Today, you're either above the API or below the API. You either tell robots what to do, or are told by robots what to do.

Devine Lu Linvega

You see, while hype is nice, it's only nice in small bursts for practitioners. We have a few key things that a grifter does not have, such as job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment the gold rush is over, due to the sad fact that we actually need to study things and build experience. Grifters, on the other hand, wield the omnitool that they self-aggrandizingly call 'politics'. That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can't actually deliver is highly transferable.

Nikhil Suresh

networking is actually an awkward, promiscuous and parasitic practice

Feminist Server Manifesto

Remember the Internet of Things? Your own lightbulbs blinking out ads in seizure-inducing Morse code, your own coffee machine calling the police if you try to feed it some unlicensed beans.

Sam Kriss

all of humanity is necessary for all of the things that we do, there's nothing that's not a collaboration with almost every dead person.

Hank Green

LLMs give you an extra arm and most people use it to jerk themselves off

Joël Franušić's friend

Tap and Go works the same way Myki does
Card tells reader “I’m card 6742069”
Reader tells server “card 6742069 just touched on at South Kensington at 4:20PM”
Inspector wants to check ticket, ticket tells handheld scanner “I’m card 6742069”
Handheld scanner asks server “when did card 6742069 touch on?”
Server responds
Ticket inspector arrests you for feet on seats
Your family leave you
You die in prison

MrHippoPants

Tom M: Entropy's #1 enemy

Tom M

An industrialist might soon purchase Twitter, Inc. His substantial success launching reusable spacecraft does nothing to prepare him for the challenge of building social spaces. The latter calls on every liberal art at once, while the former is just rocket science.

Robin Sloan

If you've never seen it before, Evangelion is a terribly depressing anime. It is the kind of thing that disturbs the comforted and comforts the disturbed.

Xe Iaso

Radicalism is when no house

Brandon Ewing

On the internet, if you stop speaking: you disappear. And, by corollary: on the internet, you only notice the people who are speaking nonstop.

Robin Sloan

Any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature.

Virginia Postrel

I study on LinkedIn for up to two hours a day after work sometimes.

An executive

We work in a field of people who envision themselves as artists, when all that is wanted are painters.

projectileboy's friend

Something awaits for me in the divine for resisting

Chris Fleming (actually here)

Don’t rent your livelihood.

Not Scott Smitelli

its study break, and just like its name suggests we study till we break

@randomtako. on UWA Computer Science discord

as a slow-witted human being I have a very small head

Prof.dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra, Notes on Structured Programming Ch. 1

Poor, sad, misbegotten, incredibly effective, massively successful PHP. Reading PHP code is like reading poetry, the poetry you wrote freshman year of college.

Paul Ford

You can't have art without resistance in the materials

William Morris

DJs are not even close to fungible

ska

The most important output of senior engineers is more senior engineers.

Some guy Tim Bray overheard

The age of humans compared to the earth, now that's some nothing shit

Bill Wurtz

The courts are like the doors to the Ritz, open to everyone!

monkaiju (my favourite phrasing of a much older aphorism)

Nostalgia is not a strategy

Mark Carney

A story is essentially just a rather entitled hypothesis

James Wood

Enormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices. I discovered this when first learning how to program. The textbooks never worked; it all only started to click when I started to do little projects for myself. The project wasn’t just motivation but an organizing principle, a magnet to arrange the random iron filings I picked up along the way. I’d care to learn about some abstract concept, like “memoization,” because I needed it to solve my problem; and these concepts would lose their abstractness in the light of my example.

James Somers

I love the phrase "thin deep slices" for learning. This is also in Lines. This page exists so I can come back to it later, I want to think about this more.

It used to be the case that people were admonished to "not re-invent the wheel". We now live in an age that spends a lot of time "reinventing the flat tire!"

Alan Kay

There is a floor on how simple the truth can be and still be the truth. Falsehoods don't have that.

Ian Crosby Danskin

You can't imagine how much harder it would be to be a JavaScript programmer in 1882

Zach Holman

A billionaire may never be held accountable. Therefore, a billionaire must never make a management decision.

John S Russel

With woodworking you actually get to hold your creations.

Zain Rizvi in Why Software Engineers like Woodworking

It never gets easier, you just get faster.

