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The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to block the development of features that add complexity, and to ensure that as little code gets written as possible (since code is a liability). We...

A few tips on 4D-ing your code comprehension skills.

Why AI won't augment human capabilities much.

GDS weighs in on the NHS's decision to retreat from Open Source Terence Eden continues his coverage of the NHS' poorly considered decision to close down access to their open source repositories in response to vulnerabilities reported to them as part of Project Glasswing. Now...

Note: I just enabled paid subscriptions for $8/month.

The Tomy Tutor was my first computer, in late 1983. I was seven and we got it at Federated. I've acquired several more since then, but this is the actual one I used and it still works perfectly. Using a design modeled on the doomed Texas Instruments 99/8, one of several u...

A bit over a year ago I wrote How I use LLMs as a staff engineer. Here’s a brief summary of what I used AI for last year: Smart autocomplete with Copilot Short tactical changes in areas I don’t know well (always reviewed by a SME) Writing lots of use-once-and-throwaway rese...

On factual vs. conceptual knowledge.

Sometimes, electronic circuit design is mostly about wood

Sometimes, electronic circuit design is mostly about wood

In preparation for a lightning talk I'm giving at PyCon US this afternoon I decided to figure out how many names OpenClaw has actually had since that first commit back in November. Thanks to this first_line_history.py tool (code here) the answer, according to the Git history...

If your definition of intelligence is "the ability to achieve your goals across a wide variety of domains", then Stalin was the most intelligent person who ever lived.

Deeply researched interviews

the verification loop for theories can be on the order of decades and centuries, and even then we know today as the better theory can often actually make worse predictions

[...] in the last 10 years I’ve learned to really love and respect CSS as a technology.

So I decided years ago that I wanted to react to “CSS is hard” by getting better at CSS and taking it seriously as a technology, instead of devaluing it. Doing that changed everything for me: I learned that so many of my frustrations (“centering is impossible”) had been addressed in CSS a long time ago, and that also what “centering” means is not always straightforward and it makes sense that there are many ways to do it. CSS is hard because it’s solving a hard problem!

— Julia Evans, Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

Tags: css, julia-evans

Western Gull, Rock Pigeon, in Los Angeles Area (custom), CA, US I went for a bird walk in the morning before PyCon, and we spotted a local seagull enjoying a Starbucks.

This is the eighth and final chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon. Thank you!

Whether you are building a traditional web application, or a web API that works alongside a web front end or smartphone app, SQLAlchemy is one of the best choices to add database support to a Python web server. In this chapter two example integrations with Flask and FastAPI will be demonstrated. These are two of the most popular Python web frameworks and should serve as examples even if you use another web framework.

Tokyo’s cheap housing and expensive land, the House response to the Senate housing bill, an IED near an Alabama dam, Fervo’s IPO, and more.

Today's links Making sense of Trump's unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire: Don't mistake "powerful" for "durable." Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Copyrighted law; Viral videos v cops; Crooked banker v tiny bat; "Infested";...

Release: inaturalist-clumper 0.1

Part of the infrastructure I use for publishing my iNaturalist sightings on my blog. I've been running this in production for a few weeks now, inspiring some iterations on how it works, so I decided to ship a 0.1 release.

You can see an example of the output in this JSON file.

Tags: projects, inaturalist