The concept of desynchronization is such a great way to frame the problems of automated code generation. It goes a long way toward explaining why we see huge productivity increases for individuals working on greenfield projects, and modest (if any) in bigger projects over longer time frames. 1/6

I use the iPhone's built-in screen reader to listen to web pages and blog posts. You can start the screen reader by swiping with two fingers from the top of the screen downward. (It takes a while to hit that particular gesture.) For my surprise, it has gotten better in the iOS 26!

A completely new set of people will find out that making computer programs of few hundred or thousand lines of code is very easy and making computer programs of hundreds of thousands lines of code is extremely difficult.

It annoys me to no end that people who refuse to look anything other than meta-reviews when it comes to scientific evidence are perfectly willing to spread around the caricature version of Dunning-Kruger without even cursory look at the original paper, let alone demanding that it should replicate.

I need something like STAMP (Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes) for my personal life.

I'm waiting for companies to roll out premium subscriptions that allow you to turn off AI features.

A discussion about the efficacy of social media posting on, say, Gaza or Ukraine reminds me about the late Aaron Swartz's post Theory of Change (www.aaronsw.com/weblog/theor...). Now, ending a war isn't something you "just do" by adopting the theory, but I think the framing still brings clarity.

"Powers' manuscript...is among the most exciting I have read in some time. The problems are of vast importance, and not only to psychologists; the achieved synthesis is thoroughly original and the presentation is often convincing and almost invariably suggestive. ..." -Thomas Kuhn

Maybe we should store a few easy-to-recharge jail-free smartphones so that we have something that we can use when in few years capitalism has ruined smartphones totally.

I really enjoy watching Nima Arkani-Hamed's talks even though I don't understand anything about theoretical physics. Example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=U47k...

Amazon Ring is introducing a new feature that would allow police to request live-stream access to people’s home security devices. Helllll no. If you have one of those things, get rid of it. Kill it with fire

I underestimate the effect of learning new stuff to my overall motivation. When I get an itch to learn something, even trivial stuff, I notice myself switching from (relative) apathy into a mode that I can learn but also do other stuff with that sudden burst of motivation.

I re-read The Inner Ring by C.S. Lewis every few years to remind myself that the yearning to be in some inner ring is what ruins our intentions to be a good human being. www.lewissociety.org/innerring/

Writing documentation is a good motivator to find out if your software actually does what you thought it did. Hint: it doesn't.

With apologies to Jens Rasmussen and Richard I. Cook, the story of our little close-call / near-miss incident and how I think it relates to eg. Rasmussen's model. youtu.be/QIxUyrwyf6U?...

Maybe (one) secret to happiness of Finnish people is that we don't regard cold plunges and sauna as a way to improve some biomarkers (advocated by some wellness/tech bro) but as a way to just enjoy ourselves.

Ivy League lectures tend to have introductions to introductions before the actual lecture and sometimes there's an introduction in the lecture too. Get a grip, people! I thought you had smarts up there.

The problem is that the decisions that have the biggest impact are also the ones that you don't get feedback for. So you will never know for sure if the decision was right or wrong. (Of course, there's also blatant lying, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem for any normal person.)

Well at least Americans can't claim anymore that USA is the greatest democracy in the world.

🧵 THREAD: A federal whistleblower just dropped one of the most disturbing cybersecurity disclosures I’ve ever read. He's saying DOGE came in, data went out, and Russians started attempting logins with new valid DOGE passwords Media's coverage wasn't detailed enough so I dug into his testimony:

Clarification to all non-Finnish people: we Finns don't go to the sauna and to the hole in the ice ("avanto" in Finnish) in order to get some health benefits. We go to avanto and sauna because it feels good. Before, during and after.

I will be talking at KCD Helsinki about a sticky situation we were in when none of applications could start new Pods on our Kubernetes clusters. I'm so happy that people are organizing a KCD in Finland, for the first time. Thank you people! sessionize.com/view/kn28rz7...

Currently enjoying @guruspod.bsky.social podcast. Somewhat rambly but I think this is what it sounds like when you try to sincerely approach truth. A good example is how they deconstructed Huberman: I now have much better understanding what I found annoying and unsatisfying about Huberman's podcast.

The most positive feedback you can get in workfile is from off-hand comments that weren't even meant too seriously.

Become 1% smarter every day until you become smart enough to realize that improving 1% at anything every day is impossible.

