jonstewart

Publishers (and authors) have long had a beef with Amazon. It was Barnes and Noble that put the bookstores out of business, and then Amazon put them out of business and no one really cared.

Most of the early internet unleashed pent-up demand for greater connectivity. The main industry that was negatively impacted was journalism. Most small towns had their own newspapers, there were many great newspapers across the country, and their business model was advertising, especially classifieds. That was all vaporized, more or less. I don’t think search ads were an improvement, though Craigslist is.

I don't have an opinion on Instructure (except as a parent generally hating the overall app-ization of education; fortunately our district switched away from Canvas a couple years ago), their cybersecurity posture, or this particular event. My only point is that even if backups exist, working through a ransomware attack often takes time.

Also, ransomware gangs often exfil the data and threaten to release it if the ransom is not paid--blackmail, of a sort. It depends on the company and the data set whether this is effective as a tactic. But when it is, backups don't help.

Backups are definitely helpful in ransomwares, but before systems can be restored and brought back online, victim organizations still need to assess the scope of the breach, find the initial access vector, identify compromised accounts, and evict the threat actor. That can take time.

I hate using languages that only have signed integers. Using integers that can’t be negative fits many problems nicely and avoids the edge case of having to check for negative.

'"That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.'

The vast majority of government employees would not have access to MNPI.

I would argue that nondeterministic finite automata are both more significant and more practical.

Dave Cutler and Raymond Chen might like a word.

This might be the major dilemma in the tech industry today, where the natural tendencies of literalism and optimism among technologists has turned into a form of defensive credulity. The real world rigor of The New Yorker’s editorial standards and concerns about defamation necessitate this circumscribed style that rewards close reading and skepticism, but those aren’t in favor in the tech industry currently.

The absolute best thing about coding agents is not having to waste time on build systems. I had Claude code port my autotools scripts to meson (which uses ninja) and it’s been a huge quality of life improvement.

It's a fantastic museum and featured a bit in Stewart Brand's Maintenance of Everything (https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everyth...).

I once explained to a friend as "imagine Umberto Eco made a museum when he was drunk, and he was a mean drunk."

Woodworking is an analogy that I like to use in deciding how to apply coding agents. The finished product needs to be built by me, but now I can make more, and more sophisticated, jigs with the coding agents, and that in turn lets me improve both quality and quantity.

We had a government agency working on stopping threat actors, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, but then DOGE ruined it. Now it’s a shell.

The C++ standards committee’s antiquated reliance on compiler “vendors” holds it back. They should adopt maintenance of clang and bless it as the reference compiler.

John Backus had some correspondence with Dijkstra that's worth a read: https://medium.com/@acidflask/this-guys-arrogance-takes-your...

Yes, make it black.

It reminds me a lot of Hans Reiser’s original white paper, which can be found at https://web.archive.org/web/20070927003401/http://www.namesy.... Add some embeddings and boom.

About 150 Iranian sailors drowned this morning, far from home, not a clear and present danger to anyone, no war declared on them by Congress, nor sanctioned by the UN. We could have demanded a surrender but instead we blew them up.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/mar/04/iran-war-...

One of them is illegal for DoD to do and the other is not.

I’m a development manager and senior developer. I have seen the described behavior from TFA play out on several different teams. Sometimes such team members learn to adapt their approach while holding onto their ideals, and they become valued colleagues. Other times they don’t and they leave out of frustration or are fired or spin their wheels. I have no doubt there’s a great deal of truth in the author’s description, but there’s also maybe some truth in the feedback they’ve received.

I also share some of your philosophy — life is too short for us not to find joy at work, if we can. It’s a lot easier to find that joy when the team’s shipping valuable software, of course.

It’s a trust issue. There’s no one more of a PITA than a new team member who joins and starts questioning every little thing and demanding it be changed (the initial questioning is fine, so long as you accept “because” as a reason). OF COURSE any team that’s shipping software will have things that don’t make sense prima facie, because they’re accumulated tech debt or historical accident.

Go beyond identifying all these problems towards solving them. Choose a small problem, where you won’t have to fight and argue, just a little dust bunny you can sweep out of the way. Do it again, and again, and again. This is how you build trust. As you build trust, it becomes easier to seek change.

Additionally, you may also find that not all the little problems are worth solving, and what’s more interesting are the bigger problems around product-market fit, usability, and revenue.

Using an ISI Whip and a microwave to make cake is a well-known molecular gastronomy technique. Here’s one that doesn’t require the ISI Whip: https://www.seriouseats.com/microwave-rocky-road-sponge-cake...

Laissez faire. They’re making businesses absorb the externalities, as they should.

ODNI also did not publish its quadrennial Global Trends report last year, even though it was written. It probably talked too much about the rise of fascism.

Make the dollar the global currency and reap the benefits of facilitating gentle commerce?

I bought a Samsung HP dryer a few years ago and it'd be great except for a terrible design flaw where lint gets trapped in its heat sink fins, turning into a soggy mess.

I just finished Annals of the Former World. It's essentially a 700 page-long ode to geology, using scientific terms for their prosody as much as their meaning. I once saw someone else remark that "Rising from the Plains" was the greatest western ever written.

I used to think geology was a dumb science, but this book single-handedly made me obsessed with the topic. Geology is really more like "earth history" and it's a startlingly young field, a dynamic which plays out across the volumes.

I’m reading your comment more sardonically about the state of US manufacturers, but globally I don’t think this holds up. Some of the most expensive vehicles—trucks and SUVs—have the worst mileage. Often the cheaper a new car is, the better gas mileage it gets.

This dynamic might not hold as consistently with used cars but it’s not entirely eliminated, either.