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Tedium. The newsletter all your other newsletters look up to.

Since 2015, Ernie Smith's Tedium has been hunting for the end of the long tail, and we've yet to find it. But we'd sure love it if you followed us on our journey. Especially now that we're ten friggin' years old and we're still using a Street Fighter II slogan as our subscribe button. Validate the use of obscure video game slang as a successful subscription strategy. Click the button.

 

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The USB That Wasn’t
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The USB That Wasn’t

A few years before the Universal Serial Bus took over the world of peripherals, another upstart standard aimed to do the same thing. And I’m not talking about FireWire.

By Ernie Smith • February 17, 2025
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New Rust, Old Drama

The periodic Rust-induced conflicts happening with the Linux kernel hint at underlying generational problems facing the project. And it’s already led a prominent maintainer to quit.

By Ernie Smith • February 14, 2025

The Legacy Of SNARF

BuzzFeed, the ultimate social media team player, decides that it needs a social media platform of its own. In the process, it gave us a crazy new buzzword.

By Ernie Smith • February 11, 2025

The Eggshell’s Outer Shell

Just in time for the eggs to completely fall out of the affordability range of the middle class, let’s talk about egg cartons.

By Ernie Smith • February 10, 2025

Broken Bits

Bitly, the link-shortening service used by millions, decides it’s going to drop an ad between you and your link. Don’t like it? It’ll cost ya.

By Ernie Smith • February 7, 2025

The New DVD Bargain Bin

A major studio is apparently treating YouTube as a place to drop some of its archive films that have lost their cinematic luster. My mind is admittedly blown.

By Ernie Smith • February 5, 2025

A Dossier Container Dossier

How we got Manila folders and envelopes, and what “Manila” means in the context of said folder. Hint: It’s not a color, and you may find the source surprising.

By Ernie Smith • February 3, 2025

Don’t Call Me, I’ll Call You

On large language models, artificial intelligence, DeepSeek, and trying to find the middle lane between skepticism and surety. I mention bionic arms a lot for some reason.

By Ernie Smith • January 29, 2025

Just Moving Data Around

We take the idea of copying files across folders and drives for granted today, but the guy who invented the original tool considered it a leap of faith.

By Ernie Smith • January 27, 2025

My Big Dumb Webmail Client

They say you don’t know what email’s all about until you’ve built a webmail client of your own. I guess I kind of get it now.

By Ernie Smith • January 25, 2025
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