I have never given Jeff Bezos a moment’s thought before this week. I am always interested in extraordinary achievement and often admire it. I am fascinated by what extraordinary achievers understand, and how evolved they are as people. Looking at him in his astronaut costume, and his cowboy hat, and…
Trenchant, brilliant stuff by William Kennedy 💯 (Cached)…
Molly White asks if Web3 is bullshit. Short and excellent talk.…
Definitely the future of television I had in mind was me having to google every movie I want to watch to see if it’s currently in one of its one-month windows on any of the seven streaming services I pay for. This is way easier than buying a DVD. I love it. @chasemit…
Jira is middle-management-ware, a term I made up for software that serves the needs of middle management, or, at least, the needs middle management thinks it has, which comes to the same thing as long as you’re selling to them. (link) Jira is a tire fire. It should be condemned and officially des…
Amil Niazi in a sobering article about ambition, COVID, women, mothers, and late-stage capitalism.…
It’s what all the Patagonia-clads are raving about. They tell me it solves all perf problems in a snap. Update Here’s an NPM package. And, of course, Java if you’d like to deploy this in an Enterprise™ setting.…
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This really got me: My job is to keep our code running while other packagers are changing theirs. Lord have mercy. NPM continued use and existence is proof that (Almost) Every Day is a Miracle ✨…
Software is and has been engaged in an endless race to the bottom. Wrong. The Achievements of the software industry over the last thirty years are astonishing. They’ve managed to entirely negate several orders of magnitude of performance improvements provided by the hardware industry. Anonymous.…
Here’s Bryan Cantrill’s classic assessment of Oracle Corporation (taken from this talk.) /misc/b/bryan-cantrill-oracle-1.mp4 On Twitter, a year after that video: If you were an enterprise database customer who hadn’t heard of the Nazis, might it be easiest to explain them with Oracle allegory? @b…
Excellent stuff, particularly the mechanical keyboard envy1. There’s a Nikhil in it too! 💁♂️ I don’t think I’ll get into them. Got myself one of these (brown switches) about three years ago after outsourcing the research to a highly enthusiastic and helpful co-worker. The “L” key sticks sometimes…
Because we don’t simply write non-annoying and non-creepy software that respects you and does the thing you want it to do anymore. Gotta deliver Value™ to all key stakeholders. By which we mean ourselves and the Market. Not you. You are nothing more than Data that taps “Purchase” to us.…
Old stuff, but always immensely satisfying to read ♥️…
Amdahl’s Law The speedup gained from running a program on a parallel computer is greatly limited by the fraction of that program that can’t be parallelized. Augustine’s Second Law of Socioscience For every scientific (or engineering) action, there is an equal and opposite social reaction. Brooks…
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. Frank Herbert, Dune…
Low resolution but enough to make the point. /misc/e/every-website-2021.mp4 See also: Every Website in 2019 and 2018. The mobile web is a garbage nightmare shitshow (especially if you want to read any fucking news.)…
The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer,” Milton said. “That’s the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let’s [sic] us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language…
The key takeaways in no particular order. Use <noscript>. If you are using it, use it a lot more. There is no guarantee that chunks will load after the main one does; the user’s location and/or network access might have changed! Think CalTrain. ISPs, Corporate VPNs, and Browser Plugins1 can m…
If you’ve ever installed a program using “curl XYZ | sh” don’t worry about what’s in the vaccine Daniel Feldman ♥️♥️♥️…
My university just announced that it’s dumping Blackboard, and there was much rejoicing. Why is Blackboard universally reviled? There’s a standard story of why “enterprise software” sucks. If you’ll bear with me, I think this is best appreciated by talking about… baby clothes! There are two types of…
Estimate Actual Time Very Easy 1 Hour Easy 2 Hours Quite Easy 4 Hours Looks Quite Easy 6 Hours Average 8 Hours Looks Average 12 Hours No Clue 16 Hours Seems Complex 24 Hours Complex 30 Hours Very Complex 40 Hours Can Take Some Time 48 Hours Fuck 60 Hours Yeah Looks Pre…
No. It’s just a fucking operating system1. A giant program on a computer. What weird, disconnected, embarrassing bullshit ‘spiritual’ techbro nonsense. “We made a website full of memes you can search through, powered by Bitcoin and Machine-Learning (of course), and are changing the world.” No. Stop…
me, a software engineer: large scale production systems are complex and require teams of experts to keep running. It’s near impossible to get right 100% of the time me, when an app I use goes down once: these fucking clowns, what the fuck @aweary…
Uber in 2016: “We have thousands of microservices.” Everyone: “That sounds insane." Uber in 2020: “It turns out that was insane.” @sandofsky…
“For all that we’ve been able to achieve while many of us have been separated, the truth is that there has been something essential missing from this past year: each other,” [Tim Cook] said. “Video conference calling has narrowed the distance between us, to be sure, but there are things it simply…
One of the most disheartening charts I’ve seen about the current hyperpartisan political climate. We fear each other so much more. – Source I suppose all’s fine and dandy if you’re in news or social media and are spiritually obligated to deliver Value™ to stakeholders via those almighty engagement…
Here’s some Buzzword Bingo based on these words by the same company. accelerate accountability action items actionable aggregator agile algorithm alignment analytics at the end of the day B2B/B2C bandwidth below the fold best of breed best practices beta big data bleeding edge blueprint boil the oc…
This is for children under 13. Because children over 13 engage with Social Media in very healthy and fruitful ways. “They are also simply too young to navigate the complexities of what they encounter online, including inappropriate content and online relationships where other users, including preda…
Because the only thing that matters is delivering Value to shareholders. (cached) Incidentally, and to the “huh” of many Value-illiterate people, defending totalitarian governments is exactly how one gives “people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”…
I love this more than I can describe.…
