thirteen charts. wildly different. some are circles, others crosses, horizontal lines, vertical lines, randomly scattered, and also, a picture of a dinosaur

i think my favourite version of anscombe's quarter is the "data dinosaur"

all thirteen of these graphs have the same mean, variance, and correlation

when people graph an average value, and nothing else, they're lying to you

this is a really dumb story that I'm sure I will see 50 times today. company goes out of business, sells its IP for $1, sells its warehouse space for $2. this is what their stock "exploding" looks like

[object Object] @zzt@mas.to unix systems will have some crap named /bin/stink and the man page is “send jobs to the Stinkwriter” and all the arguments are indecipherable and the only times it’s been touched were in 1993 when gnu cloned it from unix v6 for whatever reason and last week when it grew a CLAUDE.md and .cursor and whoever took over maintenance started flooding it with broken slop features nobody asked for

mas.to/@zzt/1164107...

I remember as an impressionable child I’d see the advertisements at airports. “Please daddy,” I’d say. “Please can we get SAP?”

“We have SAP at home,” he’d reply. But it was always quickbooks :(

Angine de Poitrine - Fabienk (Live on KEXP) YouTube video by KEXP

I can't remember the last time something has made me as happy as the existence and unexpected popularity of Angine de Poitrine. Two aliens playing fun, danceable, microtonal math rock live is the complete opposite of our zeitgeist of soulless, derivative AI bullshit.
youtu.be/pRgHYWOtqqc

"behold, I have converted many number to few number" is something that very obviously makes a ton of sense in some contexts, and is stupid as fuck in others.

Boids - Wikipedia

Fun fact: you can use the Boids algorithm to simulate a flock of nerds.

Software industry trends may seem chaotic, but they are in fact fully explained by the six-seven model of technology adoption.

My pet theory is that one reason AI tools are so popular is because Covid lockdowns transformed office work into an unhealthily solitary and isolated activity, and people used to having to go it alone are relieved to get a tamagotchi they can ask for help and talk things through with.

Being pushed to use AI at work:
Well what do you do if you don't know something or need a second opinion?
I'll ask a teammate to come over and take a look.
But what if they can't help you?
I'll ask someone else in the office.
But would you really?
I do it all the time!

New blog post: I got tired of having repetitive arguments explaining why I think it’s OK to be skeptical of LLMs for coding, so I wrote six and a half thousand words on the topic that I will be referring people to from now on.

www.b-list.org/weblog/2026/...

Everytime I learn more about software I am more surprised that the entire world is not on fire, all the time.

Is code what we produce? Like a civil engineer produces concrete?

The secret to doing anything is look at some crap stuff and going “I could do better than that”

The thread linked here is a close reading of the leaked code base and friends it is *brutal*

understanding how the most successful use of llms actually works is both enlightening and demystifying

it's a throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall machine plus a test-spaghetti-wall-stickiness machine working in concert

and there quite frankly aren't that many domains where this approach can work

part of the pollution that's happening to our information ecosystem is that it becomes harder to actually be responsible

like somebody says "oh, i don't trust ai. i'm going to find a reputable source, like an actual medical clinic"

Yes, I've used TypeScript and React in anger. I haven't used them any other way.

"It may seem that the operator who is expected solely to monitor that the automatics are acting correctly ... has a relatively simple task ...

... it is humanly impossible to carry out the basic function of monitoring for unlikely abnormalities"

— Lisanne Bainbridge: Ironies of Automation (1983)

I'm not an artist and writer because I have *ideas* for projects. I'm an artist and writer because I sit my ass in the chair and work on art instead of doing other things. The ideas I have now are better than the ones I had 20 years ago because I spent those 20 years honing my craft with intention.

I wrote ten paragraphs today and deleted seven of them. Sometimes days just go like that. That's the process. You explore ideas, and discover some of them are bad and so you try another idea. This is why just putting your idea into AI doesn't make a real story. You need the back and forth.

Väärinkäytösten osuis Kelan etuuksista: 0,04 prosenttia.

Neljä kymmenestuhannesosaa. Eli ihmisen kokoisilla luvuilla ilmaistuna jokaisesta sadasta etuuseurosta neljä senttiä menee väärinkäytöksiin.

Paljonko lie jää hakematta etuuksia, joihin kansalaisella olisi oikeus?

yle.fi/a/74-20214412

AI writing sounds like someone put the mind of a dumb and overexcited dog in the body of an American morning TV anchor.

slop is something that takes more human effort to consume than it took to produce. When my coworker sends me raw Gemini output he’s not expressing his freedom to create, he’s disrespecting the value of my time

Yes. And. Realise that organisations have adopted this approach because they see you, the developer employee, as a untrusted, unsupported individual working in isolation, and treat you as such.

Pull Requests (PRs) solve one problem only: you have broken up the work into small chunks that are completed by untrusted (and often unknown) individuals working in isolation without support or help, who produce potentially destructive changes, …

1/5

Thank goodness for my library of real, physical books, each a conversation with another real thinking, feeling human.

"you see we don't need gas or plastic as we have a mostly scams-based economy" [the latest big scam starts to fall apart] "ah"

i guess those celebrating soras death didnt get the memo that some of us need daily personalized greetings from james bond—for mental health

Any further improvements to coding speed past what the new bottleneck can handle are either wasted (if the bottleneck is upstream of coding, the coding step will always be starved for inputs) or make matters worse (if the bottleneck is downstream, there will be a pileup of inventory before it).