Posts

Good to have explained this explicitly why mathematics is such an essential component of programming. People without an inclination for this kind of abstract mathematical thinking often are poor and chaotic programmers.

Many chefs I know get upset at me when I tell them this. But this is the truth: If you can’t cook everything you make in a microwave thats a skill issue.

This is a fair point not to import code and instead fully qualify what it is that you are using.

Let’s hope Steve Klabnik’s instincts are right a second time round. Seeing the potential of Rust and making it real is already a great accomplishment. If he manages to do the same with jj and get us out of the git/Github mess, that’ll be a spectacular twofer.

Being close to tech and now also to schools, I can tell you that those two things should not mix in any way. The only interchange should be levying taxes on tech companies to better fund schools.

When comedians say that Silicon Valley CEOs (and Mark Zuckerberg especially) are bitch coded, this is what they mean.

Alternative licenses like the Forklift Certified License are a good and necessary counter-reaction to open source becoming a corporate hollowed out shambles.

Predictions are a nice business because at some point they will be true.

Lots of respect for the people who spend years pushing something like a standardised Python lock file. It’s crucial but invisible work.

I still haven’t upgraded to the new iOS and seeing these reports, I’m not sure whether I should.

When people say that Kubernetes is complicated, this is the stuff they mean. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to play this complexity game reliably, so the only reasonable way through would be not to play.

If your reliability depends on heroic efforts or arcane knowledge from individuals, then you have no reliability. This week’s AWS outage shows that clearly. Whatever conclusions you draw from that is up to you.

What I always say: “Premature abstraction is the root of all evil.”

I am not that sure that AI workslop is that much of problem in a healthy workplace.

The harder the constraint, the more dangerous it is.

We really should have Starlark as a configuration language everywhere because it’s very expressive and easy to read/understand. Instead we’re stuck with ever increasing piles of YAML and obscure configuration formats that nobody wants to deal with.

That’s a deep dive through layers and layers of abstraction from Rust to LLVM intrinsics to instruction expansion at the processor level.

Software can only be proven right within a set of assumptions. Something as simple as leftpad can be broken in any number of interesting ways.

Visual explanations of mathematical concepts are nice if they work. Here’s one such explanation of functional optics which is almost kinda accessible.

It’s always been my feeling that TLS has unacceptable collateral damage in how it breaks the web for normal people. That’s considered a bit of a crank opinion, but I’m definitely not the only person who feels that way.

The Bitter Lesson is an interesting concept. Stuffing the prompt runs into diminishing returns pretty quickly but on the other hand, getting your AI to play well with tools is challenging.

Did anybody get any benefit from the fact that we are now stuck with Atom and RSS?

Cycling home from having done groceries yesterday night, I wondered why there were police officers with machine guns standing on the sidewalk.

The marketing that DHH does for projects was always bad, disingenuous and annoying.

It was obvious long ago that DHH is a problem for the Rails community. After recent events the situation seems to have finally become untenable.

An explanation of the AT Protocol and how it could be the open layer that allows everybody to own their data.

Every programming language has to strike a balance when it comes to abstraction and none of them get it right. Rust is written in a way that is often too abstract for the things that you want to do with it.

Github is over and many leading edge developers have already moved off or are seriously considering it.

We should have more histories of software. There are lots of things that have been tried out and learned which if they aren’t captured will disappear entirely.

The guide to sqlite query planning and tuning is cool, but what’s even better is that this kind of scale and optimisations are possible at all with sqlite.

The situation described here where AI writes 90% of the code is almost entirely the same as how any software engineer works already. The only thing that’s changing is that instead of code you’re writing instructions to the LLM.

He is a Marxist who understands the importance of money and markets; without Marx, you cannot understand the movement of history, but without money, you can’t do anything about it.

This week economists have been congratulating themselves on following Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson into institutions. They are, in effect, proud to have discovered the rest of the social sciences.

Listening to this episode on the trial of John Brown I gasped several times. It’s a wild story of deep moral conviction and powerful oratory.

Glad to see improvements like this can be made without fuss and drama. The ASF is obviously better and long overdue.

At some point you have to ask yourself how many predators work at Meta. They seem hell bent on targeting children. You don’t have to be a predator to work at Meta but it helps.

The point is that once again China is teaching us to think at scale. The future scale of a more developed, post-Western world is gigantic. If we are to have any hope of climate stabilization the only realistic policy, therefore, is not some twee Western European vision of “sustainability”, it is radical and transformative. Cities will be bigger, energy needs will be bigger, production will be bigger than anything we have previously conceived.

Gleam is truly a dream of a programming language. I’m looking forward to launch my project and do more with it.

Compared to the way I had to learn about B-trees (poorly photocopied sheets bound into a reader), this interactive page is a dream.

Postgres is *the* database engine (together with sqlite) and knowledge about its internals is becoming more than a nice to have.

Litestar is an interesting addition to the list of Python microframeworks with a lot going for it.

We’re seeing increasingly more posts about jj coming out and I can’t repeat enough that it is totally worth switching away from git.

Every time I have to cross-compile something (usually in Rust to run on the cloud somewhere) it’s always rather confusing to figure out the correct target triples. Weird that something that’s this fundamental is documented this poorly.

That’s definitely a phrase worth remembering:

The write-up how Bun can be so fast is a good exploration in all the things that computers are good at now. Machines and our networks have gotten much faster and much more parallel which influences what an optimal approach to building software is now.

Subway Takes is publishing episodes they filmed in Berlin’s U-Bahn, and the results are both amusing and unexpectedly revealing.

The disabled creating custom prosthetics and turning themselves into highly visible and fashionable “neo-people” is at least one positive way that cyberpunk is turning into reality.

Attitudes towards part-time employment of men are a good proxy indicator of how sophisticated the economy is and also of gender equality.

An excellent Jujutsu reference covering most of the basic operations you will need.

The AWS CEO doing not much more than stating the obvious when it comes to AI and software engineering.