Why are sensors on bathroom sinks so crappy, but the sensors on the paper towel dispensers flawless? How did the paper towel industry develop such technological lead over faucet manufacturers?

🎵The LoveSac is a little old place where we can sit together 🎵

Is there some sort of weird psych trick around these preset donation amounts...?

GitHub commit activity sweater

Saying "never meet your heroes" is like saying "never date; you could get your heart broken." True, but also, you could have a great time! I've met some of my heroes. They ranged from lovely to horrible, but I wouldn't give up the good experiences just to avoid the bad.

My Asus router's convenient list of "famous games", from the year of our lord 2025.

Some fun stories from the (mostly) innocent hacking I did on Displate's website. blog.danlew.net/2025/11/18/h...

Folks haven't been this excited about steam machines since the industrial revolution.

Random side project: Balatro's least erratic Erratic decks. blog.danlew.net/2025/11/03/b...

Finally wrote up this short post that's been on my mind forever, regarding audio problems in video calls: blog.danlew.net/2025/10/16/f...

Excited to start reading the latest book from my sister, @bethlewwilliams.bsky.social! (Maybe if I'm lucky I can get the author to sign a copy...)

I didn't wake up thinking I'd be explaining the Seven Bridges of Königsberg & graph theory to my 2nd grader, but you need it to solve this maze game in his school's math app. (You pick where you start, and every bridge disappears as you cross it, so it requires Euler's bridge analysis...)

I'm undeniably human! (Verified by this fantastic CAPTCHA game from @neal.fun: neal.fun/not-a-robot/)

When I was in philosophy, my professor would constantly use the phrase "you can't be a married bachelor". But I just learned one of my kid's friend's last name is Bachelor. Someday he might be married. Take that, college professor!

I'm surprised Silksong is getting such glowing reviews; it was released with a fuckton of bugs.

One way to test whether a candidate is a serious prospect for your company is to schedule an interview right when Silksong releases tomorrow.

Just realized that I've been confusing The Wiz (the anthemic black musical) with Return to Oz (the nightmarish Disney movie). I must've had at least one past conversation wherein I described how terrified I was of The Wiz as a kid (and they probably thought I was just wildly racist).

A recent episode of @getplayedpod.bsky.social brought up an ancient, defunct Sim City-themed CCG from the 90s. I was fascinated by the fact that it had "tall cards" so I picked some up (for cheap) on eBay. I thought I'd share some of the more bizarre/hilarious cards I got...

Beethoven once said that the Moonlight Sonata was like the Dark Souls of piano pieces.

For every day a programmer doesn't have a meeting, they gain 1X, up to a maximum of 10x. But if they attend a meeting, they lose all their Xs (and half of their gold).

I've been laid off! (Startup downsizing to a skeleton crew, sadly.) I'm looking for my next dev role. Lots of experience in Android, most recently worked on Node/TS and Python. Ideally landing at a mission-driven place (been focusing on sustainability recently, but any public benefit will do).

Everyone's obsessed about how many Xs (1x? 10X? .4X?) they can get out of an AI engineer, but by far the biggest impact devs can make to a timeline is by adjusting requirements to make a feature easier or even skipping facets altogether. AFAIK, AI never says "what you're asking for is ridiculous."

It's extremely inconvenient that you only get good at something after you've done it for a while. I'd prefer to be good at it from the start.

A not insignificant number of past coworkers think I created the "gradlew" script and named it after myself. (It's the "Gradle wrapper" script.)

I had 8 teeth removed when I was young, which means I have 8 fewer gaps to floss. Supposing flossing takes one second per gap, and I floss once a day, every year my missing teeth give me 48 minutes more free time. I started effectively flossing ~15 years ago - that adds up to 12 extra hours.

"The Turtle and the Hare" only it's "The Programmer and the Vibe Coder". The vibe coder is way ahead and decides to take a nap while the AI does its thing. While sleeping, the AI deletes the prod database.

I shouldn't be allowed to go on vacation and let my mind wander.

Summer cometh before the fall.

Meat raffles are a high steaks form of gambling.

It is hard for me to overstate how much my coding improved when I learned how to write *good* automated tests. I understand why people get burned when they write bad tests (through inexperience or forced code coverage), but I truly don't understand the "automated tests are overrated" crowd.

I continue to write things, this time about databases that track the real world. blog.danlew.net/2025/07/01/w...

My non-spoiler review of Clair Obscur (so far).

A little gift I left myself from 17 years ago.

Wrote about a coding pattern I've disliked for years - coding by magic. blog.danlew.net/2025/05/13/c...

I'm tired of misleading AI statistics like "75% of our products were developed using AI coding". I want to know what *percent* of the codebase was actually developed using AI! And how much of it was meaningful logic. It's not useful knowing that 3/4ths of your developers use simple autocomplete.

I haven't watched any ANDOR but I'm glad people are so interested in boolean logic these days

There is nothing more satisfying than calling a plumber and finding out it's not some dumb thing you could've fixed yourself.

Could we have come up with literally any other name for this sorting method

If you're going to MinneBar in a couple weeks, check out the talk I'm gonna give about internet privacy! It is admittedly not something I am an expert in, but I am determined to become more knowledgeable because of, uh, current circumstances. sessions.minnestar.org/sessions/1732

I wrote a script to find "interesting" seeds for Balatro erratic decks. Besides bugged seeds (all tens of spades)… I3EFEF17 -> 25 tens (max # of single rank) 8778L6US -> 39 hearts (max # of single suit) 77XX2TEK -> 20 fours and 38 spades (best combo) (Will write up blog post later)

Can we please stop using the Dow Jones Industrial Average? It's a terrible metric and there are so many alternatives that blow it out of the water (eg SP500). (DJIA is based on only THIRTY companies! The tiny sample size made sense when it was hard to compile the data but that's not hard anymore).

I'm desigining the most evil API. When you search... ...If you get 2+ results, you get a JSON list. ...If you get 1 result, you get a JSON object. ...If you get no results, you get an empty string.

I wonder if we're going to see a rise in usage of static typing, automated tests, and other correctness checkers due to increasing adoption of AI coding. Why? The more guardrails you put up, the better AI coding works. (And, I would argue, coding in general, but that hasn't motivated everyone...)

I'm trying to get back into blogging again - this article is about where I focus my efforts when writing code. blog.danlew.net/2025/03/11/p...

"What if AI generates bad code?" Y'all, we've been using shoddy/incorrect answers from StackOverflow since 2008.

Approximately 70% of the joy of owning a cat is watching them have a life of leisure you wish you had.

Just realized I've been maintaining joda-time-android for 11 years. I haven't used it in years, and it's no longer my recommendation for datetime handling on Android. Yet I persist because maintaining dependencies is crucial. Discovering that something your app relies on is disappearing sucks.

Capitalism transformed an energetic cheap kids game into a stationary board game that costs $20.

Website: "Would you like to login with an email magic link or your password?" Me: <enters password> Website: "Thanks! As a security measure, you must also click a confirmation link in your email..." Me: @#&%*!

Misheard my wife reading the summary of the back of a kid's book: "everything was going great in Fairytale Land until a Nazi showed up." (It was Anansi.)