A blog about connections by Bobbie Chen
Piecing together how software connects to itself and society.

Bobbie Chen 3/23/26 Bobbie Chen 3/23/26

The Phantoms of the Fraudpera: an overview of anti-detection tooling

My talk at BSides SF 2026

Bobbie Chen 3/1/26 Bobbie Chen 3/1/26

Assorted links (2026-03-01)

Clashes of tech and the US government.

Bobbie Chen 2/8/26 Bobbie Chen 2/8/26

Making a font with 9,999 ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals

Bobbie Chen 1/25/26 Bobbie Chen 1/25/26

The behavioral cost of personalized pricing

Bobbie Chen 1/11/26 Bobbie Chen 1/11/26

Computers that used to be human

Bobbie Chen 11/30/25 Bobbie Chen 11/30/25

Year one for Digital Seams

And what’s next.

Bobbie Chen 10/19/25 Bobbie Chen 10/19/25

Any decent error message is a kind of oracle

The real reason for all those “Oops!”

Bobbie Chen 10/5/25 Bobbie Chen 10/5/25

A recent phishing attack on GitHub

Bobbie Chen 9/21/25 Bobbie Chen 9/21/25

Image transcription humbled me

Plus thoughts on the bitter lesson.

Bobbie Chen 9/7/25 Bobbie Chen 9/7/25

Image descriptions on Bluesky

A firsthand investigation of 2.8 million posts.

Bobbie Chen 8/23/25 Bobbie Chen 8/23/25

The Gypsy document editor: celebrating 50 years

Bobbie Chen 8/9/25 Bobbie Chen 8/9/25

Assorted links (2025-08-10)

Art, history, and the agent experience.

Bobbie Chen 7/27/25 Bobbie Chen 7/27/25

Interfaces for representing uncertainty

Bobbie Chen 7/13/25 Bobbie Chen 7/13/25

What birdsong and backends can teach us about magic

Bobbie Chen 6/29/25 Bobbie Chen 6/29/25

Why do Sublime Text and VS Code use Ctrl-Shift-P instead of Ctrl-K for the command bar?

Bobbie Chen 6/15/25 Bobbie Chen 6/15/25

The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end

Or, why your digital experiences are about to get worse.

Bobbie Chen 6/1/25 Bobbie Chen 6/1/25

Skip the A/B test

Bobbie Chen 5/18/25 Bobbie Chen 5/18/25

The dial-up modem lives on, in office meeting rooms

Bobbie Chen 5/4/25 Bobbie Chen 5/4/25

When encryption works perfectly and still fails

Bobbie Chen 4/20/25 Bobbie Chen 4/20/25

Assorted links (2025-04-20)

Few-shot prompting (in 1993!), the history of "So-and-so is typing", automation pitfalls, and business hours.