Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1

going-through-snowden-documents,-part-1

We are building a comprehensive archive and analysis project examining published documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Our methodology involves systematically reviewing each available document with particular attention to small details and information that has received little or no public attention since the initial 2013 disclosures. Throughout this process, we will publish posts highlighting interesting previously […]

Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

rivian-unveils-custom-silicon,-r2-lidar-roadmap,-and-universal-hands-free

RJ opened the first ever Autonomy and AI Day explaining why Rivian believes it is positioned to lead in this next phase of the industry. The company is leaning hard into compute, custom hardware, large scale AI systems, and a shared data foundation that touches every part of the ownership experience. Let’s break it all […]

Litestream VFS

litestream-vfs

Image by Annie Ruygt I’m Ben Johnson, and I work on Litestream at Fly.io. Litestream is the missing backup/restore system for SQLite. It’s free, open-source software that should run anywhere, and you can read more about it here. Again with the sandwiches: assume we’ve got a SQLite database of sandwich ratings, and we’ve backed it […]

Things I want to say to my boss

I’m sitting down to write this in a gap between jobs. The downtime is strange, like the world has stopped moving but my thoughts haven’t caught up. Other than replaying the shit that went down during the last six months – or to put it more bluntly, the reasons I left, I don’t quite know […]

Deprecate Like You Mean It

Seth Larson noticed that people don’t act on deprecation warnings. The response.getheader method in urllib has been deprecated since 2023 because the response.headers dictionary is what should be used instead. When the method was eventually removed, lots of code broke. Deprecation warnings try to solve the fat step function associated with backwards-incompatible api changes, by […]

Launch HN: BrowserBook (YC F24) – IDE for deterministic browser automation

Hey HN! We’re Chris, Jorrie, and Evan of BrowserBook, an IDE for writing and debugging Playwright-based web automations. You can download it as a Mac app here: https://browserbook.com, and there’s a demo video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODGJBCNqGUI. Why we built this: When we were going through YC, we were a company that automated back-office healthcare workflows. Since […]

An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions

an-orbital-house-of-cards:-frequent-megaconstellation-close-conjunctions

Abstract:The number of objects in orbit is rapidly increasing, primarily driven by the launch of megaconstellations, an approach to satellite constellation design that involves large numbers of satellites paired with their rapid launch and disposal. While satellites provide many benefits to society, their use comes with challenges, including the growth of space debris, collisions, ground […]

Craft software that makes people feel something

craft-software-that-makes-people-feel-something

So, I woke up today. Got my coffee, family went to sleep, and I have a free afternoon. I thought about writing something. I may delete this article, but if you are reading this, it means I went through with it. Recently, people have been asking me why I’m pausing Boo to work on a […]

Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content

meta-shuts-down-global-accounts-linked-to-abortion-advice-and-queer-content

Meta has removed or restricted dozens of accounts belonging to abortion access providers, queer groups and reproductive health organisations in the past weeks in what campaigners call one of the “biggest waves of censorship” on its platforms in years. The takedowns and restrictions began in October and targeted the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts of […]