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My comment on What blog posts influenced your thinking the most? — Lobste.rs. An early Joel Spolsky one for me was The Law of Leaky Abstractions. I read that near the start of my career and it's encouraged me to always be looking for improved understanding of the layers unde...

Yesterday David Sacks wrote a tweet and within a few minutes people did, what they usually do, and they asked Pangram if it was AI. And Pangram said it’s entirely AI generated. To which David replied that these AI detectors are bogus. Now Pangram has a pretty low false posit...

September 24, if played right, could change everything

The cost of writing code collapsed, and the cost of reviewing, fixing and operating it is following, and I'm assuming it gets there. What's left of making software is finding out what people actually want, defining it precisely, and making it pleasant to use. That cost is per piece of software and doesn't transfer, so as the amount of software goes to infinity, which it will because there's no ceiling on demand, that cost becomes the whole job.

— Laurie Voss, We are all Product Engineers now

Tags: laurie-voss, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms, deep-blue, careers

Perhaps it wasn't necessary, or perhaps it didn't occur to them that this a problem.

The post Why didn’t <CODE>Read­Directory­ChangesW</CODE> provide a way to correlate the two sides of a rename operation? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

De korte versie: De Nederlandse overheid “is niet (echt) van de IT”, en legt vrijwel altijd haar oor direct of indirect te luisteren bij een door big-tech gedomineerd ecosysteem om te bepalen wat te doen. En daardoor valt de keuze vrijwel altijd weer op Amerikaanse platformen, gerund door derden, onder Amerikaans (afluister)recht. En tegenwoordig ook vol met AI (of je nou wilt of niet).
Om weer grip op IT te krijgen, en een eigen en autonomer pad te kiezen, moet er een hoop veranderen.

The HTML specification is old and, while there is beauty in longevity, there's an inevitable build-up of boondoggles and baggage. Some elements like <marquee> have sadly been consigned to the dustbin of history - but there are still vestigial attributes just waiting to trip up the unwary. If you're young, you may never have heard of Image Maps. Back in the bad-old-days, there weren't many good…

Today's links But do you use keyboard shortcuts?: AI people are WEIRD. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Changeling"; Sony Rootkit vs CD drives; Google's scumbag lobbyists; NJ's e-voting coverup; Spying sex toys; Scott Walker dark money leak; "REAMD...

On September 13, 1983, Osborne Computer Corporation, one of the early makers of CP/M computers and a pioneer in portable computing, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Although it was able to secure funding and emerge from bankruptcy in January 1985,

The post Osborne Computer’s bankruptcy and the Osborne Effect appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Suppose I give you an n-digit number and ask you what it represents. This seems impossible, and in theory it is impossible. But in practice it’s often possible. Apps on a phone may automatically interpret a 10-digit number as a phone number or a 16-digit number as a package tracking number. And very often these interpretations are […]

The post Guessing the meaning of a number first appeared on John D. Cook.

In which Sally loses her marbles.

I’ve got Netlify Analytics turned on for a few of my websites. I use it send myself a little daily digest that alerts me when folks link to my writing, be it an individual sending me a few referrals, a newsletter sending me a few hundred, or Hacker News sending me thousands....

In short: from my experience, people like map and filter, but not reduce. I use functions like map and filter all the time. When I put that code up for review, my peers rarely complain. I get plenty of feedback about other decisions, but not about my use of map and filter. I...

Release: commit-rewriter 0.1

I built this little web app the other day to help edit the commit messages for the Datasette security releases. The initial commits were full of coding agent cruft and references to issue IDs from our private repository, so they weren't fit for publication.

If you want to edit the commit messages for a repository you can run it like this:

uvx commit-rewriter path/to/repo

Omit the path if you are already in the directory for that repo.

When you submit your edits the tool creates a timestamped branch of your current repo state - to allow you to revert if you need to - and then rewrites every commit from the first one you edited to the most recent.

Tags: git, projects, python, ai-assisted-programming

Release: shot-scraper 1.12

I've added WebP support to my shot-scraper screenshot automation tool. You can now take a WebP screenshot of a web page like this:

shot-scraper https://simonwillison.net -o screenshot.webp --quality 80

The --quality option sets the quality - without that option the WebP file will be lossless.

In my experience WebP screenshots are almost always significantly smaller in file size than their JPEG or PNG equivalents. See the PR for some examples.

I shipped this feature so I could use it to generate the screenshot for my new commit-rewriter tool.

Tags: playwright, shot-scraper

Right now developer experience is measured in seconds. If your tests take a second to run, that’s good; if they take thirty seconds, that’s bad. Any faster than a second doesn’t really matter, because most of your time is spent either thinking or waiting for an AI agent to s...

Last year, I repaired an NZXT Signal 4K30 USB capture device that I bought on eBay for cheap. It was completely dead, and the cause turned out to be a bad solder joint on an inductor, which prevented power from getting to a crucial part of the board. After I fixed it, I tried using […]

Have you ever watched any old hack movie lately? The hacker can write at 180 WPM, never using the backspace or changing his mind ever. It’s like before they ever started, they already knew the last character they would type on the screen. But that’s not how it works in real ...

A partial endorsement of his essay “We Must Pace the Frontier”

Your LG TV knows where you live. The spy in your living room may or may not know your name. But it can find your home on a map. It knows the name of your wifi network, and all your

The post The spy in your living room appeared first on The Silicon Underground.