Prediction: AI in open source projects is going to become not only inevitable but necessary. The reason is that the latest generation of AI appears to be very good at vulnerability identification. This unfortunately means that the tempo of the measure countermeasure race increases rapidly. As […]

For when it's useful . #startrek #meme

Is math the source code of the universe, some perpetually existent, Platonic thing thing outside reality, or something else? It's language. A very specific language with precise rules and consistent consequences of those rules, but a language nonetheless. I feel like that's the insight missing […]

Me: "Let's do this! Have the kind of day we want to have!" Mrs. Tomczak: "... Then I'm not leaving the house." Me: "Have the kind of day that's... At the intersection of what we want to have and capitalistically productive!"

Against my better judgment, I shall wade into the discourse on a topic I love. I've seen enough people claim that modern Star Trek would be doing better if they didn't make gay characters the focus. And I think that argument is a big head-fake. Rather, I think the people making it have cottoned […]

Thumbing through my public Facebook posts (I know, a dangerous passtime) I found where two weeks ago someone had posted my own picture to my own posts with the comment "Imagine if you hit Planet Fitness as much as you complain about Trump." And I just don't know where to start with that energy […]

One of my favorite moments of artistic creation is this scene right here. This is the inception of the character "Jennifer," who would go on to have a whole plot arc of her own. She's the one going off frame on the left. Tawny Newsome (voice actor […] [Original post on mastodon.fixermark.com]

"I feel like my 'NO SHORTAGE OF GAS' sign is raising questions that are answered by my sign."

Never ask: * A man his income * A women her age * A Hamilton her opinion on honor duels

"9 Mothers Defense" reads like a parody of a software engineering company.

"Gentlemen, we've done it. We, the most learned scholars of behavioral psychology and addiction Pennsylvania can provide. By eliminating manufacture, distribution, pre-printing, colored ink, card stock, and scratch points, we have created... The pre-scratched lotto scratch-off."

[Super Mario Galaxy movie spoiler / reference talk] Of all the references I did not expect, a reference to the original movie was the most unexpected: The Super Scope being a baby-ification gun is probably a sly side-reference to the original movie […] [Original post on mastodon.fixermark.com]

Trying to buy 24-hr Sudafed is making me miss Silk Road.

Here's the thing about Jellicle songs: they're for Jellicle cats.

I just saw "improving your emacs skills or learning new features of the libraries" referred to as "emaxxing" and I just can't. #emacs

It perhaps needs to be repeated because it comes up from time to time: If your 14-year-old uses Google's AI to take pictures of himself doing sex stuff because he's using the machine as a masturbation engine, Google _can and may_ ban your entire family's access to all Google's services. There […]

I really should do a blog post on the advantages / disadvantages of a monorepo. The tl;dr is that the advantages are visible front-ways but the disadvantages are hidden and tend not to pop up in a way that every org is prepped to handle. Things like "Your IDE will eventually fall over from the […]

🎶 I've heard there was a secret chord That quits emacs after you've explored But you just didn't read that splash page, did you? #emacs

"That's so educational. Alexa, play El Patito."

TIL of the Carnation Revolution of 1974, in which the Portuguese government found out what happens when you try to back-stop your global colonial project with the blood of your young generation by training them up how to fight, putting a gun in their hands, and shipping them overseas: sometimes […]

Linux: "The great thing about this OS ecosystem is that you can swap out any component with any other component you want; nobody makes the decisions for you if you don't want them to!" Also Linux: "This non-default clock doesn't fix itself when the timezone is changed. Or when Daylight Savings […]

"What Michael Collins got up to alone in the _Columbia_ Command Module alone on the far side of the moon" would be a pretty good short comedy bit.

Sometimes you create something and people say "Wow. That was shit. _I_ could do better." You know what? That means your work was inspirational. Good job. Don't leave your idea on the table because you're scared to be that work; even the worst work has value.

Universal Yums, I'm _begging_ you. Hire _one_ more sensitivity editor.

(mini-rant-cont'd) "You can't expect the library to know anything about your package manager. Separation of concerns." Sure, that's a good point. Counterpoint: user doesn't care; user wants a problem fixed. If every actor in the story has decided it isn't their concern (package manager […]

(mini-rant) There's a lot of bad about how even the "good" solutions for deploying and accessing software work and it's no wonder people look for solutions to patch over it. "Hm, trying to run this database connector and there's no `libpq`. Where the fuck do you get a `libpq` from?" Turns out […]

It's always fascinating to go overseas and see the ads that come up when geolocation clocks I'm somewhere else. UK hits different, yo.

