The Offal Office

One of the huge perks of working at a software company is, when there's something about the product that bothers you personally, you can get your hands dirty and find out why it's basically impossible to get fixed

When @mittechreviewbr.bsky.social is calling out the emperor’s lack of clothing, the game is almost over www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/30/1...

Those of you who've followed me long enough may know that I don't keep my birds in cages. And at some point I start to let them out. They may choose not to come back, but that's a risk I am willing to take if they're ready to live "on their own". This one came back today.

that's why i made this script to automatically let me know when things break. but of course that could fail too, so there's another system that notifies me if *that* breaks. but of course that could fail, so...

Automation doesn’t guarantee that the thing won’t break. Automation only guarantees that when the thing does break you won’t be watching.

a like on a skeet about a green checkmark must be INTENSE

I thought a social media like was a good dopamine hit but goddamn a green checkmark on a pipeline build step is the real shit

On the one hand, I often feel like I'm just writing the same blog post over and over again. On the other hand, I feel like the resilience engineering concepts I'm writing about still have yet to be widely disseminated in our industry.

A deeply insightful post in which Lorin reprises his role as Cassandra. The curse of the systems thinker.

white house has joined bluesky click here to block all official us government accounts instantly bsky.app/profile/did:...

#stats poll a. Bonferroni b. Holm c. Hommel d. Benjamini-Hochberg e. YOLO

A friend of a friend made this and the aesthetics are deliciously DIY. If you like it, please "LIKE" it and help them win a SfN competition. youtu.be/RCjua7f2v9U?...

If you had told me six months ago that the tv episodes I would be sitting around waiting for each week was Peacemaker I wouldn’t have believed you 

In our house, we have a 10 ounce jar of Herrell’s hot fudge that is about to go out of date. Tensions are high. I have, heroically, picked up a spoon.

New post: Controlling IP traffic on your webserver A cool part about having your own webserver is that you get to choose who can visit. When IP addresses try to access sensitive files or aggressively scrape, you can just block them. Here's how. brandonrohrer.com/hosting5.html

They don’t tell you an engineering school how much of your job will be telling the future.

Caring for Your Webserver is out. It covers - browsing the access logs - catching missed pages - automatically adding .html to requests, when needed - redirecting URLs - setting up log rotations - finding a content provider for large files brandonrohrer.com/hosting4.html

come on buddy i feel like you're not even trying

For folks considering grad school in ML, my advice is to explore programs that mix ML with a domain interest. ML programs are wildly oversubscribed while a lot of the fun right now is in figuring out what you can do with it

My new pomodoro app doesn’t have many features, but there are also no updates and I won’t have to recharge it for 500 years.

It’s wild to me how much complexity we’re willing to accept to automate something that could be done manually with a weekly reminder

you’re probably underthinking it

If you're a former smoker you're eligible for the Covid vaccine, and CVS didn't ask me for any proof.

Another unexpected perk of self hosting is that I get to see all the times my feed.xml gets touched. Before, publishing rss felt like sending a message in a bottle. Now I know that at least the aggregators are eagerly gobbling it up.

I’m bummed that this has become more relevant, not less, in the six years since I wrote it. What do we do when our institutions fail us? brandonrohrer.com/org_response... No shade intended for my current employer, which is well above average in this regard

The incomparable @b0rk.jvns.ca has partnered with the folks at git-SCM.com to create one heck of a cheat sheet git-scm.com/cheat-sheet

I am recruiting (Canadian🇨🇦) graduate students at York University for Fall 2026 in Social and Personality Psychology! If you are interested in misinformation, political polarization, and/or computational social science, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out with any questions.

I’m here to f**k up your SQL query and eat my PB&J…. And I’m almost out of PB&J😈

You know what’s wrong with young people these days? All the same crap that’s wrong with old people, they’re just not as good at hiding it yet.

Blocking misbehaving ips on my server is a new pasttime. Sept 9 was when I figured out how to implement a block list.

One thing that me and my eight year-old self can agree on is that a new pair of shoes really do make you faster

A cool thing about hosting my own website is that I get to see logs. Normal users are gratifying, but what's really cool are the ones doing shenanigans. A pattern I saw today - apparently a group of ip addresses divvied up some of my pages into groups of 7-12 and visited them in alphabetical order.

at the end of the day I'm a basic b**** printf debugger and idgaf if it's some magical silicon matrix muncher, I'm gonna find a way to printf. agents are even more reliant on it so we get along well when we do awful things to the pipeline in the name of printf

If you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs maybe don’t make an omelette.

Cheers to 10 years of making videos 🥂

Just migrated my brandonrohrer.com blog to a webserver I manage. It is zippy af. (24ms ping times to a NY data center help). feeling powerful I'm a total novice here. All the credit goes to the excellent tutorials (especially @digitalocean.com's) and generous experts who improved on my attempts.

When designing a system for your own use, you no longer have to consider the threat vector of malicious insider attack. Although you very much still need to consider the case of bumbling insider fuckups.

This makes me happy because it confirms my bias that if you really want to impact SOTA, focus on the data. Training data, data preprocessing, post hoc analysis of high-error data points. It’s not flashy but that’s the pay dirt.

I remember being weirded out in the early days of Bluetooth earpieces by dudes in business shirts, walking through the airport, having heated conversations with themselves.

Thank me later

If you want to become the master of your own domain, here's how www.brandonrohrer.com/hosting2

i wanted to understand the current landscape better, so i did a deep dive on current embedding sizes and architectures vickiboykis.com/2025/09/01/h...

Happy first day of flannel season in the northern hemisphere to all who celebrate

I’m like the guy in Momento except instead of tattoos I use blog posts

One of my most visited posts is on how to set up ssh for a home network. I wonder if there's more of that happening nowadays. www.brandonrohrer.com/ssh_at_home

It’s surreal to see Tech Review backing off on breathless AI hype to a more measured stance. I don’t hate it. #ReinforcementLearning

I'm researching what is happening in the tech jobs market. If you're a hiring manager recruiting, or an experienced eng on the job market, would love to hear what you see. DMs open. (Feels like a weird market. I suspect data on eg jobs doesn't reflect what's on the ground)