This reminds me of my meeting with a prospective lawyer as my first marriage fell apart and me asking him how 50/50 custody works and him being kind of shocked I'd even be interested in that sort of thing and him explaining how most men wanted to be able to, like, move out of state.

If only life were like Skyrim where you could finish all the side quests first and then find yourself ridiculously overpowered when you finally get around to finishing the main quest line.

In my experience, this is the dividing line between folks who are superstars and everyone else. Every superstar developer who I'd trust with my life is incredibly good at thinking through a problem before their hands ever touch a keyboard. The code has always been almost an afterthought. Which is...

You can watch the id and ego (there is no superego) of the administration battle it out in real time.

Tesla is a meme stock with car dealerships.

“He can’t magically access my bank account just because he has email access.” Are you *sure*? There isn’t a stray email that references your bank name and account number? Maybe a random attachment you forgot has your SSN in it? The inevitable “OpenClaw helpfully reset my bank password…” awaits.

In pondering this, I came to the realization that a lot of my career has involved coming in to some mature impossible-to-distingish-from-vibe-coding codebase and trying to whip it into some semblance of shape. My time has come!

My experience is similar. Typically deciding what to do (i.e. design) is the most mentally taxing part of engineering, but you'd get a pause between design problems because you'd have to spend time coding. With that short circuited, it's just the hard thing, over and over and over.

Giving a shit can be a real liability when working with LLMs.

A corollary to Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced software system is indistinguishable from vibe-coding." That's... actually shockingly true.

This is a very impressive achievement but, in fairness, a C compiler is like the "Hello, world!" of compilers. A half century old language that is extremely compact and straightforward with an extremely simple type system. As the foundation of the most important pieces of software in the world...

The thing is, whether Apple is on the “stupid” list or not, probably three of the others will definitely be there regardless.

Even if you believe that measles is no big deal, I just don't understand not having the impulse to help spare your child suffering. My oldest kids just missed the introduction of the rotovirus vaccine and got it. It was awful, but they survived just fine. I would have been happy to have spared them.

One of the critical things that distinguishes a senior developer from a junior developer is an understanding, deep in their bones, that the cost of DOING a thing is cheap compared to the cost of truly FINISHING a thing and utterly trivial compared to the cost of MAINTAINING a thing. Like 1:10:10000.

A truly unexpected side effect of the Epstein Files release is getting a window into what was really going on in the upper reaches of the Microsoft org chart during the Windows 8 timeframe. Absolutely not on my bingo card.

It reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) words of David Lee Roth: “Money may not buy happiness but it’ll buy a big enough boat to sail right up next to it!”

I don't believe for a nanosecond that Anthropic won't start running ads when the time comes (c.f. "don't be evil"), but well played for the moment.

I guess Bezos forgot a semicolon back then: Democracy dies; in darkness.

What the hey? How did the nice Seattle Scandinavians get pulled into this crap? Watch this Almost Live skit from way back to see what Scandinavians contributed to Seattle. Uff da!

I'm having a real problem with Claude Code. I've got too many f**king ideas and I can't stop creating new git worktrees. I'm really worried about where this is all headed.

In a meeting, it finally hit me that coding agents are just machine equivalents of Leonard from Memento. Every time you wake them up, they have no idea what's going on and have to read all the post-it notes and tattoos to catch themselves up.

What is starting to come into focus is that agents like Claude are like a true genie in a bottle: incredibly powerful but you really have to ask for the right things in the right way or you’re going to find that getting what you think you want is going to be an unpleasant experience.

This picture just...

My daughter is just slightly older and has the "Pikachu" version of that hat. You squeeze the white balls hanging down and the ears flip up. She's got a cubby like his. I can't imagine if I didn't know where she was for 24 hours only to find she's in some detention center halfway across the country.

I think one of the subtler reasons senior developers are so excited about agents is the prospect of a coworker with absolutely no ego to bruise. I’d feel bad telling someone who worked for a week on something, “No, that’s not what I wanted, throw it out and start again.” No such problem with agents.

I have to say, of all the unintended consequences of giving Obama the Nobel Peace Price, this is the most unintended one of them all... I hope?

