"Managers are the new super-ICs in this AI age" say a bunch of agentic posts popping in all over. Corrected: "Developers are now managers, you just 10x-ed your organizational breadth and communication chaos"

See also: asking ChatGPT for legal advice is a really bad idea because your chats aren’t privileged and can be subpoenaed: perkinscoie.com/insights/upd...

Rereading portions of Continuous Deliver for input on a long SDLC post I may eventually finish. It's always interesting to open a book like this 10+ years later and see how much became part of how we work and how much of the underlying value never made it into common usage.

This doesn't even feel like it was written 20 years ago: spectrum.ieee.org/why-software...

"What matters about creating alignment around a strategy is not the volume of communication, but its quality and precision." I swear I intended to play video games this morning, got sucked into a great book summary instead. Lots of gems: www.lostbookofsales.com/notes/book-s...

Here is a very current example: a lot of younger people have never done «trunk based development», they think GitHub PRs are the epitome of software development. But PRs were made to support a workflow that makes 100% sense in open source, but often just adds «quality theatre» for team development.

I'm glad "2 pizza teams" was one of the things we took from early Amazon management style and not "don't forget to look under your chair to see if you have been reassigned today".

And it is infinitly cheaper to fix security bugs BEFORE you ship rather than after"

Sometimes people think I'm joking when I say I break software by using it. Today my RSS reader says I have -1 items waiting. One interpretation is that I've read so much this morning that I looped back around into the negatives. Or maybe I tapped the "Mark as Read" with the wrong finger...

Slowly working on a new web architecture post (or maybe series, tbd). Diagram that started out being part of a discussion about how to thoughtfully design your architecture somehow ended up instead being a commentary about a few common architecture patterns.

Look, if you're on us-west-2 and it has problems, then you have to explain a million times to everyone that it's not your app it's AWS. If, however, you're on us-east-1, you don't even have to respond. They already know (and your ticket system is probably down anyway).

Three months late, but I really liked this one: rebels.cs.uwaterloo.ca/papers/tse20... Authors claim that type annotations catch ~15% of bugs found in the wild, with breakdowns of type of bug, how long they estimated annotations would take, etc.

The 1s problem with established companies running teams "like a startup" is most of the folks you're saying "be a startup" to don't have the experience of running a successful startup, they're going to copy the memes. The 2nd problem is lack of direct contact with the market to learn differently.

Woke up to an email that one of my kids has been suspended from the Playstation network again. I'm fairly certain it was a retaliatory report. The process to get any info on what he was suspended for or to have it re-evaluated is "no, we don't make mistakes".

The S in MCP stands for security

1.6 million people showed no statistical increase in 29 adverse events after mRNA covid vax jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... #MedSky

The Smithsonian Institution is not backing down on its stance that Congress has no legal authority to mandate Discovery's removal, and they're bringing the receipts. www.space.com/space-explor...

Agreed. I also found that many investors (and engineers) wanted to hear a lot about the prompt engineering or custom models, and less about all the engineering around it. From the outside the LLM is magic that makes the system work, but on the inside it's the total opposite.

Trying to decide if dropbox having a drip campaign that includes emailing users with 15+ year old accounts with tips like "Take dropbox to the next level by creating folders" is poorly thought out or really, really clever.

Azure portal: "We know you're using one of the cheapest possible tiers that doesn't even get pennies worth of SSL cert support, but you should consider adding frontdoor because you receive traffic from *handwave* lots of places"

Using a CLI tool that has AI generated usage examples of a command when I misuse it. I'm all for using "AI" (LLMs) where it helps, but there are a ton of CLI base libraries that solve this already and won't suggest 2 (of 3) commands that ignore the required options (aka: don't work).

Things I've broken today: - Apple Family: a success dialog near the end shows up with an accessibility token instead of the actual message - Apple Music: Signing in as a child account for the first time fails with "Cannot complete purchase" error (grant purchase sharing briefly to get past it)

What a strange way to do business. Needed to contact playstation support today, and they have really gone out of their away to avoid talking to people. Lots of digging to find a "Contact" button, that just leads back to a kb. Phone number (also hard to find) "closed" w/ no posted hours. Just wild.

Cato has published my comprehensive review of the ~240 Venezuelans the US government renditioned 2 months ago to Salvador’s notorious prison. We identified FIFTY who came legally, never violated any immigration law, but are imprisoned at the US government’s request and at US taxpayer expense.

I'm tempted to create a "state of AI/autocorrect" website with only one metric: "Has Outlook stopped suggesting I sign my emails with Elizabeth yet?"

New from 404 Media: the Signal clone the Trump administration uses was just hacked. TeleMessage makes a modified version of Signal that archives messages for government agencies, Waltz used it. A hacker got some users' messages, group chats. Hugely significant breach www.404media.co/the-signal-c...

