toolbars. My web browser opened to Yahoo, where finding anything felt impossible. Internet Explorer sprouted toolbars I never remembered installing. We crammed features into every nook and cranny of the screen. Then minimalist design took over the web. Finally, we had breathing room. Finally, I could see the actual background color of a page. But I also couldn't find anything useful becau...

My mother handed me her phone a couple days ago. "Do you think this is true?" she asked, her finger hovering over a video about new curfew laws coming to California, featuring Denzel Washington's take on the matter. I'm so proud that she's learned to ask this question now instead of immediately sharing. But as she waited for my response, I noticed she had already watched the entire video. We listened together for one second, just one second. The voice was obviously synthetic, that familiar AI-ge...

OK, that may be a little mean-spirited, but I don't just mean you. I mean a whole lot of us. A couple weeks ago, a graph made the rounds showing the decline of Stack Overflow. At its peak, there were 207,000 questions asked in a single month. By December 2025, there were just 3,600. That's a steep drop. The accepted explanation is simple: LLMs have displaced Stack Overflow. And it's true, I rarely visit the site anymore. Many of my peers don't even know it exists. A lot of people blame Stack Ove...

I hear this all the time. If your employer isn't treating you right, just get a better job. If your manager is overworking you, just find one who won't. If your company has a chaotic codebase, just move to a sane one. In fact, if a stock in your portfolio is underperforming, just pick a better one. It's that easy... Except it isn't. With jobs, it sometimes feels like it should be that simple. When my friend and I were both looking for better opportunities years ago, I quit immediately and took t...

That first Monday of my holiday break, I made a promise to myself. No work emails, no side projects, not even glancing at my blog. This time was for family, for Netflix queues, for rereading dog-eared novels. One thing I was really looking forward to was learning something new, a new skill. Not for utility, but purely for curiosity. I wanted to learn about batteries. They power our world, yet they're a complete mystery to me. I only vaguely remember what I learned in high school decades ago. Thi...

Microsoft won't let you dismiss the upgrade notification So support for Windows 10 has ended. Yes, millions of users are still on it. One of my main laptops runs Windows 10. I can't update to Windows 11 because of the hardware requirements. It's not that I don't have enough RAM, storage, or CPU power. The hardware limitation is specifically TPM 2.0. What is TPM 2.0, you say? It stands for Trusted Platform Module. It's basically a security chip on the motherboard that enables some security featur...

It's the holiday season. My kids are doing all sorts of projects at school, this means we are doing a whole lot of printing. So I went online to look for the ink cartridge for our printer. I typed the printer name and model because who knows the ink cartridge number? I found our printer. And to my surprise, the printer only costs $64. What a time to be alive. I grew up in the 90s, those are not the numbers my father dealt with when we wasted paper on his printer. Buying a printer was a privilege...

I was in the elevator when an older couple got in, patiently waiting to get to their stop. I smiled, they smiled back, and I pressed the button for the ground floor, just because. All three of us were going down. I had my back to them when I heard the lady say, "I think he will know." I turned to see if they were talking to me, since it was just us. She stepped forward, put on her glasses, then rummaged through her purse to get her phone out. Before I could say a word, she handed it to me and as...

“Hey, what’s the name of that website?” That was the question my brother asked me. I didn't need any clarification, I knew exactly what he meant. When people come home eager to watch a tv show, they sit in front of the TV scrolling through search results. Then, their phone comes out of their pocket. They search again. They check their subscriptions. Is it on Prime? Ok, maybe available as a rental? Then you see it. That defeated look on their face as they turn to you and ask: “Hey, what’s the nam...

What are my options here? Inside the "Remind me again in" label are the following options: 1 Week 30 days And when I select one option, what does "No thanks" do? Does it dismiss the box entirely and I never have to see it? Or does it validate the reminder schedule? What if I just don't want OneDrive? Microsoft has embedded it so deep into Windows that there are no easy ways of getting rid of it. I would understand if they had asked me when I set up my machine the first time, but why every single...

August and September. Google unveiled the Pixel 10 in August. Now it's September, it is Apple’s turn with the iPhone 17. These are not commercials. These are productions. Hollywood gloss, cinematic light. Jimmy Fallon laughing on cue. Job titles growing longer by the year. Influencers, celebrities, and everywhere you look: Gemini, Gemini, Gemini. Then Tim Cook, measured, polished. Apple the first, Apple the next. Don’t bother with Netflix & Chill. Just tune in to the event with your date. Ap...

On September 8th, 18 npm packages were compromised with malicious code. These packages are very popular. They receive an average of 2 billion downloads every week. If you are not sure whether you are affected, you can run this grep command on your repository to search for the malicious code: grep -r _0x112fa8 . If it returns any results, you are in trouble. It's already concerning that this hack was only possible through social engineering, but it targeted the type of person who would be the mos...

Aye, gather ‘round the fire, lads an’ lasses, an’ I’ll tell ye of the True AI Scotsman . A myth as grand as the Highlands themselves, yet as slippery as an eel in Loch Ness. He stands tall. Och, taller than Ben Nevis, his jaw chiseled by the gods o’ Silicon, his hands strong as tempered steel, yet gentle as a lamb when promptin’ just so . His eyes gleam with the cold fire o’ perfect logic, an’ his voice? Aye, ’tis smoother than aged whisky, never stutterin’, never doubtin’, never wrong. They say...

In today's social media-saturated world, does it feel like your memory is failing you? It's not that you can't remember anything, but rather that you're constantly distracted while trying to remember. Just a few years ago, I had a nightly ritual. Before drifting off to sleep, I'd mentally replay my entire day, trying to recall every single detail. As a single person with no kids at the time, this luxury of free time allowed me to meticulously reconstruct most of my day. I'd remember the specific...