When Cloudflare goes down but you still remember how to program without Copilot

This is awesome. Listening to Lake District Radio - DJ Lee Durrant is playing for 24 hours (from 8am GMT) in protest against the sewage being dumped into the lakes. He's only playing songs that made it to "number two" in the UK charts :D bsky.app/profile/radi...

Tried to find the page documenting my main No Man's Sky base. I do also play Palworld. This is hilarious.

Software devs solve problems that haven’t been solved before, or solve them in new contexts; otherwise we’d be buying (or open sourcing) solutions. When AI solves problems that don’t come from its training data set, I’ll worry about my mortgage. Until then it’s great for the other stuff. Mostly.

AI is super-helpful, especially when we tread on someone else's specialist turf to get things done. But it still takes a human to help you check / test the work, and AIs can't tell you who the right person is to do that, or reach out to them for you. As ever, the hardest problems in SW are human.

Specialisms in modern SW means that we have to work with each other: to over-communicate, relentlessly clarify priorities, work as a team-of-teams when they shift, create and clean up docs, and it's always messy no matter how hard you try. Katherine Kirk calls it "the entanglement of entanglement."

It's been eye-opening getting "back to the coal face". The complexity of modern software development is mind-boggling. Back in 2000 one person could reasonably hold the whole of an Enterprise website plus services in their head having spent a year or so on it. Now we necessarily have specialisms.

I stumbled across this essay as I was falling asleep last night, and left myself multiple emphatic reminders to remember to circle back to it today. "The joy we're about to lose...we'll become overseers rather than creators, managers rather than builders." annievella.com/posts/the-so...

We need Wranglers + Engineers. medium.com/mapai/from-f...

This seems like a good time to remind folks of what Hannah Arendt once wrote:

What gets me about the Signal chat isn't the chat itself. It's that nobody can answer the question: "What other information has been compromised?" This will not be the only thread, possibly not the only leak, and anything > 4 weeks old is deleted. They have no idea what they leaked, to who.

@RonJeffries.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy Just found my copy of Kate Oneal's "The Mythical Italian Restaurant" which you gave me as a gift the first time we met (Agile 2005?) for my clumsy explanation of BDD to you and Chet. Finding it today made me smile - thank you!

Don’t ask Amazon Q Developer to put code under test for you. It thinks you’re trying to “put it under”, refuses, and directs you to the Responsible AI Policy instead.

Newsletter: Our digital lives are unregulated growth-hacked ecological disasters. The modern tech ecosystem's growth-at-all-costs mindset is actively harming billions of people, pushing them toward authoritarianism for profit. We must fight back. www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

Wow, the Cynefin.io wiki has come a long way since I last looked at it! This page on the vector theory of change is really concise and has a great example of dispositional landscapes: cynefin.io/wiki/Vector_... - would love to pass this on to change agents everywhere!

Here's a puzzle. How do y'all work out what data you need from your users and data constraints, alongside your emergent product, when you can't get the data later if you didn't get it from the get-go and you can't put data constraints in if the data is already a mess? What should I read / watch?

Had a lot of conversations this year about Doug Hubbard's method of calibrating estimation confidence - found a great write-up of it here. Next time they ask you for an estimate, ask what level of confidence they're looking for! www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/11/11/a...

This seemed inevitable to me after just a couple of weeks evaluating GPT-4 and previous versions. First rule of reality: it's *always* an S-curve. garymarcus.substack.com/p/confirmed-...

@lunivore.bsky.social coined the term 'sadlines' and i think it's revolutionary.

Can you imagine going to a restaurant and yelling at the waitress to bring your food faster, following her around the room shrieking at her and when she finally sets your in meal in front of you, sniffing it and walking outside. MY CAT CAN

12 years later and Cynefin for everyone is still such a useful post. Thanks @lunivore.bsky.social lizkeogh.com/cynefin-for-...

Optimist: the cup is 1/2 full Pessimist: the cup is 1/2 empty Excel: the cup is January 2nd

The National Gallery in London is renovating its Sainsbury Wing and they’ve just found a secret letter from one of the original donors, sunk into a concrete column, saying that he hates the columns and is glad they’re being demolished. 10/10 unhinged rich man behaviour, no notes

wrote a thing idly after the kids went to bed

I'm watching some folks reverse engineer the xz backdoor, sharing some *preliminary* analysis with permission. The hooked RSA_public_decrypt verifies a signature on the server's host key by a fixed Ed448 key, and then passes a payload to system(). It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable.

This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/