It's AOL Monday all over again.

Really hope Hegseth's up first. And it's live.

"Quite vocally, the leadership has acknowledged that some of the reductions were premature..." I'm sure that will be comforting to the 4000 folks who got fired.

At least Jonathan Ross has a nice cushy job waiting for him at a16z, so he's got that going for him.

In lighter news, I never would have guessed there was actually a dude named "Sheetz". I always thought it was some kind of made up name with some obscure meaning.

Apropos of my posts this morning, when I was starting at Microsoft, there were still a lot of devs who *liked* to handwrite their code in assembly and didn't trust the output of the C compiler/optimizer (sometimes for good reason, in those days). They talked about a similar feeling of loss when...

I'm excited to announce the official Nullschool app is here! earth.nullschool.net on mobile browsers works fine, but the app is nicer. Full screen display, persistence across sessions, text size that matches device settings. Even landscape works well. And, like the website: no ads! Links below ⬇️

Put another way, the hardest, most interesting question in software engineering is, and always has been, “what is the problem I’m trying to solve?” It’s an incredibly simple and incredibly difficult question and if there was an easy way to answer it everyone would be billionaires already.

I get one side of this but not the other. Last night I was talking to my wife about a problem she’s having and literally had the thought “maybe I should just use Claude to whip up an iOS app to solve it,” which would have been an insane thought to even six-months-ago me. But I don’t get the…

A lot of really amazing games. I was so happy M.U.L.E. was in that list, it was an awesome multiplayer game and it’s stunning it was on the Atari 800.

Guessing there are a lot of ChatGPT DeepResearch queries coming from .gov accounts right now like “Come up with a transition plan if Maduro is deposed”….

“A kind of wanting, written onto the rungs of my vertebrae— ancient, unsung.” Excerpt from “Want of a Child” by @anyakirshbaum.bsky.social. It appeared in the Winter 2025 collection of Online Exclusives. Read the full poem at the link below: buff.ly/UQN13dN #writingcommunity

My wife’s family tradition is that Santa’s gifts are wrapped, which I took umbrage at until I realized the full implication and saw that it was brilliant!

Gotta look into whether any of the abused detainees had preexisting conditions.

This is so true. Situations that seem completely unsustainable somehow end up going on and on and on. And when they give, usually you wake up one day and the world has completely changed.

I really appreciate the CO2 detector has an annoying chirp to let you know it’s at the end of its lifespan, BUT a) it’s 8pm as the little one is falling asleep, b) we don’t know what it is, and c) it’s stuck behind a huge bookcase that’s been there for years.

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

The main thing I worked on during my brief time at Meta was a project to try and help tame the *millions* of source files that make up the Facebook website backend (this doesn't count the mobile apps or Instagram or WhatsApp). There's simply no way current LLMs can handle that. It does raise...

So I was listening to Frank Sinatra sing “Let It Snow” on the radio with my 7 year old and it occurred to me that Sinatra is about as real to her as an AI bot generating Christmas songs and I guess that’s where we’re probably going.

I really want to see what he wrote about Chester A. Arthur.

This article was shocking to me. Only 30% of people treated with medication? I can remember exactly where I was the first time I had a gout attack, it was so painful. Allopurinol has been an absolute godsend and haven't had any attacks since starting it. I can't imagine just continuing to suffer.

If your goal is combat, then I think it totally can make sense to head on over to X. I, for one, am not really up for combat and am just interested in keeping up with a few different communities that I have an interest in, and so...

SKULL OF THOMAS AQUINAS: TAKE A LEFT NOW PRIEST: No, the GPS says we have to keep going— SKULL: I KNOW A SHORTCUT PRIEST: Do you remember the last ti— SKULL: FOR THOSE WITH FAITH, NO EVIDENCE IS NECESSARY; FOR THOSE WITHOUT IT, NO EVIDENCE WILL SUFFICE

When there is a financial incentive to do so (and obviously there is a massive one in this case), the degree to which programmers can make things run faster, smaller, more efficiently is basically unlimited. There's going to be an interesting inflection when the optimization folks catch up...