oh this is a timely subskeet! I was just reexamining my priors…

I'd forgotten all about that. Thanks!

“Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded” was right, if the crowd was cars.

I’m on hour three of “are you sure we need to patch that dependency right now?” getting an LLM to get an existing app to run this week.

1: All that to avoid signing up for an API key?!
2: No, don’t disable auth.

hah, did I take that?

I bet that tool will be super reliable!

Do we end up with more specialists per team…? Or just more specialized agents in the end?

Totally! I’m really interested in what happens if AI tools truly increase the rate of change in products by a factor of 10 (or more, or close)

I think customers are going to be begging for more structure around releases, better QA processes, insist on fewer regressions, lower crash rates etc.

True broadly!

I think anything close to this much economic power should be controlled and allocated democratically. Would that be so hard?

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

Me automating: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Me being automated: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

What I learned at West Side Books — and what comes next "Everything we love will disappear, but if we are lucky, it transforms before vanishing."

This story of our local bookshop is a poignant portrait of our times. It rightly centers the previous owner, the workers, the patrons, and the ray of hope from the new owner.

denverite.com/2026/01/28/d...

Pin by Aurelia North on Tattoos | Migraine art, Migraine aura, Visual migraine This Pin was discovered by Aurelia North. Discover (and save!) your own Pins on Pinterest

People paint them, it’s amazing.

Tag yourself:

jp.pinterest.com/pin/49764782...

I don’t have it to hand (it’s an old picture) but if you dig a bit for Dreyfus’s early explorations of Kierkegaard you’ll find references to The Present Age. I’d start here goldberg.berkeley.edu/lecs/kierkeg...

Ugh 2001, sorry!

Excerpt from On The Internet by Hubert Dreyfus. Key paragraph reads: “But the vision of a worldwide electronic agora precisely misses the Kierkegaardian point that the people talking to each other in the Athenian agora were members of a direct democracy who were directly affected by the issues they were discussing, and, most importantly, the point of the discussion was for them to take the responsibility and risk of voting publicly on the questions they were debating. For Kierkegaard, a worldwide electronic agora is an oxymoron. The Athenian agora is precisely the opposite of the public sphere, where anonymous electronic kibitzers from all over the world, who risk nothing, come together to announce and defend their opinions. As an extension to the deracinated public sphere, the electronic agora is a grave danger to real political community. Kierkegaard enables us to see that the problem is not that Rheingold's 'electronic agora' is too utopian; it is not an agora at all, but a nowhere place for anonymous nowhere people. As such, it is dangerously distopian.”

I really think Hubert Dreyfus nailed this in On The Internet (2002) and I’ll keep posting this page until everyone has seen it. Key para in alt text.

Yes!

You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof. What happens when you do minimal screening before hiring agents, arming them, and sending them into the streets? We're all finding out.

Did you see slate.com/news-and-pol...

It’s a pretty little book too, if you have means and like Things.

Did you see the saga of her Ren Fair costume contest entry? So good.

#AdventOfCode Day 9 part 2 definitely threw me today. So much for bragging about the runtime of naive algorithms and JavaScript as “good enough”. A hackish memoized somewhat brute force solution, after several attempts, finally competed in 15 minutes. Phew!

It only took 21 years for passwords to be split out of Safari as its own app, or 25 years if you see it as an offshoot of Keychain.

One optimization of note, switching to a basic PriorityQueue (sort as you build) instead of building then sorting the list by distance helped drop runtime from ~300 to ~90ms.

One thing I noticed this time: the answers worked more as "checksums" that you'd done the right calculation, rather than meaningful parts of the puzzle. Would have been nice for the answer to tie back to the question, e.g. the length of wire needed for the elves to complete the circuits?

Part 2 is my slowest performing JS code so far in this advent, running in about 300ms on my laptop. Might try to dig in and see if there are optimizations to be made... later!

An adventure in reading comprehension — I had an off-by-one error in my counts because I was counting *success* and not *attempts*.

I just completed "Playground" - Day 8 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/8

[Spoiler in thread]