Great moments in U.S. History.

Let’s time-travel backward like there’s no tomorrow.

New blog post: synthesis is harder than analysis surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/07/03/s...

My years-long streak of never entering the password correctly on the first try continues

Thumb: A-okay! Opposable thumb: Fuck off.

hey tangential but i saw this meme the other day and thought you might like it

New blog post, in which I lament how LLMs will be used for writing incident reports in the future: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/06/19/i...

I wrote a column for the Journal of Systems and Software: "Dear researchers: help me deal with incidents!" surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/06/16/d...

Zombies with a mid undead crisis

Fable of the deconstruction

The slow and the curious

Imagine being a crypto startup founder in 2021, visiting the Oracle, and being told that in five years, companies will IPO at trillion dollar valuations, where their business model is selling increasingly expensive tokens.

I think I could live off of 80% olive oil and garlic if i had to

If you can’t see the constraints imposed on the system, you won’t be able to make sense of the resulting behavior.

why is vanilla synonymous with boring? vanilla is delicious. imagine a world without vanilla. it would be so oregano.

I’m personally not holding my breath on the prose improving, sadly. More being forced to read sloppy PRDs for work, until morale improves I guess www.interconnects.ai/p/why-ai-wri...

Bonus blog post for today about my instinctual revulsion towards AI slop: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/06/06/i...

I’ve never been very knowledgeable about Greek mythology, it’s always been a bit of an Achilles elbow for me.

New blog post: the demon of the gaps surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/06/06/t...

I don’t think I have the strength for another Trump vs Biden election.

Raw milk is cooked. healthandwelfare.idaho.gov/news/idaho-p...

Fighting ire with ire

Why isn’t partisanship ever clothed?

My new avatar is thanks to @charity.wtf, who channeled my order muppet nature.

That you could be born into the Horse-and-Buggy era of no cars or planes, and live to see the Concorde and the Moon Landing and the home computer, is still amazing to me. One aeronautical engineer worked on designing both the Sopwith Camel biplane and the Harrier JumpJet. Now that's a career.

I feel you LLMs: my context window fills up too.

CREAM: context rules everything around me

My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it.

bro you ever find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife and ask yourself well how did I get here bro

San Francisco: a land of contrasts.

Somebody needs to write an essay on the topic of “WIP limits in the age of LLMs”.

Tired: Waymo Wired: Wade mode

Tired: thinking, fast and slow Wired: thinking, shallow and deep

Why don't they just ask the AI how to make AI profitable?

Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical inspired me to write this post on predicting the impact of technology: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/05/25/f...

This is the under-discussed part. Multiple agents don't remove coordination work; they move it. Now someone has to manage task boundaries, shared context, merge conflicts, evaluation, and who owns the final story.

Take it from someone who managed a construction site: herding a lot of different actors doing technical things that have to do with each other semi autonomously is surprisingly hard

Bonus blog post, on the coordination work demanded by the use of multiple coding agents: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/05/24/t...

A new blog post on thinking about reliability work as improving the odds: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/05/24/r...

"Metaphor debt" is when all of your metaphors involve the concept of "debt" because you can't think of any other metaphors anymore.

Today’s systems thinking case study

AI increases the demand for coordination work but doesn’t reduce the costs of coordination work. Watch for coordination challenges to increase in the near future.

oh how i pine for the halcyon days of yore, when people still pined & knew what ‘halcyon’ meant 😬

Proposed operational definition for AGI: when a computer can be held accountable

Question for CS academics: how are undergraduate enrollments trending in your departments?

LLM hallucinations are yet another example of data-driven lies.

at $prevjob we had SLA language in some contracts around "full platform outage", so some of our architectural energy went into maintaining legacy systems that didn't go down when our main app tended to (hence never having a "full" outage)

uptime is a social construct

Not so sure about this stat, Bluesky

I GET LOGGED OUT. BUT I LOG IN AGAIN