Mass market paperback edition of THE SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE (in glittery, boxy grey-blue letters] by TRACY KIDDER

I just heard that Tracy Kidder passed away this week — I read his THE SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE as a teen, and it’s one of a handful of books I can point to as having a significant impact on my life, starting with going to engineering school.

www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

but really the closing company totally messed up and should have never closed us.

The title company sued them for negligence after paying out.

yep, bought a house where seller was defrauded on a refinance. A few months after I moved in his old mortgage went into foreclosure.

Title insurance covered the lawyers and eventually had to payoff that original mortgage. It was a 💩 show.

best $ i ever spent

Taps the sign

Been following you for a while because of Kubernetes, but I’m also a new HAM so the topic was a fun surprise.

AI writes and deploys the majority of the code at Anthropic which sounds impressive but the service uptime is terrible.

I’d love to see a post-mortem from them about the past few weeks of availability issues.

Claude code is really nice for working with my homelab. Which keeps reinforcing how I feel about AI, its great for things I’m not good at, even though it’s annoying and gets in my way for the things I am good at.

I am a little heartened to start seeing some discussion around costs, and that engineers aren’t being replaced but now companies are spending $ on AI in addition to total comp. I feel like that will become an issue sooner rather than later.

over 80% are seeing no productivity gains from adopting AI

yet overwhelmingly they’re predicting productivity gains (though the expected lift is like 1%?)

I feel like there’s research showing that proper sleep, higher morale, and clear vision/roadmap have a FAR larger impact on productivity

I have worries for all the possible outcomes with AI right now.

It lives up to they hype, jobs are destroyed. We have great depression levels of unemployment the economy crashes.

It doesn't live up to they hype, the bubble bursts and the economy crashes.

And things between those two outcomes.

I'm skeptical of that actually happening, but if it did I'm also unsure how we'd maintain the skills to adequately code review generated code when we're no longer using those skills.

The idea of using LLMs to generate a significant portion, > 50%, of the code for my work is downright depressing to me. If the job evolves into being a manager and code reviewer for agents then I'm not sure what I will do.

I am using LLMs everyday, and I find them useful a good amount of the time. But they also get in my way a lot. In my experience it's been a mixed bag.

For me there is such a gap between my experience using these tools, even at their best, and how they are talked about publicly by executives and evangelists. I'm having a hard time figuring out how to bridge that gap.

Almost every conversation I have with someone else in tech right now eventually leads to the existential dread of AI. And me feeling like I’m crazy for not believing in the current hype.

The enshitification of retail and corporate restaurants is so depressing. The cost cutting and understaffing is so obvious. The maximize shareholder value at the expense of employees and customers is so defeating for everyone but private equity and the investment class.

Spending the snowy/icey weekend spinning up a new kubernetes cluster in my homelab. It’s been about 3 years since my old cluster died and I switched to a few docker containers.

Not sure why I find moonlighting as a sysadmin “fun” but I do 😂

I have to worry about my kids being shot at school, because any gun laws are a violation of the constitutional right to bear arms.

But federal agents can execute citizens in the street now? 🤨

NRA and gun nuts were always full of shit, but that BS is being laid completely bare now.

I totally needed a new hobby 😐

Learning about GMRS radios & starting to study HAM things. My YT algorithm is going to be interesting with a mix of preppers now 😂

TFW your new ADHD hyper fixation hobby is competing for attention with your older hobby and your job 😂

Introduce yourself with five concerts you’ve been to:

Tyler Childers
John Mayer
P!nk
Death Cab for Cutie
Ozzfest

the inference costs of the frontier models is too high for consumers to pay and I’m still unsure how the companies survive long enough to bring that cost low enough to make any profit. Currently those costs scale with usage which compounds the issue.

so this is a universal problem? our 19yo has refused to pick out a coat and is “fine” since he has hoodies 😒

“I regret you all the time” is such a great lyric.

The idea that if you join a hot AI startup that a big tech company can show up to hire away the founders & top engineers, pay out the investors and leave the rest of you with nothing but broken promises seems bad for the startup ecosystem.

Nothing like a random 70° day and a few MTB laps to remind me how much my mental health needs exercise and time outside!

While visiting with my mom recently we were talking about cooking and I mentioned a tofu meal I cook often. My mom earnestly asked "What if Tofu?" I answered that as best I could. But it highlighted to me how much I've strayed from the norm of my family and upbringing.

In hindsight I'm amazed at the quality of those classed. CS 1 was QBasic on 16Mhz 386 machines in 1999, CS 2 was Pascal. He made it a point to teach concepts and the language was just the tool.

After I graduated they finally got upgraded machines and switched to Java before the classes ended.

This reminds me how lucky I was to get 3 years of CS in HS because it was a pet class from one of my Math teachers.

When he left my HS they ended CS classes. I just happened to catch a window there, that completely put me on the career path I stayed on.