Dr. Josephine Baker fought for milk testing in lower Manhattan over a century ago, where babies were 7 times more likely to die than WWI US soldiers in the trenches. Milk was often adulterated with chalk and germ-y water. Today the FDA stopped testing milk due to lack of staff. Shame on you, Trump.

AT&T sent me my daily "Your 5G wifi radio isn't on, download this app..." email. Good news! Today's email adds an unsubscribe link! (probably because I turned off the 2.4 yesterday) Bad news! the link doesn't work (no NS record) So close. Maybe I should send them a DNS setup email daily.

AT&T is sending me a daily email to let me know my 5G wifi radio is turned off with instructions on how to turn it on and no unsubscribe link. Fine. Let's see what turning off the 2.4 does, since I didn't mean for ti to be one anyway.

Periodic reminder that several dozen US citizens have already been deported It was pervasive enough that the federal Government Accountability Office did a report on it, released in 2021: www.gao.gov/products/gao... The NYT graphic is laughably false

Boston has the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever

The Griffin List: thegriffinlist.com

BREAKING: Republican-majority panel of the Republican-majority NC Court of Appeals rules 2-1 that the Republican candidate for Supreme Court (their colleague on the Court of Appeals) wins the election even though he got several hundred fewer votes than the Dem appellate.nccourts.org/opinions/?c=...

Watching an AI agent chew through an integration test project that hasn't been touched in 11+ years to update to latest version of .Net, selenium, etc. It's actually doing really well. The fun one will be in a week or two when I get far enough to have tit convert this whole project to playwright.

Anyone that's worked with me before knows that I have that magic power of breaking software just by using it as intended. AI Edition: Cursor's agent just went into an endless loop and evaluated the same file for the same reason 137 times in a row (I even changed model providers, it kept going).

Doing some work on a project that was touched briefly 8 years ago, but mostly written 12+ years ago. The goal is to test out Cursor assistance on modernizing it, but so far it's mostly been "how do I make the old bits run enough to get started?"

This one is just too big for me to upload off Instagram, but it's so so so important and well presented if you can stomach watching it in some private browser. https://www.instagram.com/share/_ycwus2W6 Every TW related to ICE and police abuse. ‼️

And it's false. The IRS serves 153,800,000 taxpayers and has about 100,000 employees. Chase Bank has 40,000,000 customers and 317,000 employees. The IRS has more than three times the clients and less than 1/3rd of the staff as a bank.

finally someone has charted the real data we need about inflation—the prices of Taco Bell menu items

The Army just deleted without explanation its page about the 442nd “GO FOR BROKE” infantry regiment—the Japanese American WW2 unit that is the most decorated in US military history. Archive is here: web.archive.org/web/20250304... Page was here: www.army.mil/asianpacific... Disgusting.

Trump: Gutting National Parks—And Hiding the Evidence National parks hit 331M visits, but Trump officials don’t want you to know. A leaked memo bans the Park Service from promoting the numbers—while firing rangers, closing visitor centers, and cutting safety. This won’t go well—we love our parks.

Industrial robotics is pretty mature. It's been used for product manufacturing & assembly for decades. If a manufacturer can save money with robots, they typically do it. If they're not doing it, that usually means they've checked & found they can't.

Katie Leonard (one of our eng managers) recently wrote a 🔥killer🔥 piece on the current obsession with cutting middle management in the name of "efficiency". "Efficiency is not the same as effectiveness. An org running at 100% capacity is brittle, not agile." www.linkedin.com/pulse/cuttin...

Technically this is "running the govt like a business". There's a fairly common PE revenue/asset extraction play (Red Lobster, for ex) where you sell the acquired chain's buildings to a private party who rents them back at high rates and retains the buildings after inevitable bankruptcy

This is almost every major federal building in DC, and even includes the HEATING PLANT that supplies steam and cold water to government buildings.

Do you remember all those rushed changes that your developers implemented three years ago and how they complained about the design damage they caused to make that happen? It's all still in the codebase. It doesn't disappear. It never disappears.

18F's website has been removed. Hours after the staff was laid off, the whole damn site is gone, including hundreds of blog entries and essential resources. The entire De-risking Guide that I wrote, vanished from the internet.

18f is one of the closest things to a profit center the fed has outside of the irs, and also one of the single most efficient agencies, increasing services delivered _while_ decreasing costs, all with engineers that are "underpaid" by industry norms but love helping others

I need help. 3 National STEM Festival sponsors pulled funding because of the current climate. Please help. This is a life changing opportunity for kids that have worked so hard! www.gofundme.com/f/support-th...