Six years ago Waldo Jaquith, Robin Carnahan, and Randy Hart released “De-risking Custom Technology Projects: A handbook for state grantee budgeting and oversight”. This tome was written for state legislators and agency heads that were looking to fund and conduct oversight on new custom software. Besides recording the current state of the art, the team at 18F wrote a guide to technical project management for non-technologists. On the other end of the spectrum Software Carpentry focuses on teaching academics or others new to writing software how to do so. There is still a need for a guide to commissioning (or not) custom software projects for smaller organizations and middle managers that are lucky enough to receive grants to do so. They’re not trying to compete with Google, they just need to make some pretty good software.1
The title and structure is inspired by Pretty Good House. ↩
Before it was bought by GameStop and turned into a soulless purveyor of collectibles, ThinkGeek was “Sharper Image for sysadmins”. It’s eclectic mix of gadgets, puzzles, and yes even collectible merch made it a fun and reliable place to find a novel gift.
Read MoreRecently the New York Times was in the news for suing OpenAI over copyright infringement. Tech journalists like Mike Masnick have taken the other side and suggest that finding in favor of the Times would be bad for innovation. Having studied copyright in law school and experimenting with large language models (LLMs) makes me think that the Times is correct here, and I doubt that this will hamper innovation.
Read MoreIn Boston a lot of things can be recycled. Plastic, aluminum, paper. These things are easy: place them in your blue bin. Yet I see so many folks mess this up. Junk mail might sightlessly be dropped in the waste bin. Plastic that could be rinsed and recycled is dropped into landfill. These are easy, the hard ones are even more annoying: textiles, batteries, electronics, and plastic bags (#4). Now there is a separate composting bin to figure out.
Read MoreWix CEO Avishai Abrahami on Decoder:
I also probably have the luxury place of being in the spot where I see more websites than anybody else on the planet, and I know the results on Google, so I can see a lot of the things behind the algorithm. If Google will decide one day to remove fake content, there’ll be no fair content in Google.
Another reason to use Kagi.
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