He who is too critical of his peers shall be doomed to repeat their mistakes and have very good reasons for doing so that made a lot of sense at the time, I can assure you. #hubris #softwareengineering

[uspol, ruspol, ukraine, iran] One of the more interesting aspects of the Ukraine war was the revelation of how badly compromised Russia's defense assets were. It was, honestly, a little startling to the public to learn that the feared Former Soviet State still had size on its side, but not a […]

Some days I'm just tired. Most days, I like working with junior engineers because we learn new things from each other. Some days, I'm just like "I _need_ you to not slow down the PR process asking why we don't replace "check for membership in a 2-element list" with a hashtable lookup […]

The Devil went down to Georgia He was lookin' for a soul to steal He was in a bind 'cause he was way behind And he was willin' to make a deal. When he came across this young boy sittin' at a chessboard hustlin' old men And the devil took a seat across […] [Original post on mastodon.fixermark.com]

Some days software engineering is simple. And then some days it feels like you've been tasked with splitting out the atriums and ventricles in a heart into two separate organs because it turns out they don't scale symmetrically so sometimes we need to be able to change our atrium/ventricle ratio […]

Me when Adele Goldberg's face shows up on the rotating kiosk of "Women in Computing" at the office.

Sure, the _Look Around You_ science education parody is funny, but irl if you jiggle special metal near other metal it makes stuff happen and there are self-warming rocks that kill you so idk wtf to tell curious kids about the actual rules of the real game they're born playing...

Things recent grads think will be hard in software engineering: * high-performance search and sort * well-optimized memory management and CPU cache use * writing cryptographic hashing solutions Nope, that's all written for you; in fact, _don't_ write your own. Things that are […]

I think there's an essay in my head struggling to get out, but it has to get in line. It's gonna shape up somewhere around "We need systems of justice because we are one of the few species on the planet that practices disproportionate vengeance response, of the scale of 'That wolf ate one of my […]

I see people pushing back on adding AGENTS.md to projects because they worry it'll encourage vibe-coding. TBH, I love seeing them. It means someone has put more than zero thought into communicating to an outsider how to interact with this project, which is a lot more than I see in _most_ […]

Digital photography has flooded the world with banal images that nobody really needs. But, man, it’s fun to go through old images and see my frequently moody teens being goofy and enjoying themselves as tots.

[uspol shitposting] "Begun, the Drone Wars have."

Anyone have thoughts on USB-C for monitors? My KVM switch died, and it has reinforced for me how much I despise HDMI as a hardware standard and how excited I would be for an alternative.

[PG sex joke] 🖼

1993: "The great thing about the Internet is nobody knows you're a dog!" 2026: "I swear to God if _any letter_ of your post came from an LLM I will _yeet your whole account into the sun._ " #llm #anonymity

[PG-rated sex joke] Remember: sex should only continue if both partners give not only consent, not only enthusiastic consent, but

I keep seeing blips of this news cycle about how studies are showing that software engineers, given LLM assistance, don't use it to decrease their work but instead to take on _more_ work, sometimes resulting in damage to the output quality due to lack of focus. ... and I just want to respond to […]

Me: "emacs would be so good if I could just highlight the current line so I know what panel my cursor is in." emacs: _has that_ Me: "I wish I could go back after navigating to something. It's a shame that's not a feature." emacs: _has that_ Me: "I wonder if there is a way to bind documents […]

I think I have finally hit upon what bothers me most about both CSS and SQL, and it's the same thing. There's a soft principle in software engineering: "Don't be clever." Clever solutions run the risk that they are not understood by subsequent maintainers and collaborators and as a result […]

It's not "advertising," it's "human-targeted prompt injection."

I don't have a structured settlement, but J.G. Wentworth sends me cash I won't object.

Anyone who doesn't understand cognitive dissonance can probably learn a lot from meditating on the phenomenon of 9/11 truthers. Like, my broskis... I'm sorry that you got hit with the knowledge that the post-Cold-War US was not invincible _and_ your completely-untested assumptions about how a […]