Spent my Thanksgiving playing with public incident data and seeing if it was under statistical control. surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/11/27/f...

Give me the assignment and I don't miss. Clockwise from top right: - Caramel apple pie - Two pumpkin pies - Two banana cream pies - Blueberry pie - A Milk Bar inspired pie in the middle

The pie baking has commenced. Aiming for six pies this year.

Seeing more reports and industry players blaming code reviews for slowing down the quick development done with AI. It's unclear whether anyone's asking if this is just moving the cognitive bottleneck of "understanding what's happening" around. "Add AI to the reviews" seems to be the end goal here.

Hey fellow software engineers of the interwebs, we have an out!

Just me at 2am reading apple pie recipes in prep for Thanksgiving

I keep hearing "Well, you can't put the genie back in the bottle..." wrt AI from the same people who are promoting it so hard. If it's so great, why would you *want* to? Isn't that an aphorism for something destructive, or at least negatively impactful? Also, I just don't agree with the premise.

Don't worry, as a resident of NYC suburbs we're not putting up with the bullshit from people who threaten to leave with Mamdani's win either. Congrats New York, wish I was still living there to celebrate.

Okay now that he’s conceded, it’s time for Curtis Sliwa to hang upside down by his feet like a bat for three years or whatever he does between elections.

The whole "Should millionaires be subsidized to ride the bus/have free child care?" debate is so wildly ridiculous. If public schools didn't exist, the same argument would be used there. "Why should the rich get free education!?"

I'm not sure you can get more marie antoinette than taking away food stamps before thanksgiving while you build a gold and marble dance hall so the other crooks can bring bribe you over a badly-cooked (argentinian) steak

The number of people who didn’t know what us-east-1 was on Sunday and are suddenly experts in running multi-region distributed systems at scale today is truly remarkable.

At Etsy, we had an upgrade go out for MySQL with Chef. Meant to go to one server, instead upgraded all of production. During that time, it had to update very tall tables, which mean locking them from any reads or writes. Turned into a multi-hour downtime where we just had to wait for it to finish.

Man, I forgot about MF Doom, shame on me. So good.

"It's a tremendous amount of work to solve problems you're creating". Heard this used to describe film making but man, could that ever apply to software engineering too.

I guess now is a great time to get bad opinions out there. I think Final Fantasy IV (II in the US) for the SNES is at best a mediocre game. Characters are barely one dimensional, the storyline is boring, combat is super tedious and the sprite work isn't anything to write home about.

Software incidents are painful, and we're trying to help change that. If you deal with incidents in your work, please help us help you! Take the survey here: www.thevoid.community/survey

The culture of working in tech these days is being constantly worried about being overworked or unemployed. Take care of yourselves. We are replaceable cogs to our employers but irreplaceable to our family and friends.

Re-upping this again, please spread far and wide:

"Will, write the scariest monster for your D&D game" *Points at Hazel*

I'm actually kind of a pacifist... *reads* Oh you better throw some fucking hands at that.

Hey, we're going to play some D&D!! The party is battling The Old Man of the Forest - the Metsavana - a monstrous corpse eating creature keeping them trapped within this small oasis within the dark woods. Come hang out! www.twitch.tv/wcgallego/

and I am trying to think of how to explain to this man that I literally DO NOT KNOW HOW to not smile when an exercise hurts and he was like, “fucking ballerinas, man, every one of them is the fucking Terminator” and it was the most validating thing anyone has ever said about me

The search for work continues! - Podcast Editing - Sound Design - TTRPG Design - TTRPG Editing - Project Coordination Those are the things I'm best at/want to do the most. Please boost and share! Rates will follow.

🐈‍⬛🤍

When Github is having its weekly failure but the Github status page says "All Systems Operational"

AI in software development feels like we wished on a monkeys paw. "Man, there's so much new stuff every day. I wish we could focus on just *one* for a while..."

once again saying that your AI can sense your commitment to old view monocausal failure analysis and responds accordingly

I loooooved chatting with my good friend @ellaceron.bsky.social about writing for her newsletter! Here’s a brief excerpt of me being a real AI hater. Read the whole interview: open.substack.com/pub/ellacero...

YouTube has gone so very unhinged with ads. I'm getting two ads (the first 15 seconds and unskippable, and then a 30 second skippable after 5 seconds) every 5 minutes while watching some videos. Completely untenable.

It’s not you; it’s not a personal flaw!! New York City Companies All but Stopped Hiring in First Half of the Year www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/n...

It costs less to fucking SHARE of EVERYONE DOES IT

When I hear people trash talking DC over absolutely nothing, it makes me think of this absolutely brilliant sketch from @brennanleemulligan.bsky.social & crew www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNpo...

Great week for people who are like once I saw a black person, therefore it’s time for martial law

I think I need to play a little frog man in a TTRPG

Sam, I love you and I love Dropout, but cmon. We're not linking to, ya know...

Holy shit this goes hard

Thanks Ben!

A reminder that Elephant Shrews are the best

I love this because any NYer worth their salt (so, not Cuomo) would call it the LIE

Anyone else wince when compiling their code? ...Just me?

Stickers, pins, and iron-on patches are all now available for my queer Game Changer designs! Thank you so much to @samreich.bsky.social & @dropout.tv for the kind permission to make and sell these! Every sale really helps with my own trans expenses and creating more queer art 🏳️‍⚧️ canopyrobin.etsy.com

One weird trick: If someone says something dumb, you can just block them.

I hope you're all doing ok, and if you're not then you're taking care of yourselves as best you can.

AI is a wonder technology that is going to change every industry, which is why - people have to be forced to use it - people have to be tricked into paying for it - people who do use it on purpose have to hide it from their peers to avoid being mocked

Weezer - Blue Album Ben Folds - Rockin' the Suburbs Arcade Fire - Funeral (Springsteen's Born in the USA would be on here, but the title track has been ruined in my head by people who have never listened to the lyrics of that song)

so i rode the las vegas loop this weekend and holy shit. they have a closed course with signal controls that only contains other vehicles they control like 1: it should be a tram 2: that tesla cannot get self driving to work at all in these conditions is embarrassing

AI today is literally not capable of replacing the senior engineers they are laying off. corps are in fact getting less done, but they're banking on making an example of enough people that survivors put their heads down and help them implement AI in exchange for keeping their jobs... for now.

Here's one of my main AI criticisms: The state of the art is such that, there are no applications of gen AI where the operator can wield the tool effectively with zero knowledge of the domain they're applying it to. The burden of truth/accuracy/effectiveness lies with the operator. Yet!--