It is always a little bit difficult for me to handle when someone whose content you follow is associated with some genuine douchebag.

Two predictive features of the iPhone that are NEVER right: the share link/image thingie and the suggested apps feature. They are astonishingly bad.

You wake up. It’s 2013. Some language platform has chosen to use an insecure algorithm for its random() function, and HN is blaming the numerous security flaws that resulted from this decision on individual software developers. www.zellic.io/blog/proton-...

Splitting a task you find disgusting into smaller tasks doesn't make a bit easier: now you just have more tasks you want to avoid.

Turns out neurotypicals have vastly overestimated their ability to detect and interpret emotions in other people. (Our own too, but that's another story.) Who would have guessed.

One advantage of being a senior engineer is that you are allowed to ask seemingly stupid questions. To which no one usually knows the answer anyhow. Juniors can also ask seemingly stupid questions, but only few of those are the ones to which no one knows the answer.

A podcast episode about non-fiction writing starting by mentioning three books & authors that were demolished by @ifbookspod.bsky.social isn't exactly inviting to listen more. It might have been exactly the non-fiction writing tips that lead to publishing utter drivel.

Dear service providers, don't include the word 'important' in your email subjects. I will decide it myself. Furthermore, 'important email' implies that you also send unimportant emails to me. Please stop doing that. Yes, you too, and especially you, AWS.

Is there a movement in cyber security and infosec that resembles the paradigm shift of Safety II vs. Safety I? With some distance to the field, having worked in it for a short period earlier, I think the parallels are obvious. Ie. focusing on what goes right instead of focusing on incidents.

Dear Americans, I'll reconsider putting USA in the category of civilized countries once you remove fascists from the leadership positions and start using the metric system. I'll even settle only for the former.

If you repeatedly tell a colleague some advice and they don't seem to get it or it seems they ignore it, it might be that they just lack the needed context to understand your advice. Once they understand the context, they suddenly become responsive and, in an instant, understand what you were saying

While spotting typos and grammar errors in my old skeets, I came back to the idea of monotropic attention tunnels. The point is to create conditions for tunnels to happen, I cannot control them. I _can_ do any task, though sometimes with great struggle, but I'm vastly more productive in a tunnel.

My unhealthy attitude towards work has always been that I consider my effort valid if I manage to complete a task. If I don't manage to finish a task, it's as if I hadn't done any work at all and it is not morally justified for me to demand compensation for the hours I've put in.

The idea that all software developed with taxpayers' money should be open source seems reasonable on the face of it but falls apart if you think about it for more than 15 seconds. 1/

A regular reminder that contrary to what some people claim, filtering spam email is NOT a solved problem. Important emails go to spam folder and if you don't want to miss them, you have to go through the spam folder too. At least with gmail.

When designing a software system, the best course of action is to acknowledge that you have to make compromises, then decide what compromises you will make and document what are the negative implications of those choices. I know, it's sad, but that's how the world works.

If this isn't innovative use of cloud resources then I don't know what is. Cool stuff!

Jos perffiasiat kiinnostaa, tässä meidän tiimiläisen Jaakko Rinta-Filppulan blogautusta siitä, miten ollaan näitä koitettu parantaa. Varsinkin isojen tapahtumien aikana meille osuvien pyyntöjen määrä on hurja. yle.fi/aihe/a/20-10...

"The problem (AI) is solving is that greedy people want their money. That's the problem. The CEOs are like 'What if we could get drawings without paying an artist? ...scripts without paying a writer? ...music without paying a musician?' It's solving a problem for like 8 people."

If you're already an adult and realize that you might be, say, autistic, but also acknowledge that you aren't going to get an official diagnosis, for whatever reasons, you will still have a better life if you accomodate it like you were autistic.

After the mind-blowing presentation by CERN's Ricarco Rocha, I had to enlighten him about the Magical Shell History tool, Atuin, that no one seems to have heard about. It felt a little silly to be talking about shell history after the SCALE of the talk, but that's how I roll. 😎 #KCDDenmark

It is easy to forget how much of the world is run by volunteers and how much better the experience is with volunteers. Hooray for volunteers!

People's right to exist should never be determined by their economic value and the incoming administration doesn't actually care about tanking the economy for ideological reasons but I don't think anyone outside the tech industry understands just how much the tech economy relies on trans people