I hadn’t thought about Lambda School in a long time, but what a read: https://www.sandofsky.com/lambda-school/

I dunno, but I have a feeling that the normalization of automatic updates has relieved developers and their clients of having to consider a user's needs to a large degree. Software change is now something you do to your users, not something you persuade your users to accept.

This is a remarkable graph.

You might have heard that "EV sales are slumping", "people are starting to avoid EVs", etc.

That's not what's happening.

What's happening is "Tesla is cratering so hard that it's skewing the aggregate market data."

Or, put differently, "Tesla is failing harder than the entire rest of the market is succeeding, combined."

git status is now taking half a second, which is apparently the point at which I get annoyed at it. Probably time to prune my submodules.

merge conflict tips

(this is #bonuscomic #5 for "How Git Works" https://wizardzines.com/zines/git/, with things that aren't in the zine)

I've been breaking my usual "don't write about things I haven't tried" rules for these bonus comics, but other people suggested these and maybe they'll be helpful!

I’ve been told to stop referring to the git commit history as “the public chronicle of our errors”

the job hunt continues but it has brought me this actually quite good job requirement

@nat One comment on your draft on management at Pivotal:

But Labs still needed mentors to help develop new consultants – so you see this very mentorship-focused management system develop.

Not sure if my experience was out of the ordinary here, but I didn’t really think of my manager as being there for mentorship. Some did wind up being mentors in some form or fashion, but they were generally too far removed from the work and I received more mentorship from more senior engineers on my team.

Looking forward to the revised post on this, also - will be great to have a resource to point people to when I talk about the Pivotal [engineering] management structure.

This is really good.

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/06/succor-borne-every-minute

Woo, finished a Tuesday #NYTXW downs-only!

I haven't seen anybody mentioning it or even noticing it, like it's just the water we swim in now, but this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of what would become a seminal, and is arguably the single most important, piece of social software ever created.

Written by Douglas McIlroy and James Hunt and released with the 5th Edition of Unix this month in 1974: diff.

https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/source/s1/diff1.c

Fully endorse this rant on USB-C. https://blog.doismellburning.co.uk/usb-c-a-rant/

I don’t know how more people aren’t running into the issues that I encounter with power negotiation in particular.

Dang, this is so true.

RE: https://circumstances.run/@hipsterelectron/112622973211647891

Bring Back the Corporate Death Penalty: https://neuburger.substack.com/p/bring-back-the-corporate-death-penalty

Charity Majors writes a lot of bangers, but I especially liked this one a lot on engineering experience and generative AI: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/06/10/generative-ai-is-not-going-to-build-your-engineering-team-for-you/

Surprised a few of my coworkers last week when they found out I was 40 (from being grandmasters-eligible).

Perplexity AI Is Lying about Their User Agent https://rknight.me/blog/perplexity-ai-is-lying-about-its-user-agent/

Shocking absolutely no one an AI company, Perplexity AI, isn't sending the correct user agent string they say they will and they completely ignore robots.txt

When it comes to the efficiency-thoroughness trade off, we reward efficiency (ability to execute) and punish absence of thoroughness (post-incident: why didn’t you do more testing?) without explicitly acknowledging that the trade-off exists.

Have you ever had an experience like, you're walking down the street, there's a piece of litter, and you kind of like, kick it by accident, your foot grazes it, and suddenly you feel a compulsion to pick it up and put it in a trash can? This is litter, it wasn't your problem, but then you accidentally touched it and it Became your problem, somehow the act of touching it tagged it as "yours" and now the superego says you're obligated to deal with it?

That's what open source contribution is like