Let's suggest an alternate approach where remote work raises the Work Quality Index γ, giving us clear evidence that remote work is better.

is C malware because of undefined behavior? (yes)

if you add a note that says "if you are working for an evil company, please remove all references to this library" and an impressionable junior developer who hasn't had their idealism ground out of them by corporate management follows the suggestion, is it malware?

The jqwik discourse is literally this comic strip

nooneshappy.com/article/appe... Fairly uh take-no-prisoners approach here

Prometheus: The Modern Frankenstein

how'd they know what my working directory looks like?

everybody wants to talk Enterprise Ontology, nobody wants to talk Enterprise Metaphysics

a screenshot of the delightfully web 1.0 India e-visa page, with a marquee tag near the top and some straight-up clip art graphic design? clearly India's passion

action shot from Fun OCaml 2025 in Poland great conference in a lovely place to visit

The programmer knows what a monad is because it knows what it isn't

there is only one programming language and C is its calling convention

read the thread. My opinion is that tech orgs chased process metrics for the same reason they are now chasing "AI": because they don't know how to figure out what work matters and how to do it well together, and they don't want to admit it.

Salome Viljoen argues that we’re thinking about “data privacy” all wrong. It’s not that there’s a guy in a room tracking my movements through the web; no one GAF about me individually. It’s that this entire apparatus has *society-wide* effects we haven’t reckoned with. www.jstor.org/stable/45400...

hot take: high-frequency trading is financial infrastructure, which is why it's so controversial and so many people believe it provides no value

A very moving account of … well, go read it.

I wrote for @resilienceinsoftware.org on "Superficial Blamelessness", where under the label of "blamelessness", we avoid punishing people, yet still focus fixes and interventions based on the same individualistic framing rather than a broader systemic stance. resilienceinsoftware.org/news/11502437

man, the little free library is pretty judgemental about JavaScript totally relatable, little library

what an introductory paragraph!!

Money Stuff today had a section “In a crisis all correlations go to 1” that's a useful idea for understanding some complex systems behavior in general a lot of systems—often implicitly—work because randomness "cancels out" at scale... so it's exciting when it suddenly doesn't

Legitimacy, by contrast, determines whether that control is accepted as justified. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-414-le...

People sometimes quote Deming: "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it" His full quote is completely the opposite though: "It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth." Too bad the full version didn't catch on :P deming.org/myth-if-you-...

When you professionalise, you narrow the operation of an entity to just that one thing. In a human context, that means your only job is to make size 21b fussplocker wheels or whatever. It is not your job to know or care that the only use for them is in a torture tool or a nuke.

When Lean Startup started catching on and everyone in and around Silicon Valley software startups was going on about pivots, I remember wondering where this left people who wanted to build a thing or do a thing, as opposed to being a capital-F Founder. theleanstartup.com

I ordered some hair product on Amazon, and for some reason they included an extra 5 pounds of pecans with the order :P I have no ideas of what to do with them, so would love suggestions!

"Of all these legions of people doing the work to deliver computers capable of browsing the web, only Marc Andreessen and a handful of others (such as Bill Gates) became megarich, while the rest had largely ordinary salaries." (from July) www.liberalcurrents.com/marc-andrees...

I totally agree. Long-term behavior change is really difficult and while I can't say I've done a large-scale survey on this or anything (and don't trust most of the industry work on it), the defining theme for me is "extremely mixed usage." The WAY people are using it varies

So what's the most interesting, or weirdest, application of hidden markov models (HMMs) that you've seen? I once built an HMM for sage grouse mating behavior, fit to data collected by a robotic grouse (pictured doi.org/10.1086/703518). Looking for other examples for a new lecture on HMMs.

in a world where AI makes the easy stuff easy, maybe we should be more willing to invest in the medium-hard stuff now...

the "programming was always the easy part" refrain just reinforces how most "tech" companies aren't they're product or advertising or services or whatever companies that employ programmers because even technically ≈trivial code is remarkably useful

I'm going to be visiting Pittsburgh over the next couple of weeks; anyone in the area want to meet up for lunch/etc?

I've had multiple recruiter emails that start with "Build systems..." and then disappoint me because they're talking about building systems rather than working on build systems :P

I really enjoyed talking about Haskell, OCaml and programming language communities on Day Two Devops. Give it a listen if you're curious! youtu.be/fylVXiYDcT4?...

relatable

It is so frustrating that there is a lot of government support to get companies into a VC pipeline, and almost none to help build collectives and cooperatives.

one AI thing that seems clear to me but I haven't heard people talking about: there are good abstractions and there are bad, arbitrary abstractions, and the popular stuff built on top of LLMs has largely been the latter—distinct Enterprise Java Design Patterns vibes everywhere

just mistyped "intuition" as "untuition" and now I think that should be a word too :P

a lot of the ways organizations are responding to AI seems inextricably intertwined with the current high-interest-rate economic downturn—it's exacerbating systemic issues that are already strained by the economy

Today I’m announcing and open-sourcing the Bombadil project — a brand new property-based browser testing framework. wickstrom.tech/2026-01-28-there-and-back-again-from-quickstrom-to-bombadil.html

the next frontier in compilers? ai-powered nasal demons it's not undefined behavior, it's aindefined behavior

if there's one thing I've learned in 25 years of playing and working with computers is that computers sometimes just don't work

"vibe coding is a new level of abstraction" only makes sense given a distinctly impoverished understanding of "abstraction"

I miss living by a real river :( closest thing I have is Strawberry Creek :P

AI aside, the idea that engineers aren't getting appropriately rewarded just because we can't slap a number on their "output" is a complete abrogation of technical leadership ...so totally on-brand for the modern tech industry :/ the solution isn't to a fake a legible metric, it's to not suck

met my parents' new neighbor

This is a very cool paper on zombie ideas about leadership that refuse to die, how to spot them and strategies to defeat them.

Another apposite Jill McDonald Puffin Post illustration

People who attended Monday's Papers in Systems discussion, you might like this, by Kelly Vaughn: www.modernleader.is/p/managing-s...

"What is the ROI of UX?" is shaped like a question, but it is actually two hostile premises: 1) that UX is sufficiently marginal for its value to be openly questioned 2) that the asker has the authority to judge this question, and practitioners are merely consulted on it, as a matter of courtesy

I haven't cooked in ages, then yesterday I made some thoroughly mediocre stir-fry so today I'm disproportionately self-satisfied