fidzu : web

Thirty Years of Palantir demet Fri, 08/14/2026 - 11:42

What three decades has taught us about what lasts

Thirty years ago last month, between my sophomore and junior years of college, I started a company called Palantir Internet Services, later known as Palantir.net. I had been building personal websites for nearly two years at that point and was captivated by this revolutionary new medium that allowed anyone, anywhere, to publish something that anyone else in the world could read.

While the internet touches nearly every part of our lives today, in the summer of 1996 it was still seen by many as a novelty. There were only about 250,000 websites on the web, and while Amazon and eBay had already launched, Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia were still years away.

That fall, I met Tiffany Farriss, and together we built Palantir into a company that developed websites for clients of all shapes and sizes. As college students, we were featured in a news story on CNN and profiled in a front-page Chicago Sun-Times article. Our first paying clients were colleges and universities, and then for several years we partnered with Chicago design firms who were making the transition from print to the web.

During that time, we built and deployed several versions of our own in-house content management platform, eventually deprecating it in 2007 in favor of the newly released Drupal 5. Putting our energy into contributing to an open source project not only brought us new business opportunities but also introduced us to a community we are proud to still be part of today.

Along the way we grew into a full-service digital consultancy, bringing our strategy, design, build, and support services to public sector agencies, higher education institutions, nonprofits, and healthcare organizations whose needs are genuinely complex and whose work has a profound impact on others.

Only a handful of companies in our industry have been around as long as we have. Over the years, we've watched it go through several transformations: the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, the rise of "Web 2.0" and social media in the mid-2000s, and the emergence of smartphones and the mobile web in the late 2000s.

Today, we are in the middle of one of the web's biggest transformations yet, as generative AI has fundamentally disrupted the traditional ways that online content is both created and consumed. The business models that built the web are no longer sufficient for an environment increasingly dominated by bot traffic and bot-created content. As more money has flowed into generative AI, we've seen less of it invested in other forms of online infrastructure, and that shift has affected us and many others in our industry.

At the same time, these tools have already demonstrated their usefulness for automating manual and labor-intensive work, from code review to content audits. We believe that when used thoughtfully, generative AI can improve the online experience and make vital information more accessible to more people.

And that's why, in an era of slop and enshittification, we feel it's more important than ever to recommit to our mission and vision. Palantir exists to help others discover, create, and share knowledge, and to strengthen humanity through the work that we do and the way that we do it.

We may not be able to predict the future, but 30 years of experience gives us a lot of perspective on where things have been and where they might go next. Technology keeps changing, but it's people who decide where to put their time and attention. That's the choice we've made so far, and it's the one we will continue to make.

14 Aug 2026 4:42pm GMT

I know this blog post's title implies losing my (programming) skills, and I will gladly address my feelings about how agentic coding has caused my problem-solving and coding to atrophy from lack of use. The main focus of this post is about losing, specifically deleting, my overly verbose and complicated skills and AGENTS.md files.

I was inspired to write this post after recently switching to the latest OpenAI GPT 5.6 models with Codex and OpenCode as my harnesses for Drupal development. In a previous post, I discussed that one approach to working with AI is to accept that every beginning and end of a session is like onboarding and offboarding a new team member. To help onboard an AI, we need to provide documentation, guidance, and workflows, typically implemented as AGENTS.md and agent skills.

AGENTS.md and agent skills are instructions added to your context to nudge the AI in the right direction. After switching to a more intelligent frontier model, I began to suspect I needed to rethink my assumptions about what the AI was capable of and how much initial context was required for the AI to succeed at a task. So I removed all my assumptions, deleted my AGENTS.md and skills directory, and started fresh.

Losing my agent skills

I had a hunch that some of my installed agent skills were costing me extra tokens and not adding enough value when I read a Reddit thread about "are you guys still using the superpowers skill?" Superpowers nudges coding agents to adopt a pragmatic workflow that includes brainstorming, specs, plans, tests, and review....Read More

14 Aug 2026 2:41pm GMT

Questions, story leads, and feedback on future Drupal coverage are on the agenda for contributors and community members joining the monthly meeting.

14 Aug 2026 9:39am GMT

The anniversary of the first public release of Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is a very interesting historical milestone on the decades-long road of W3C's work on fonts on the web.