Greg LeMond

First, that algorithmic curation commonly depends on numeric thresholds which are very often poorly understood.

Christo Buschek & Jer Thorp

The world of computing, I came to learn, is vast but organized almost geologically, as if deposited in layers

James Somers

You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them

noduerme

Your soul might occasionally emit statements that are legally actionable,

Steve Yegge

Girlfriends are temporary, ex-girlfriends are forever

/u/UnemployedTechie2021 (maybe)

My robot girlfriend walks in with the crop, I'm already tied to the bed. "what's the safeword?", she asks. I respond by saying the letter "A" for 90 seconds straight followed by a short hex string.

calc.exe opens up on her eyes. Finally, a PoC!

Shouldn't have used fixed length buffers without bounds checking, babe. This is a rookie C mistake.

Foone Turing

as well-detailed in Hazel's memoir (and mercilessly abbreviated here),

Joe Brockmeier

The only thing required to be a grifter, inadvertently or not, is to have your presentation skills outstrip your technical skill

Nikhil Suresh

fandom is a wiki website (allegedly)

Jes Olsen

Building the perfect enemy is in the catalogue

The entropy of victory

40:50

I do want to pull from the menu of what radicalises a human being, what are the stations of the cross that lead to political consciousness

46:00

I have not enjoyed controlling the lathe of heaven

1:60:00

The site will live or die by how it handles its first porn of misty from Pokemon Written on cohost, though I came across it in their pre-emptive autopsy of cohost.

lori

Subcultures are dead. I plan to write a full obituary soon.

David Chapman

This is quality determined by quantity: the more stuff in the wastebasket, the better the strip

Matthew Morgan

I do not collect your data. Stop sending it to me.

Tristram Oaten

You are not creative and then create something, you become creative by working on something, creativity is a byproduct of work.

Jürgen Geuter

I believe Apple silicon has Jira coprocessor

rplnt

I think that’s the real danger, that you can do that and then nothing’s original anymore. Everything’s just a copy of something else. The problem is, that’s what readers like.

Jennifer Lepp

Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.

This is biology.

Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”

yes, i understand you can't buy happiness. but can you sell it

Bill Wurtz

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.
More on this on the Creative Commons site

Woodie Guthrie's Anti-copyright notice.

Society tends to normalize things that have ad budgets.

mcdonje

Go is not much fun but that is by design

Tom Delalande

Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.

couldn't actually find a good source, first saw here but appears in many other places

It's easy to say with hindsight that NFTs are a stupid scam but it was also easy at the beginning to say that and through the middle too

@IlllllllllllllI on 2022-06-14

Everyone falls into creative ruts, but two people rarely do so at the same time.

James Somers

Blog posts are written, not defecated

Merlin Mann

TypeScript is an entire language backed by a trillion-dollar corporation with the sole purpose of reducing the likelihood of undefined is not a function popping up in error messages.

Barnaby Keene

I know I'm the last committer, I committed atrocities

Michael B. Paulson

Long week, long month, long life

John Green/David Leviathan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

It's okay to half-ass something, when all you need is half an ass

Who knows

A podcast has to eat something, there's basically the choices of what a podcast can eat. a podcast can eat the news, the podcast can eat guests, or the podcast can eat the lives of the hosts.

CGP Grey

Code is, ultimately, characters on a screen, and software engineers do nothing but hammer that code into shapes that spark Joy and Money.

Ludic

As if I were a self-styled Moses, coming down from the mountain all alone, carrying the stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments carved in immutable stone--the original command-line interface

Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line

I totally get that there are amazing people out there who would give me plenty of runway, but what I’m building toward isn’t financially defensible. It’s not a moat. It’s a life raft.

Steve Yegge

Nothing will make a nerd a communist faster than getting a taste of real life on dating apps.

vasco

Yea as long as you do all the work and watch all the lectures you’ll be chilling

seph

Sometimes, tools don’t move the needle because there’s no needle to move.

Fernando Borretti

Xeact remains open-source software to this day where it is used by thousands of milli-developers.

