Tonight we watched CODE RUSH (2000), a documentary about Netscape's launch of Mozilla. It felt... pathetic

The project is called ctrl+shifted, and we're going to try to get out a few short posts a week, of various sorts. https://ctrlshifted.substack.com/p/vignette-web-page-designer-1998

the greatest trick Yahoo! ever pulled was convincing the world it was just silly

Tonight we have been reading and recollecting to figure out what ruined the internet, and I think I have arrived at a theory. The impact of javascript was really very minimal for a long time. The pivot occurs around 2005 with Gmail, a legitimately good service that fills a real need. The side […]

In Silicon Valley, is the Jack Barker character supposed to be Jim Barksdale, CEO of Netscape?

If there was any doubt about whether I was ever going to collect on social security, I think my reaching 65 coinciding with the end of oil just about seals it.

Most transmission protocols can switch to post-quantum crypto and be fine, and people holding cryptocurrencies can migrate to different signing schemes if blockchains add support, but there is gonna be a hella funny debate about what to do with the lost Satoshi BTC

I don't understand why, when we look for explanations of gambling addition, we feel like we have to reach back through an evopsych lens to some paleolithic man's stochastic reward experience of an elk hunt. Your entire life, in the large and in the small, consists of trying things that don't […]

Got an iphone from work and it's the first time I've used an apple device made within the past ten years. It's weird. There's a bunch of ways in which the thing is kinda slick, but it seems like it's all for the device's own vanity. I don't know why I would pay for this, I don't understand how […]

some 15 years ago I saw toy quadcopters and immediately said this is going to transform warfare, I kinda don't get how it took this long for armies to cotton onto the idea

What is the merit of user avatar graphics?

Yeah why spend eighty bucks on a pager, when you could spend three hundred bucks on a phone and install the PagerDuty app on it

IT'S HAPPENING GITHUB, THE FIRST ENTERPRISE CLOUD SOLUTION TO REACH ZERO NINES RELIABILITY https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ #github

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@bodil/116328578684084741 This is what technology is. For any invention, there are some applications for which is it very suitable. Those benefits are often dwarfed by misapplications and side effects.

I met a boy today who excitedly wanted to tell me about a gacha game on his phone. He explained that it is like gambling, but without money. He said there are seven tiers of items to pull, including epic and legendary. I'm afraid for the future.

When search engines showed up on the scene, it was also difficult for people to develop the skill to use them when they worked well, without falling into the trap of wasting a bunch of time on bad results.

I think the end of Witness is really amazing, and understated - I didn't get it when I was younger. The movie culminates in this big action sequence. Book doesn't win the fight. The boy finally does what he knew all along he was supposed to do, which is ring the bell. A dozen dudes from […]

I think mathematicians tend to want to claim parts of human activity that don't really belong to them. People will say some shit like "Knitting is math!" as if they're magnanimously pretending they respect the low class. Maybe some of your math is knitting! Maybe the thing you're talking about […]

I talked to a Guy today and dude I gotta tell you the common man is angry about big data center builds

Is there a way to start a business organized in such a way that it in some meaningful sense *cannot* be sold? As a software user I would like to prefer services that aren't eventually going to do the sort of major rug-pull change of management that happens when a startup sells out, and as the […]

Wondering how often github services have to be down before we call it an existential risk to the business

it's crop-dusting day, motherfuckers

Traditional software, dogshit: > docker run (docker build -q .) validate /config/default.yaml Error: accepts 0 arg(s), received 1 Claude, uses words to explain things: > ❯ why isn't this fish command working docker run (docker build -q .) validate /config/default.yaml > The collector expects […]

"Using a global bovine density dataset, previously published satellite casualty probability code, and a complete lack of funding to do this calculation carefully enough for submission to a peer-reviewed journal, we calculate a ≃ 0.3–1% chance of a cow-sualty in NZ from reentering Starlink Gen2 […]

I don't understand how browsers have gotten so much worse. I thought we were making progress when the pop-up blocker was invented, but now popups are back with a force, and plus websites can automatically start playing videos

Now that I've disabled every single feature in the vivaldi url bar and turned it into a plain text input field, I've realized that I actually flinch when I start interacting with it, because I'm anticipating surprising things happening

I forgot about Modest Mouse for a long time but been listening to The Golden Casket (2021) lately and still like them a lot

my screen is covered in just three terminals running claude code and I feel like absolute jackass

It would be neat if programming languages were languages, not complete tech stacks that each requires its own copy of all of software that's ever been written

I wish people would stop using "memory leak" to refer to algorithms with poor space complexity. That's not a leak, a leak implies permanent loss, allocations that are never freed.

Coming up on my laptop's tenth birthday. They last a lot longer than they used to now that there's no moving parts

you'll all be happy to know the US jet fuel consumption and groping system is back to 100% operational status

I believe it is possible to run an entire engineering department that consists solely of repeatedly triaging confused bug reports for low-incidence known issues that have been decided aren't worth fixing

So the complaint is... mostly an aesthetic one?

The software industry on the whole never really learned how to write code comments fluently; usually explanations of parameters in particular are either absent or, when an effort is made, it's things like (flibbertygibbet: boolean) /* Whether or not to flibbertygibbet. */ which are both […]

"AI can complete a task with clear acceptance criteria" would threaten my job if I ever received a task with clear acceptance criteria.

Yet another incredibly stupid reason Claude Code adds to the development experience is that it's very good about actually killing any processes it starts. Most shells and command line tools are pathetically bad about this.

Culturally, music piracy of the late 90s opened the door for unauthorized incorporation of text into LLMs. We put a lot of work into making the case that you do *not* have a natural rights over intellectual property; at best you may have profit rights over commercial activity, if lost sales can […]

I don't think it's simply obvious whether "immediate access to all information" enhances the general rate of innovation by providing resources, or stifles it by acting as a force toward conformity that squanders the exploratory potential of a large and diverse global population.

julie and I have finally started writing our manifesto

I don't understand why there's a meta tag that you have to put on every html page that means "don't make this tiny as fuck on mobile browsers"

I don't know the right thing to do with LLM-heavy code artifacts, but it's neither "fit them unlabeled into hand-written projects via existing processes" nor "don't produce them at all"

so Garth Brooks refuses to sign a deal with Spotify because he wants to help stand up for the concept of songwriters getting paid, which is super cool what's super fucked up: Spotify has an artist named only as "Garth Brooks Tribute" who has recorded imitations good enough that you might not […]

no-kings day headlined by... Bruce Springsteen, a billionaire

Installed a rain gutter on the house today. Modest project because it's only a ten foot segment of roofline, but ladder projects are a tremendous pain in the ass

I forgot how hard the west wing opened with the liberal version of sex positivity (pornography as a speech act, prostitution the sort of lawbreaking they're cool with because she enjoys it) in episodes 1-2

I actually don't buy the argument anymore that AI coding tools are an impediment to the development of new programming languages, because: 1. The premise that AI tools require having been trained on a substantial amount of code in your particular language seems to be wrong. The tools do much […]

I actually don't buy the argument anymore that AI coding tools are an impediment to the development of new programming languages, because: 1. The premise that AI tools require having been trained on a substantial amount of code in your particular language seems to be wrong. The tools do a much […]

"only use primitives as react hook dependencies" is the most "fuck, javascript people are idiots"-inspiring head-scratcher for me in a long while