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You see a series of checkboxes checked. Schedules met. Requirements satisfied. Demos delivered. It's a good day. Good job, you, good job! A promotion is in sight.
But you didn't feel it. You didn't feel it.
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I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who are…
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With the development of artificial intelligence racing forward at warp speed, some of the richest men in the world may be deciding the fate of humanity right now.
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Hermetic /usr/ is awesome; let's popularize image-based OSes with modernized security properties built around immutability, SecureBoot, TPM2, adaptability, auto-updating, factory reset, uniformity – built from traditional distribution packages, but deployed via images.
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#archlinux #mkosi In this post we'll build a small single-file Arch Linux rescue image for EFI systems. We will end up with a single EF...
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I believe that language models aren’t world models. It’s a weak claim — I’m not saying they’re useless, or that we’re done milking them. It’s also a fuzzy-sounding claim — with its trillion weights, who can prove that there’s something an LLM isn't a model of? But I hope to make my claim clear and persuasive enough with some examples.
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Some ideas for a language similar to That, but smaller in size and scope by dropping the systems programming constraint Rust has.
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A guide to writing good design documents
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Some teams require that every TODO comment in a codebase gets logged in the bug tracker. Others automatically delete any “stale” TODO that has been in the codebase for over a year. Don’t do it!
Also see https://lobste.rs/s/j1hijj/todos_aren_t_for_doing
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Ever since discovering the Entity Component System pattern through Bevy a few years ago, I've been simultaneously obsessed with it and frustrated with the lack of attention it is getting outside of the game development world.
Hopefully with this post (which I have been trying to write since at least May of 2023), I'll be able to move the attention needle just a little bit in the right direction.
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Frivilous dependencies are the enemy of maintainability.
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The study, from MIT Lab scholars, measured the brain activity of subjects writing SAT essays with and without ChatGPT.
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We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities in one relevant setting; as these systems continue to rapidly evolve, we plan on continuing to use this methodology to help estimate AI acceleration from AI R&D automation.
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there's an effectively unlimited massive fusion reactor in space we literally all live off of, and for all practical purposes we always have and always will. it is very much a free lunch! concretely: every lunch you have ever eaten and will ever eat is a free lunch given to earth by the sun.
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When every dev is just doing the next ticket, who’s steering the ship?
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This is meant as a "response" to Carlos' Moving away from Nix, not as a rebuttal, but as a telling of why Nix works for me. I will go over the same points as Carlos' post, but from my perspective of having embraced Nix, rather than "dealing with it," and why they don't bother me.
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After using nix in my dotfiles for over 2 years, I’m now moving away
from it.
Here’s why.
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One of the most harmful pieces of advice is to not reinvent the wheel.
It usually comes from a good place, but is typically given by two groups of people:
those who tried to invent a wheel themselves and know how hard it is
those who never tried to invent a wheel and blindly follow the advice
Either way, both positions lead to a climate where curiosity and exploration gets discouraged. I’m glad that some people didn’t follow that advice; we owe them many of the conveniences of modern life.
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A story from 16 years ago - trust, tech, and a server that had to disappear. They offered me a blank check. I said no.
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A perennial complaint among various sections of the Rust community is “all these darn programs that use 300 crates to do anything”. These complaints are valid, but my argument is that they’re also not NEW, and they’re certainly not unique to Rust. Rather the difference in dependencies between something written in Rust vs. “traditional” C or C++ is that on Unix systems, all these dependencies are still there, just handled by the system instead of the compiler directly. The distro maintainers do more of the work, and our build systems assume the presence of various system libraries in system places. The only thing new about it is that programmers are exposed to more of the costs of it up-front.
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It's becoming increasingly apparent that one of the reasons why tech companies are so enthusiastic about shoving AI into every product and service is that they fundamentally do not understand why people dislike AI. I will elaborate. I was recently made aware of the Jetbrains developer ecosystem survey, which included a lot of questions about…
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The Plea is a data-driven documentary that tells the story of the first vaccine and the eradication of smallpox—a modern retelling of one of humanity’s greatest triumphs.
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Six years ago, David Thompson wrote a popular blog post called “My favourite Git commit” celebrating a whimsically detailed commit message his co-worker wrote. I enjoyed the post at the time and have sent it to several teammates as a model for good commit messages.
I recently revisited Thompson’s article as I was creating my own guide to writing useful commit messages. When pressed to explain what made Thompson’s post such an effective example, I was surprised to find that I couldn’t. It was fun to read as an outside observer, but I couldn’t justify it as a model of good software engineering.
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A Society That Lost Focus par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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I've always personally defined the "as code" suffix in "X as Code" to mean "a system of principles or rules"1. This is in contrast to the popular interpretation of "as code" to mean "as programming."
I feel the need to write this short blog post and clarify my intent because I'm often personally a target of this misunderstanding due to my history of starting Terraform2 which is a flagship "X as Code" tool.
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In my opinion, one of the most important ideas in product design is to avoid the “nightmare bicycle”.
Imagine a bicycle where the product manager said: “people don’t get math so we can’t have numbered gears. We need labeled buttons for gravel mode, downhill mode, …”
This is the hypothetical “nightmare bicycle” that Andrea diSessa imagines in his book Changing Minds.
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Forty was both the most destructive and most generative year of my life. Cells in my husband Jake’s body divided, killing him. Cells in my body divided, giving our daughter Athena life.
I didn’t survive.
The “I” that I used to be—someone who didn’t know what it was like to watch the man she loved dismantled ruthlessly by cancer—died with Jake on August 8th. What was left of her died in childbirth.
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A re-introduction to socket activation with listenfd/systemfd.
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Chose one. Or maybe two?
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The product of software development is not code but a mental model, a theory: a specific way of explaining the world.