Xe Iaso

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

Internal IBM Presentation 1979

Engineering is the art of finding the solution that only sucks in ways that don't matter

Skylar Hill

Test what you detest

ughh idk this video

My customers, basically, are working and have too much week left at the end of their paycheck

[Micheal Goldstein](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwKV3SEBfGk](https://youtu.be/WwKV3SEBfGk?si=PuElpCiB0NmSo3iC&t=50)

The history of software production as a profession (as against computer science) is essentially a series of incremental increases in the size and complexity of systems (and teams) that don't fall apart under their own weight. There isn't much evidence we have approached the limit here, so it's a pretty good bet for at least the medium term.

ska

Treating Sunday as the first day of the week is a religious tradition going back thousands of years.

However, I know only one god, and his name is ISO 8601.

jl6

For another thing, as a document this is very incomplete: I am only too aware of the fact that it ends in mid-air. Yet I have decided to have these notes duplicated, besides some practical considerations mainly to show what I have thought to those who expressed interest in it or to those whose comments I would welcome.

Prof.dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra, Introduction to Notes on Structured Programming

Existential crisis aren't funny but aren't they... comedy flavoured?

Afterthoughts

And these kind of conflicts is how you end up with the microservices pattern. Your backend gets carved up into parts maintained by different teams. In an ideal spherical cow reading of microservices, every microservice has a well-defined API that it uses to communicate with other services to help a user request turn into a response. Does this happen? Scholars continue to debate to this day.

Xe Iaso

Web scraping is an absolutely despicable practice and if you want to learn how to do it at an industrial scale check out this video on my second channel

Fireship

Create with no intent, consume with no intent, congratulations, you have industrialized nothingness.

PewDiePie

security budget:

• $1 looking into languages that don’t trivially buffer overflow
• 50¢ looking into enabling exploit mitigation features
• 1¢ research into things like compile-time diversity
• $10M hiring a disgraced CISO from a FAANG company
• $100 hiring a red team to ignore feedback from

someone who is good at the economy please help me. my enterprise platform is dying

Kate Temkin

Speaking as the most senior member of my team, nothing useful starts with that phrase

Sarai Rosenberg

Algorithms are human-directed and humans are algorithm-directed in ways we do not fully understand.

John Green

Users need open source projects, but open source projects do not need users.

Matt Holt

If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.

Steph Ango

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

Randall Munroe

Deloitte has a human intelligence problem

Deborah O'Neill

Don't let OpenAI steal the art for you, steal the damn work for yourself

Tristram Oaten original (privated) video

a physicist stares at the ceiling while an undergraduate, high off internet forums, explains that Buddhism anticipated quantum theory

Paul Ford

However, I suppose they caught on to the unpatchable strategy of Having Friends

Andrew Moses

when you age, you start realising that everyone doesn’t necessarily have their shit together like you thought they did as a kid, but they just become better and better at hiding it until the closet becomes full.

Alex Pagano

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Cory Doctorow, TikTok's Enshittification

Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utlititarian one. There's nothing moral about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there's nothing immoral about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They're just the best way of balancing out so that people's physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.

Cory Doctorow

The computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work and it was a serious problem we were trying to do. The disease with computers is that you play with them.

Richard Feynman, Los Alamos from Below

If you have the disposable income to pay to remove advertising, you are exactly the market segment advertisers want to reach. They will always be willing to pay to outbid that segment’s own desire to not see ads.

Tim Raymond

It's not fun or possible to know everything which is why we are supposed to share the load. Share the load.

Hank Green

XML is dead, the millennials’ best kill so far.

varjag

No for-profit company has managed to make a chat system pay for itself.

Simon Heath

We kill people based on metadata. But that's not what we do with this metadata

Michael Hayden

In Sydney everyone is pretending to be rich, in Melbourne everyone is pretending to be poor

A guy I saw on instagram and then lost track of

Software isn’t a thing, it’s a craft. A chair maker doesn’t develop a single chair for years on end. They make more and more chairs, better chairs. And they don’t pass on chairs to future generations. They pass on skills and knowledge and experience and expertise. We should see software the same way.

Lu Wilson

This is a hack and if you use it and something breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

Xe Iaso

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Kurt Vonnegut

Inspiration can convince you something is interesting or worth doing, or from time to time get you some really good sentences. But by the time you're, say, 80% of the way into something, it's kind of like an old relationship

Zach Weinersmith

I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.

