Fun fact you can do everything you want with just HTML tables and people liked that version of the Internet a lot better
20.02.2026 13:58
👍 301
🔁 43
💬 21
📌 5
Fun fact you can do everything you want with just HTML tables and people liked that version of the Internet a lot better
What year is it? Called Rikon for a replacement part and a human picked up. No phone tree, no "virtual assistant" or AI. Got the whole thing sorted out in under ten minutes, and most of that time was just providing shipping details.
More of this please.
ok but i don’t wanna host my own everything and now add “host ur own groupchat” to the list 🥲
Been beating this drum for a couple of years now tbh. Code generation is cheap now, but one of the fundamental, mathematically proven ideas behind agile is that large batches slow you down
It's the "I should buy a boat" cat meme, except instead it says "I should build a solar farm."
The economics of the DePue solar farm literally has me thinking--
You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test
Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs)
Good tech.
Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales)
Bad tech.
Adaptive human capacity strikes again!
Oh it's working all right. Not for us, granted.
Third time's a charm!
How about some more vector.dev? This time, some goofy tricks you can do to smuggle controls and variables through a pipeline using the namespacing/metadata feature.
wolfman.dev/posts/vector...
One of my favourite things right now is vector.dev which is why I wrote a blag post about how to catastrophically break it.
wolfman.dev/posts/vector...
anyone who
-brings up vibe coding like it’s a good thing unironically
-asks me “do u think AI will replace all software engineers”
-says “we are ____ compliant” as if that defaults to being secure
will receive 1 of following
-incoherent screeching
-bad beatboxing/singing
-coherent yelling
IPv6 is wild. During VPC design, I would always carefully plan out address allocation so that I wouldn't run out of IPv4 addresses.
Now you can just allocate 4 billion trillion IPv6 addresses to divide up into 17 million address subnets. Dang. Yo.
engineers: there’s a 50% chance this might fail
VC: ok then do it twice
This isn't ‘'renting a server.' It's leasing access to a whole sprawling, capital-intensive, technically-capable system that must be just as available in Cairo as in Capetown, just as functional in Bangkok as Berlin. Particularly given the high stakes use cases of many who rely on Signal. 6/
One of the points Alex Gaynor makes in his “Learning From Failure” talk on software engineering is that the “root cause” of an issue is seldom “someone chose to do something they knew was unsafe”. More often they’re doing something that they’ve been led to think is safe, but which isn’t.
Even though I've been doing cloud things for almost ten years now, I'm forever grateful for having spent time wrangling physical networks with some great mentors. Knowing this stuff in the era of cloud VPCs is like a super power.
fosstodon.org/@nickpegg/11...
None of the above changes with AI tools generating code.
So if AI tools can generate code faster (and more of it with less effort), ask yourself: what will happen?
"Fundamental" truths about software:
- Code is liability
- The more code you have, the more bugs you tend to have
- The more complex a system, the more important architecture becomes
- Writing maintainable code is a lot more effort than just getting it to work
In other news: vector.dev is hot shit and I should probably write a blag post about it soon.
(*For my complex systems friends, "accident" in the sense of Normal/System Accident, not "whoops." Though, I'm sure there's some whoops too...!)
Some of the suggestions: lighter weapons, more flexible blades, better control (ok, everyone should be doing _that_ one anyway).
Maybe there's no level of adequate protection against someone cranking a 900g sabre.
There's been some high-profile accidents* in the historical fencing scene recently, including a rapier going through a jacket and a heavy sabre knocking someone out cold.
I keep hearing that historical fencing/HEMA is new on the scene, and can't help but wonder if we're relearning why MOF exists.
OH: activity is not the same thing as productivity.
insult ppl like tostolyevsky
instead of “be fuckinh for real” try “What terrible tragedies realism inflicts on people”
instead of “that’s bullshit nice try” try “You can be sincere but still be stupid”
instead of “wow u love like this” try “Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything”
Consider though: if your role is to write stuff (be it code or not code) then you probably also want to be good at writing stuff, and you get better at writing stuff by writing stuff.
I feel like I have to caveat that I am not all on the "LLMs bad" train. There are some neat use cases when they aren't stealing from artists or threatening to shear reality with generative video or, y'know, all the other stuff.
Hey it's me writing about (not) using LLMs for generating code: wolfman.dev/posts/writin...
I often think about what a huge loss it was (for us, at least) that we didn't get you on our side of the org chart.
It's the Geordi La Forge meme. He's saying "no way" to a base64-encoded string with padding at the end and "heck ya" to the same base64-encoded string with its padding stripped.