Posts

FUTO Swipe: Handling Keyboard Layout Peculiarities

Most swipe typing feels like a guessing game. You slide your finger across the screen and hope the algorithm correctly interprets your imprecise movements. Most keyboards treat the layout as a secondary detail, a set of coordinates that the decoder tries to map back to letters. It's an approximation that often misses the mark. FUTO is doing something different. They're treating the keyboard layout as a first-class citizen in the decoding process. Instead of a generic approach, they've built a model that is specific to both the language and the layout. It learns the exact peculiarities of how we actually move our thumbs on a QWERTY board. Because this requires specific swipe data for training, they only have English QWERTY sorted out for now. It's a narrow start, but the accuracy is actually impressive. They've moved the logic on-device for the Android app to kill the latency, though the web demo still relies on a server. The real question is whether this layout...
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Why Bunny DNS is Removing Core Network Fees

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Most DNS providers treat basic connectivity as a profit center. They charge you for the privilege of your traffic actually reaching your server, adding layers of cost to a service that should be a utility. It's a frustrating way to run a business, and it makes the web slower for everyone. We've decided to treat connectivity as a prerequisite instead. I've spent a lot of time looking at how the big players handle this, and the math rarely adds up for the developer. You end up paying for "premium" tiers just to get reasonable latency. We're trying something different by removing those friction points entirely. It sounds simple, but moving the needle on global resolve times without breaking the bank is a messy engineering challenge. The question is whether we can actually maintain that performance at scale without eventually sliding back into the same pricing traps. The Toll Booth Problem Charging for basic DNS is a bad move. When you put a paywall in...
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How War on Terror Surveillance Tools Shifted Domestically

The legal frameworks we built to track foreign terrorists didn't just vanish when the wars wound down. They were turned inward. We spent a decade arguing that "extraordinary measures" were necessary for national security, only to find those same tools being used on domestic protesters and political dissidents. It's a classic case of mission creep, but on a scale that actually matters. I've spent a lot of time looking at how surveillance tech migrates from the battlefield to the city street. It usually happens quietly. A piece of software designed to map insurgent networks in a conflict zone suddenly becomes a tool for local police to monitor a neighborhood. The logic is always the same: the tool works, so why not use it here? The problem is that these tools aren't designed for a society with a bill of rights. They're designed for environments where the target has no legal standing. When you port that logic into a domestic setting, you aren't just u...
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Google Workspace CLI and API Policy Violations

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Getting fired for writing a successful tool is a weird way to find out where the line is between being a "proactive engineer" and a liability. Justin Poehnelt built a Google Workspace CLI, put it out there, and watched it hit number one on Hacker News. It gained thousands of stars and users in a matter of days. Then Google fired him. Most of us are told that shipping high-impact code is the fastest way to get promoted. But there is a hidden friction when your project goes viral outside the walls of your company. Suddenly, you aren't just a developer solving a problem. You're a security risk or a policy violation waiting to happen. It makes me wonder if the "owner mindset" we're all encouraged to have actually has a ceiling. At what point does taking initiative stop being a virtue and start being a fireable offense? The tool and the intent The goal of this CLI is to stop the constant context switching between the terminal and the browser. If y...
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How to Spot Red Flags of a Fraud-Driven Company

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It’s a jarring realization when you discover your professional growth was funded by a business model that didn't actually work. I spent a good chunk of my early software engineering career at a UK startup called GenieDB, which eventually got snapped up by a US venture capital fund called Frost VP. I was functionally the only piece of the company that actually moved to the States. For a while, I lived the stereotypical startup life. We built things fast and played a lot of foosball. We also actively rejected revenue opportunities, which was the standard Silicon Valley playbook at the time. The goal wasn't to build a sustainable business, but to create "pioneering technology" that someone else would eventually want to buy. The problem is that this strategy relies on a very specific kind of luck. You aren't building a product for a market, you're building a lottery ticket. I spent years sharpening my skills in an environment that treated profit as a dist...
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Building Desktop Apps with Deno Canary

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Deno is trying to do something that feels a bit reckless. They're moving past the server to build a runtime that basically guesses what your project is and handles the updates for you. It sounds like a recipe for unpredictability, but in a world where we spend half our lives fighting with config files and dependency hell, it's a bet I'm willing to take. The framework auto-detection is the part that actually interests me. If you're running an Astro or SvelteKit project, Deno just figures it out. It launches the production server in release mode or kicks off the dev server with hot reload if you pass the hmr flag. No more hunting for the exact start script in a random package.json. Then there's the binary-diff update system. Instead of making users download a whole new runtime, Deno polls a manifest and applies bsdiff patches. If the launch fails, it rolls back. It's the kind of infrastructure work that usually happens behind the scenes at a big company, ...
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Why SMPTE Made Professional Media Standards Free

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SMPTE just decided to stop charging people to read their technical specifications. For years, if you wanted the actual blueprints for how professional media tech works, you had to pay a membership fee or buy an expensive PDF. Now, the gatekeepers are stepping aside. It's a weird move. We're used to these legacy bodies hoarding their standards to maintain a sense of authority. But with the rise of the Open Services Alliance and the push for On-Set Virtual Production, the industry is moving too fast for a paywall. If the specs aren't accessible, the tools just won't get built. I'm not sure if this is a genuine shift in philosophy or just a desperate attempt to stay relevant in an era of open source. Either way, it changes how we build for the screen. The real question is whether the industry will actually use this freedom to innovate, or if we'll just find new ways to complicate things. The end of the paywall SMPTE moved to an open-access model because...
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