If you train models on stolen copies of all the world’s fiction, I don’t think you should be surprised when they blackmail, narc, or murder.
If you train models on stolen copies of all the world’s fiction, I don’t think you should be surprised when they blackmail, narc, or murder.
This article on the rise of Markdown was going ok until it called the ‘#’ character “hashtag” 🤮.
This is five years old now, but a delightful walk through the history of CSS, most of which I was around for (I mostly bowed out in the later years).
An interesting pair of articles from authors I very much admire, one pro and one less so. Glyph’s resonates with me much more right now, but it’s hard to disagree with Armin’s.
Interest [summary of a study on what people do when reviewing code]Ihttps://rdel.substack.com/p/rdel-94-how-do-experienced-engineers).
This is a great list of what open software development needs to do better.
Sometimes I end up rereading something old, like this Joel on Software post on pricing and am reminded how well-written these pieces were. I read lots of insightful things now, but some of the grace seems to have disappeared.
An interesting take on writing clever code.
Imagine how great it would be if AoNZ also built up ‘clouds’, for us and the smaller Pacific countries. And especially keeping the open-source element so that it’s synergistic with Europe doing it. Of course, we’d be starting even further behind, but being smaller could potentially move faster.
A fair summary of AoNZ’s COVID response. A great start, with flaws, leading into a hugely wasted opportunity and screw ups. And somehow long-COVID entirely missing from the conversation.
Interesting details of improvements in the cryptography functionality of the Python standard library.
Meanwhile, we’ve been telling our kids that the standard for decent people is enthusiastic consent. That’s very evidently not the case for the tycoons running the technology industry.
I mostly read Simon Willison (for the pro & practical side) and Ed Zitron (for the anti & economic side) but this is a good take of LLMs in coding.
Whatever the chocolate milk version of nerd-sniping is, this is it.
I have never seen Drink Da Milgy, so will keep my eye out for that. I don’t remember having Bickfords Iced Chocolate Almond Milk. They missed Green Valley, but I’ve also not managed to find that. I think it’s wrong to include protein drinks but exclude mixes (Quarterpast and the like).
Outside that, this is the right order:
The story of Slack continues and is now at a point when Slack arguably started to deteriorate. Interesting to read the positively-put background of the time.
This sucks for Troy, is an excellent example of how even experts can be fooled and make mistakes.
We are destroying software. Hard to disagree with most of these.
I was iPad-only for a similar period of time until moving to be mostly laptop (Ubuntu) during the working day about 18 months ago. Matt’s thoughts generally align with my own.
Interesting thoughts on getting a European Cloud.
AoNZ needs to be thinking and doing more about this too - although if there was a strong European Cloud choice, that would make it less urgent, particularly since our values (re: privacy for example) align more with Europe than the US.
Continuing with the analogy, Charms & Juju are:
I use any brand of instant coffee (Nescafé, store-brand) and don’t need a coffee maker at all.
In the cloud ladder.
(The thing I like most about the coffee analogy is that the coffee snobs will say only #1 is acceptable and engineering snobs will say only #1 is best, and in both cases it always depends on the specifics).
Nice post on what the hyperscalers are selling that smaller players can’t.
Charms are furniture in this example, although kitset mostly now, since you need a Juju to run them somewhere.
A nice ‘falsehoods’ list, for languages, but examples would have been great.
Rings very true:
The other story is much more typical, and it goes something like this: I’d love to leave, but there’s something keeping me. One more year and I’ll get a new title, and then I’ll be so well-placed for a new job. I’ve heard the market is bad, so I should wait until it picks up again. I’ll get a raise soon, then I’ll negotiate for a new job. I’m scared of keeping up with mortgage repayments. I just need a year to finish up this project, it’ll look great on my CV. My network is terrible, so I don’t have the same options open to me. I think I can make a difference if I’m given a few more months.
In two years, this second approach has never gone well. Never, ever, ever.
This advice on getting jobs is long but feels right. Although not for Canonical, and I’m definitely not an expert here, more the schmuck who sees himself in the quote above.
Five basic rules from Lesley Carhart:
[“At the end of the day, where you stand on “shitty code” depends on your primary goal:
Are you shipping a product and racing to meet user needs? Or are you building a reusable library or framework meant to stand the test of time?"](https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/2/20/ugly-code)