Tech Radar

Om Malik didn't just report on the tech industry. He helped define how we actually analyze the intersection of business, software, and the web. He had a way of cutting through the noise that felt rare even back when the blogosphere was new. He passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital. He'd been dealing with heart issues for a long time, and he was surrounded by family and friends when it happened. It's a heavy loss for anyone who cares about the history of how we talk about technology. I'm still processing what his absence means for the way we cover this beat. There are a few things he did better than anyone else, and it's worth looking at why those things actually mattered. The Malik Method Om Malik's approach to tech blogging is a shift in how we consume industry news. Before he started, tech journalism was mostly a relay race of corporate press releases. Reporters took a company's claims at face value and published them. Malik stoppe...

Most developers treat their choice of ML framework like a religious conversion. They start with TensorFlow because it's what the tutorials use, move to PyTorch because the tensors actually make sense, and then eventually find themselves squinting at JAX because they want to do something truly weird with gradients. It's a predictable cycle of chasing the cutting edge, but the actual shift in momentum is harder to pin down than the anecdotes suggest. I decided to stop guessing and just look at the data. By overlaying search trends from Hacker News, you can see the exact moment the community's collective brain shifted. TensorFlow owned the early gold rush, but PyTorch didn't just nudge it aside, it completely gutted it in the research labs between 2019 and 2021. Now, JAX is the new darling for anyone doing heavy lifting in 2023. The most interesting part isn't the tools, though. It's the players. For a long time, OpenAI's dominance looked like a forego...

We're finally reading texts that have been physically inaccessible for two thousand years. The trick isn't unrolling the scrolls, but seeing through them. For centuries, the carbonized library of Herculaneum has held a cruel bargain. These scrolls survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but they did so by becoming essentially charcoal. They're so fragile that trying to open one is basically an act of destruction. You can't just peel back the layers without turning the whole thing into dust. The latest preprint on the virtual unwrapping of these papyri is a strange victory for computer vision. By using high-resolution CT scans and machine learning to detect ink that's invisible to the human eye, we're bypassing the physical decay entirely. It's a clever workaround, though I suspect the actual translation of these fragments will be a much slower, more frustrating process than the tech makes it seem. The real question is whether the content of these ...

Porting a 20-year-old physics-heavy masterpiece to the web isn't actually a graphics problem. It's a memory management war. Most people assume the hurdle is getting the shaders to look right in a browser, but the real fight happens in the heap. WebAssembly is great, but it doesn't just magically handle the kind of aggressive memory allocation these old engines rely on. When you're dealing with a codebase written before modern garbage collection was a standard consideration, you end up with leaks that would make a C++ developer blush. I've spent the last few weeks chasing a memory leak that only appeared when a specific type of physics object collided at a certain angle. It's the kind of tedious, invisible work that makes you wonder why we bother bringing legacy software to the browser at all. The result is a weird tension. You have this incredibly stable, polished game on one side and the volatile, sandboxed environment of a web browser on the other. Ge...

Anthropic is accusing Alibaba of stealing the "brains" of Claude. They aren't talking about a simple data leak or a stolen weights file, but something more clinical. According to Anthropic, Alibaba used a sophisticated model extraction technique to reverse-engineer Claude's intelligence, essentially using the API to distill its reasoning into a new model. It's a clever, if slightly sleazy, way to bypass the hard work of training a frontier model from scratch. You just prompt the target model millions of times, record the outputs, and use those high-quality responses to train your own smaller, cheaper version. It's basically academic plagiarism scaled up to a corporate level. The real problem here isn't just the corporate espionage. It's that this method proves how fragile the "moat" around these models actually is. If you have enough compute and a few million API credits, you can effectively clone the behavior of a competitor's best w...

OpenAI is finally trying to stop paying the Nvidia tax. For years, the company has been tethered to H100s and B200s, effectively acting as a massive revenue stream for Jensen Huang. Now, they've partnered with Broadcom to build their own silicon. It's a move Google and Amazon made years ago, and frankly, it's about time. The result is a custom inference processor they're calling Jalapeño. Greg Brockman talked through the strategy on the company's podcast, but the hardware is the real story here. It isn't a general-purpose chip. It's built specifically for the way OpenAI handles inference, which is where the actual cost of running these models lives. The chip is still in testing, but OpenAI claims the early performance numbers are significantly better than what they're seeing with off-the-shelf hardware. The real question is whether they can actually scale the manufacturing to a point where it matters, or if Jalapeño is just a high-end science pr...