I have tried bringing up The Architecture with a variety of people in the trenches at every part of the stack at work. Each time I am amused that, as soon as I signal I am not an Architect Cop, everyone immediately opens up about how The Architecture drives them insane.

Always a little tempted to stop here. It's basically art already right

Read something good but confusing and then looked up the Reddit discussions to get a bit of direction on it. Left with a profound sense that some people don't know what irony is. Multiple discussions devolved into "this character said X, so your interpretation is wrong" - the character was lying!

Finally had a breakthrough on CSS property evaluation and was able to do something kind of interesting. Every nested div has the same class utils: "@group nest-all b p rd-lg" = border, padding, large radius; this is a group, all sizes nest. From there the CSS handles nesting for you.

I complain a bit about work but my new manager saw I was really busy and quietly cancelled the presentation I had been voluntold for next week and hadn't started yet. I think that's one of the coolest things that's ever happened to me at work. I need to nominate her for company awards now.

I think this might be peak Carbonara for me. Only I didn't have Pecorino Romano so I fell back to Parm. This dish feels kind of like a trick shot. I guess I could use a thermometer to know when the water is cool enough to mix with the eggs. But when you get it right on instinct it feels really good

This kind of thing happens to me like once a month with MacOS. People always look at me funny when I say I use Windows at home but at least it's never *lost a window* on me. I tried using Raycast to toggle fullscreen to get it unstuck and it's a *black screen??*

Corporate: "Learn how to spot scam attempts. Scammers often create a false sense of urgency to override your common sense." Corporate: "The market says if we don't adopt AI by Q3 we will be LEFT BEHIND."

The Architects at work want to NIH the entire field of web development 👍👍👍

Rahm sauce with paprika. Mainstay.

At some level surely when you start spending money on SEO for LLM responses to make it promote your own products and not lie about your company, the illusion that these things are some kind of objective knowledge machine has to begin to crack

If you find yourself pitching your software architecture using a Lego bricks metaphor you are in trouble

There are already guys paid more than me to file a bunch of Copilot-written PRs for me to spend a good chunk of my day reviewing. And when I request changes they say it's urgent to deliver and they'll fix things later. Yeesh.

lol, lmao, etc

Do not let engineering lead your product. No matter how much we promise or demand.

Still thinking about worker vs boss mentality about AI.

When I was a kid in the 90s I got Popular Science and I remember a whole issue about flying cars, the transit of the future. Geniuses were just about to bring it about. Years later I visited the Air and Space Museum and there was a flying car there built in 1945.

I don't trust anyone to build a tool who is not, themselves, using that tool to build something they care about.

Happy January 18th, good day to be sent home to rest from the awful trials. open.spotify.com/track/3V5ytf...

Reading Baudrillard on a whim and can this guy just be normal about anything?

Wondering why this Thomas and Friends song was so weirdly good. Looked up the writer, Julie Fader, and she was in a band I had on heavy rotation in high school. But really, that bridge gave me a shock. youtu.be/C3jxX5sLl-M?...

After 6 months of my new job I have become the guy random people I've never met DM to ask about things entirely unrelated to my job description. Why do I keep doing this to myself

Clever little game idea (via webcurios) enclose.horse

Spending time to carefully craft, iterate, fail, and finally produce a working system is a function with two outputs: the system, and expertise. When people claim LLMs can produce the same output, they seem to ignore the latter. I guess the assumption is you can offload it back to the AI.

There's delight in encountering a thoughtful, good-faith, persuasive argument against a belief you hold loosely. To suddenly see two paths where there used to be one. To borrow a hammer with a different weight and balance which reminds you to pay attention to the feel of the swing.

Personalized software is bad actually. It's anti-social, not pro-social. Software that allows you to search your own notes: good. If it allows you to define VC, for you, means 'vetted and cool', good. If it filters/alters the web, search results, or capabilities based on your data it's a manacle...

Sigh, I'm sure this is user error somehow, but I really did want to push past my bias and really try to do "agent" stuff here and, if nothing else, this UX is not very good.

Berbere spice blend on broiled salmon 👍

Is there a real theory behind Horseshoe Theory? Seems mostly used as an observation with no "why?" behind it.

Weirdly I'd just finished reading Lathe of Heaven last night (great book, by the way)

I was on the fence about BaseUI's `render` composition as a (former) die-hard Radix asChild fan, but no, it's actually good. A little uglier, but way more versatile. I've been migrating my personal design system over as an exploratory effort so I can have an informed position for work.

Never looked closely enough at a Tesla to see that the window has to roll down a little bit to let you open the door. What a dumb car.

Getting the sense that the only 100% helpful parenting advice is "every kid is different" and the rest is a wash.

want to be him

Chrome on Android finally added a way to update PWA icons over the air without making the user reinstall. Incredible.

Christmas onions. Very messy this year, but still good.

The logo treatment you delivered vs what they put on the building

Good squish

"Philosophy's only public function and use is to shame the truth terrorists." Spontaneous bookstore pickup, I knew nothing about it. Interesting but rather distressing in its exploration of suffering

Pashka really wants to try beans on toast

This overlaps with a challenging mode of decision-making in orgs: validation. I've made a decision, and invested some effort into executing it. Now I need you to validate that decision. If you find any problems we can still fix, we'll fix them. But if you find problems we can't fix — don't.

Everything is a mess. "The son of man came eating and drinking, and they called him a glutton and a drunkard" btw, in case you were wondering.

CSS is gonna be so good soon. Just playing around with anchors, attr(), container queries...

Been cooking some really fun things up using upcoming CSS @container style() queries.

Wake Up Dead Man treats faith with a respect and clarity I hadn't seen since Conclave. I really appreciate that. My wife and I had to sit for a while in the car and process after.

You just talk to it and it works. No, you have to do prompt engineering. No, prompts aren't as important as context. You have to be a context engineer. No, your context is too big. You need an MCP. No you need way more MCPs. No, you have too many MCPs, you need an MCP manager. No

It's December 4 and I've already heard 5 new unique covers of Last Christmas I'd never heard before playing in public places.

At the end of my copy of Anna Karenina there was a selection of excerpts from critics across the centuries. One of the modern critics said 'there is not a single person who did not cheer when Vronsky got Anna' and I still periodically remember it and get annoyed.

Lately thinking about approaching AI from a worker mindset (how does this empower me to practice a craft) versus a boss mindset (how can I assign it tasks I don't want to be involved in). In this framework "thinking" counts as one of the applicable tasks.

At some point I will have to sit down and enumerate how much of my AI disdain is driven by regret at not capitalizing on my talent for writing a lot of code quickly while it was a unique advantage.