28 Jul 2026 2:40pm GMT

This blog post is about incremental improvements by W3C's IT/Systems Operations Team that puts task force participation management directly in the hands of participants and chairs.

24 Jul 2026 10:35am GMT

At the European Identity and Cloud Conference (EIC 2026) in Berlin, we explored how Threat Modeling with LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® can help uncover security, privacy, and human-rights threats in age-based content restriction systems. Starting from an Issuer-Holder-Verifier model, participants built harms such as exclusion, surveillance, profiling, and correlation, then mapped them back to flows, actors, and assumptions. The exercise showed how compliance choices can become Web architecture.

20 Jul 2026 9:23am GMT

On January 14, 2006, John Resig introduced a JavaScript library called jQuery at BarCamp in New York City. Now, 20 years later, the jQuery team is happy to announce the final release of jQuery 4.0.0. After a long development cycle and several pre-releases, jQuery 4.0.0 brings many improvements and modernizations. It is the first major … Continue reading →

18 Jan 2026 12:29am GMT

It's here! Almost. jQuery 4.0.0-rc.1 is now available. It's our way of saying, "we think this is ready; now poke it with many sticks". If nothing is found that requires a second release candidate, jQuery 4.0.0 final will follow. Please try out this release and let us know if you encounter any issues. A 4.0 … Continue reading →

11 Aug 2025 5:35pm GMT

Last February, we released the first beta of jQuery 4.0.0. We're now ready to release a second, and we expect a release candidate to come soon™. This release comes with a major rewrite to jQuery's testing infrastructure, which removed all deprecated or under-supported dependencies. But the main change that warranted a second beta was a … Continue reading →

17 Jul 2024 2:03pm GMT

When it comes to crafting an article, the headline is crucial for grabbing the reader's attention and enticing them to read further. In this post, I'll explore the 7 types of article headlines and provide examples for each using the subjects of product management, user experience design, and search engine optimization. 1. The Know-it-All The […]

The post 7 Types of Article Headlines: Craft the Perfect Title Every Time first appeared on Smiley Cat.

29 May 2023 10:20pm GMT

Product management is one of the most exciting and rewarding careers in the tech world. But it's also one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented. There are many myths and misconceptions that cloud the reality of what product managers do, how they do it, and what skills they need to succeed. In this blog post, […]

The post 5 Product Management Myths You Need to Stop Believing first appeared on Smiley Cat.

09 Apr 2023 5:28pm GMT

The role of a product manager is crucial to the success of any product. They are responsible for managing the entire product life cycle, from conceptualization to launch and beyond. A product manager must possess a unique blend of skills and qualities to be effective in their role. Strong strategic thinking A product manager must […]

The post The Key Strengths of the Best Product Managers first appeared on Smiley Cat.

11 Dec 2022 4:43pm GMT

Last week I helped the folks at ezSystems debug some APC problems they were having. The problems ended up being a 64bit architecture problem (they have uber-fast Opterons) and the bug is now fixed in 2.0.3.

Today I received Python & XML from them (off my Amazon wishlist). Thanks guys!

On a side note, my wishlist seems borked. The list I get when I search on my email address or name is not the same one I can edit when I log into the site.

01 Apr 2004 6:53pm GMT

1st of April 2004 get's to it's end and I guess it's time, to summarize the recent April fools a bit. Not that I think anyone in the world believes in them, but some were quite funny:

1. Changes to case sensitivity in PHP.
Alan Knowles announced that PHP will change to the studlyCase API and therefor will get everything broken by changing established functions.

2. IBM takes over Zend.
Myself hacked a little article about IBM taking over Zend to make PHP a compete of Java.

3. The first PHP virus has been seen.
Wasn't there one last year, too?

4. PHP has been overtaken by Micro$oft.
Mhhh... a little bit unreliable, if they had been taken over by IBM this morning... Maybe one should first look, what others wrote...

5. And finally, PHP4 and 5 showed their real faces...
Take a look at a phpinfo() output!

I guess I missed some, so feel free to comment on this entry, if you found another!

01 Apr 2004 5:49pm GMT

Symantec have a report of the virus here. I've yet to see any of the PHP news sites picking up on it but, using a virtual host account, managed to deliberately expose some PHP scripts to it. From examining the infected scripts, what's disturbing is once infected, every tim...

01 Apr 2004 12:19pm GMT