← Feed

Posts

• View post

  You know something is afoot when these stickers are on pumps in super red South Carolina. #nokings

• View post

  Software principles that last don't come from architects in glass offices. They come from practitioners who noticed what kept working. These principles arose from doing the work. They did not descend from on high from those far removed from the work. This, I feel, is the most fundamental truth about doing work: those without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

• View post

  Renting other people's computers is expensive. Until you go look at buying them and then running them in a data center and paying for the Internet you need there for >100 servers. And don't forget paying people to manage those servers.

• View post

  Mechanical sympathy is this niche idea that doesn't get as much play as I think it should in software engineering. Have you heard the phrase before? If so, how have you heard it invoked?

• View post

  If someone offered you a sum of money to quit your job today without another one to go to and you're not allowed to just go back to your current job, what's the least you'd take to do that? What would you do after you quit? Why? And if there's no amount, why? Just curious. No judgement.

• View post

  How much would your next job have to offer you to take it? (Stated in % compared to your present job.) In all other ways as far as you can tell, it's like your current job. Same field, same benefits, etc.

• View post

  Internet programming attacks through the ages 80s: hehe...I pretended to be Bob on IRC 90s: 1k people went to my website at once and the server caught on fire 00s: PHP/ActiveX/Flash - we make tech that's basically designed to be hacked 10s: one of these 10k nodejs dependencies got hijacked, glhf figuring out which one 20s: the LLM got prompted-injected via emojis

• View post

  Any software engineering leader ignoring Shirky Principle risks wrecking their org. "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." This principle explains why organizations often resist changes that would eliminate the very problems they were created to solve. 1/

• View post

  Are we all just following the dopamine? Yeah, that's the entire thought.

• View post

  More people should embrace "probably" instead of certainitly. I recently had someone express nearby me that ADHD is certainly not real, and my immediate reaction was to say, they were certainly wrong. I didn't actually express this because they weren't talking to me. And upon reflection that reaction itself is wrong. Understandable, but wrong. They are almost certainly wrong based on current evidence. That is a better framing. Also for the record, this is wh...

• View post

  I made an index of CLI tools written in rust: https://inrust.dev Enjoy!

• View post

  I'm not anti-LLM. I'm just pro-thinking. Everyone I know who is REALLY into AI uses it for reading EVERYTHING longer than 1000 words. It's the mental equivalent of eating only smoothies, because they go down easier. I say this with love: reading is thinking. Stop letting slop think for you.

• View post

  Can code be objectively good? Objectively is doing a lot of work here so let me be very clear. I'm thinking in terms of something like if a hypothesis in science is good. - testable / falsifiable - specific, makes a clear prediction - consistent with existing evidence - parsimonious, that it's simple - fruitful, leads somewhere 1/

• View post

  🔥 take for this audience. LLMs are a dead end for AGI, a dead end for many applications, and that still makes them useful. They're just not the genies that certain financially incentivized people claim they are. The big model makers are incredibly wasteful and incredibly not transparent. Why would they be? Their ability to make money hinges on this stuff seeming to be magic. It's not magic. It's math. We've taught old rocks new tricks. 1/

• View post

  OH: "In today's AI rich env...."

• View post

  I particularly love this cover of Tool's Schism: https://youtu.be/uDT1tniPD2Q?si=LE5N7VljmnFV8oHz

• View post

  I think I need more field notes.

• View post

  #nokings

• View post

  Have you ever had AI help you remove code? Genuine question. Not rhetroical to make a point. I ask it because whenever I use it claude code or anything else the codebase just seems to naturally inflate, and it'll never really suggest to you, "hey, uh, we got like 10k lines in this function...maybe that's unwieldly." And before someone is like,"well, it won't ever suggest a thing." I've totally had it suggest ideas. It&#39...

• View post

  Recently read a book that said the central concern of software engineering is complexity. I initially was agreeing until the author defined complexity which was this: anything related to the structure of a system that makes it hard to understand and modify. I don't have a better definition to put in its place, but that one sounds suspiciously similar to the original definition of tech debt.

• View post

  I'm suddenly both tempted to move to Mumbai and also to stay as far away as possible https://youtube.com/shorts/yuPJ5s7jVEc

• View post

  I want to particularly hammer on the Amazon point, as _all_ big tech at this point is very problematic, but Amazon's main source of profit is AWS and the Federal government is their largest contract. If you can get your company to switch to a competitor (yes, even GCP or Azure), then you can message why you're switching from and to.

• View post

  When you wonder why a colleague wrote that convoluted function. When you become curious why a user clicked the wrong button. When you ask why your manager is pushing hard on a deadline. You have become more human. Yes, you will get better outcomes too. If you do it for that reason, move from a place of service and curiosity and towards a place of where people are things for you to get what you want. And we don't want that in our lives. You don't want others to treat you that way.

• View post

  'murica. Land of "you will own nothing and be happy" https://youtube.com/shorts/osml_SGSTlk

• View post

  https://youtube.com/shorts/NzEkKGhPshw I aspire to greatness like this