Paul Graham

I am an English major to death. (You know us not by what we’ve read but by what we are ashamed not to have read.)

Paul Ford

Look I'm an atheist, but when God sends me to hell I want him to hesitate

Technoblade

Your standard CRUD applications and web services are largely just a rigamarole of reciting the right incantation and duct taping bits together. It's immensely non-stimulating work when done properly.

jacoblambda

Joyce Kilmer and most computer scientists agree: there is no poem as lovely as a tree.

Philip Wadler

Sure, if you’re based in San Francisco and you go to your adult daycare—sorry, I mean startup office

Andy Bell

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds the warplanes must be silent.

Marwan Makhoul

I write the above in pencil, not pen

Justin Duke

I’ve never come across a subject so fractal in its complexity. It reminds me of computing that way. A day of programming might involve constructing an elaborate regular expression, investigating a file descriptor leak, debugging a race condition in the application you just wrote, and thinking through the interface of a module. Everywhere you look—the compiler, the shell, the CPU, the DOM—is an abstraction hiding lifetimes of work. Biology is like this, just much, much worse, because living systems aren’t intentionally designed.

James Somers

Miyazaki said he can feel it every day, the limit of his ability, and he was talking about getting older but I think that's something a lot of us have experienced. Personally I can feel myself straining against the limit of my ability as though it were a brick fucking wall and my true potential, whatever the hell that is, is some amorphous shape on the other side that I can't quite reach.

Savannah Brown

This code is free as in mattress. If you decide to use it, it's your problem.

Xe Iaso

The only technology that you need is deadlines.

Paul Ford, here (allegedly, I came across the quote here)

In Unix everything is a file. Files are files, folders are files, disks are files, your keyboard is a file, your mouth is a file, the air is a file, you can't breathe, your file lungs fill with files and you try to scream but only files come out oh god Dennis how could you do thi

Sy Brand

Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.

Clay Shirky

"Proof" for thousands of years was whatever was written down, and that was even easier to forge.

There was a brief time (maybe 100 years at the most) where photos and videos were practically proof of something happening; that is coming to an end now, but that's just a regression to the mean, not new territory.

thepasswordis

I consider English orthography worthy of UNESCO protection

mousethatroared

NO MORE IDEAS

WE HAVE ENOUGH

(merge them instead)

Lu Wilson

"You are what you eat" also applies to information diets.

ryandv

@jerry@infosec.exchange:
Hi all. Fedia.io is going to be offline for a while during some open heart surgery on the database. If you are a religious person, praying might be in order.

@sehugg@infosec.exchange:
ALTAR TABLE

Stephen Hugg

In general, empathy is how I feed my family

Tony Gilroy, on empathy as a byproduct of creative work

You can tell quite a lot about a person by looking at what they choose to write in close proximity to the word "experience".

Mike Playle

Collect constraints you enjoy. Unusual constraints make things more fun. You can always change them later. This is your style, after all. It’s not a life commitment, it’s just the way you do things. For now.

Steph Ango

In ISO C, file handles (of type FILE) cannot be safely copied as their addresses may be magic

Wikipedia - Magic (programming)

In programming, everything we do is a special case of something more general -- and often we know it too quickly.

Alan Perlis

When C++ is your hammer, everything starts to look like your thumb.

Amazon Interview Candidate

who called it object oriented programming and not class struggle

Elle Mundy

Resources are limited, but resources are less limited than they have ever been before.

Paul Farmer

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam

Frederik Pohl

It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money.  And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.  A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear.  “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements.  Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes.  They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.

G. K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem

If I can’t rely on the data on the screen being accurate, it might as well not be there. So now we begin the most beautiful process in software - starting from scratch.

Lily Mara

lambda has the benefit of making the code compact and foreboding. Plus, it prevents people from trying to add meaningful names, documentation or type-hints to the thing that is about to unfold.

David Beasley

Most of your screen time isn't leisure. It isn't addiction. It isn't even a choice.

It's maintenance.

Your phone is not a slot machine.

It's a to-do list that writes itself.

Terry Godier

being human is about to come back in style

Bill Wurtz

Linear algebra churned through the sand in a remote data center

Xe Iaso