Software
File formats decide whether your files outlive the software
Choosing a format is a preservation decision disguised as a save dialog.
Software
Operating systems, updates, formats and the logic underneath the interface.
21 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 2
Software
Why software gets slower on the same hardware
Every layer added for developer productivity costs something at runtime. The costs are individually reasonable and cumulatively large.
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Software
Why your device stops getting updates long before it stops working
Support ends because a chain of suppliers stops publishing code, not because the hardware became incapable.
Software
Sync is not a backup, and the difference shows up on your worst day
A service that mirrors your files faithfully will mirror a deletion or an encryption just as faithfully.
Software
What open source guarantees, and the three things it does not
Published source answers who may read and change the code. It says nothing about who is checking it or who is paying for it.
Software
Why some machine learning runs on your device and some cannot
The split is decided by model size, memory bandwidth and power, and each of those constraints has a hard edge.
Software
Why some files compress to almost nothing and others refuse
Compression removes predictability. A file with none left has nothing to give, and that limit is mathematical rather than a…
Software
Why text sometimes turns into question marks and boxes
Characters, encodings and fonts are three separate layers, and mangled text tells you which one broke.
Software
Keeping accurate time is much harder than a clock suggests
Computers drift, timezones move by political decision, and getting both right is a surprisingly deep engineering problem.
Software
Why software ships with bugs the developers already know about
Shipping is a decision about which known defects are acceptable, and pretending otherwise would mean never releasing anything.
Software
What a browser does between your click and the page appearing
A sequence of lookups, handshakes, parses and layout passes runs in a fraction of a second, and slow pages are usually stuck in one…
Software
Computers cannot invent randomness, so they harvest it
Deterministic machines produce predictable sequences by definition, and security depends on collecting genuine unpredictability…