“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolki…
I’m not a great developer, I’m just really good at finding the magic one-liner fix on the 14th page on a repo’s GitHub Issues @iamdevloper…
Well… not really. Maybe. Brian Will examines the history of the OOP way of thinking and it’s over-application as a panacea to every problem domain, particularly in The Enterprise™ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM…
This is what it takes to view a read a bloody article with a PiHole to block ads. I don’t even want to get started on the AMP nonsense. First, a focus-stealing popup asking if you’d like to subscribe to some bullshit. . . . followed by another popup asking you’d subscribe to more bullshit. . . . a…
Dear web developers, The answer is zero. Zero. Get it through your thick skulls. Zero is the number of times anyone has EVER wanted something to autoplay on your site and start making noise. I’d honestly rather you mine crypto-currency in my browser than use my speakers. #kthxbye @MalwareJake…
“Our hip product designers all agree: Adding significant noise via tiny profile pictures allows our users to tell, at a glance, who is online and who isn’t.” “And no, you cannot opt out. Because fuck you. What’re your options? MatterMost? 🖕😂🖕”…
to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Facebook’s engagement practices and likens them to time-tested strategies used by Big Tobacco before they were somewhat regulated. And he would know. Kendall was the former “Director of Monetization” at Facebook and is currently the CEO of Moment, a c…
The software industry is currently going through the “disposable plastic” crisis the physical world went through in the mid-20th century (and is still paying down the debt for). You can run software from 1980 or 2005 on a modern desktop without too much hassle, but anything between there and 2-3 ye…
/misc/e/every-website-2019.mp4 Source. See also: Every website in 2018…
Being a satirical take on the state of enterprise software development, and authored by smart people who presumably like to watch the world burn. The issues are highly entertaining as well.…
On tech culture’s obsession with quantifying and optimizing every single moment of one’s existence1: I hate this framing. It is pressuring, dehumanizing as it contextualizes human endeavor in transactional terms, usually in a market. I know this goes against the ethos of high-tech, but humans don’t…
I’ve usually heard this phenomenon called “incidental duplication”, and it’s something I find myself teaching junior engineers about quite often. There are a lot of situations where 3-5 lines of many methods follow basically the same pattern, and it can be aggravating to look at. “Don’t repeat you…
Dec 9 It’s so bad a Swiss company made a much saner substitute that sells for ~$20. Nov 16 Looks like you can use the old remote with the new AppleTV. I’m annoyed every time I have to use the infernal thing. It tries (poorly) to be something other than a damn TV remote1. There’s no way to tell w…
I absolutely love Dustin Curtis’ splendid explanation of “AppleTV” branding that’s making making the rounds on HN. For posterity, I stole this handy color-coded transcription off Michael Tsai’s blog. See also: The intractably stupid AppleTV Remote.…
When I was little — and by the way, I was little once — my father told me a story about an 18th century watchmaker. And what this guy had done: he used to produce these fabulously beautiful watches. And one day, one of his customers came into his workshop and asked him to clean the watch that he’d…
No Code is the best way to write secure and reliable applications. Write nothing; deploy nowhere. Start by not writing any code. Brilliant. I love both the presence and contents of the Dockerfile in that repo. As is always the case with such projects, the issues and pull requests are 💯 And if one…
Back in the second century BC, Cato the Elder ended his speeches with the phrase ‘Carthago delenda est,’ which is to say, ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ It didn’t matter what the ostensible topic of the speech was: above all, Carthage must be destroyed. My opinion towards JavaScript is much like Cat…
At least in Civilization: [. . .] Gandhi tends to be the first to use nuclear weapons, and spares no expense on wiping your civilization off the map. You probably always thought you were crazy — how could a series that prides itself on historical accuracy portray Gandhi so wrong? Well, you’ll be ha…
OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I’m not aware of them. – Dr. Alan Kay on the Meaning of “Obje…
A great complement to the book. When I think of Theranos, I really think that there were two entirely different worlds. There was the carpeted world and there was the tiled world. In the carpeted world where Elizabeth was a goddess. Everyone, you know, almost worshipped the ground she walked on. Sh…
In programming, it is also common to refer to the “NIH syndrome” as the tendency towards reinventing the wheel (reimplementing something that is already available) based on the belief that in-house developments are inherently better suited, more secure, more controlled, quicker to develop, and incu…
Shturmovshchina was a common Soviet work practice of frantic and overtime work at the end of a planning period in order to fulfill the planned production target. The practice usually gave rise to products of poor quality at the end of a planning cycle. It has three very, very familiar stages Spi…
For a single project I made the mistake of working on in my Dropbox folder: Wonder what the downsides are to hardlinking by default. And, fundamentally, why creating an amazing, Python-like standard library is such an intractable problem in the first place. […] core-js is also utils library, qui…
In addition, engineers have commoditized many technical solutions that used to be challenging in the past 15 years. Scaling used to be a tough challenge, not any more for many companies. In fact, part of my daily job is to prevent passionate engineers from reinventing wheels in the name of achievin…
Saw this minor dis by Safari and then this video on the history of Java. Also by the author: something of a tribute to Flash (RIP.)…
margin: 0; padding: 0; ... margin: 0 !important; padding: 0 !important; ... sudo margin: 0 !important; sudo padding: 0 !important via @thebarrytone…
/misc/e/every-website-2018.mp4 Source…
What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling them. The things you say often don’t stick, and the few things that do stick are often distorted. Also, most…
XKCD. Add to the mix virtualenvwrapper pyenv pipenv pythonbrew Conda Then there’s Python’s packaging and distribution kerfuffle……