Joy & Curiosity #96

When I compare the first 10 years of my professional life as a software developer to the last two it’s mind-boggling how many things that seemed foundational, or: institutional, in the life of a software developer from, say, 2008 to 2022 are now anything but that:

GitHub and open source contributions (maintainers are closing down pull requests; who cares about their GitHub contribution graph anymore? When was the last person hired due to their open source contributions?), StackOverflow (you just said “ahh, right, StackOverflow”, didn’t you?), O’Reilly books, FANG as the hottest place to work, 2-week sprints (2 weeks, man! You know how long that is now?), TDD (I wrote books that use TDD! I loved TDD! And yet at some point in the last 2 years I wrote my last test by hand), text editors (man, I had heated arguments about text editors; I worked on a text editor; I was close to getting Vim tattooed on my body at some point), …

It’s like Lenin said: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

• My Laracon talk now on YouTube: How I Prompt. What an intro from Aaron. I swear I didn’t pay him to say all of that.
• I love this idea for a Greasemonkey 2.0: “Modern coding agent + browser use + a custom personal extension that allows you easily modify your most frequently visited sites. Have extension track which sites you visit and then coding agent proactively suggests modifications to make sites less distracting / more efficient.” I just checked, though: 2.0 was released in 2014, so this will need to be called Jellymonkey 1.0.
• This is the best and most beautiful and most inspiring and most thought-provoking and humbling thing I’ve read this week: Canon. There are many great things in this post, but here’s one special snowflake of a paragraph that I want to present to you: “Cant is a language designed to be frustrating in enlightening ways. A reasonable objection might be that it will teach bad coding habits. But from my own childhood experience, what it will actually teach is why the good habits are good and how the layers of abstraction and expressibility get built one on top of another.”
• Stripe acquired OpenRouter for $7.5 billion and the letter to investors leaked. What writing! You can tell it’s the Collisons: “Stripe is, of course, a private company today. We view this as a growing advantage as we venture into the vicissitudes of the singularity. The world is becoming harder to predict and we expect that deft helmsmanship will be required of every company. We’re fortunate to have a corporate structure that helps us steer the right long-term course.”
• On that acquisition, I found this post by Martin Casado interesting (even though, of course, when you read his “what a time to be alive!” chant at the end and know that he invested in Cursor and OpenRouter, it’s hard not to go “yeah, I bet, mate”): “AI has given us two modern miracles. The first one everyone knows, which is that we can turn electricity into intelligence. But the second one is more subtle but equally miraculous. It’s that we now have intelligence as a universal medium of exchange, in the form of tokens.” Tokens as an exchange medium is very interesting.
• The Vicent Martí post on the history of scaling Git is as good as everyone says it is: Git at any scale.
• A lot of people are shitting on GitHub for their outages but, dude, look at the numbers: 2.9 billion commits per month, 24 million new repos. “Since April, monthly commits have grown from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion.” Since April! “We have since added more than 3 million CPU cores, 120 petabytes of high-speed storage”. Hot damn.
• Thomas Dullien / Halvar Flake: Three important steps in my maturation process. The whole thing is very good and I feel bad about highlighting one of the three steps here, but, well, this bit here was very neat: “The monocausal determinism that young computer enthusiasts get used to is an illusion that generations of electrical and process engineers spent their lives perfecting and maintaining. It is because of these engineers that computer scientists could largely get away without probabilities or any empirical grounding in the past. There is an argument that you have so many natural scientists that crossed over into AI because CS education was for a long time too focused on reasoning within the deterministic monocausal illusion.”
• I need someone to explain the Nvidia & Poolside deal to me.
• Thought-provoking, nearly sci-fi level stuff on emergency alerts: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway.
• Someone tweeted a photo of a handout that David Foster Wallace gave to his students in 2002 in his Advanced Fiction class and I loved it so much that I threw the photo into Amp and had it build a nice HTML version for me that I can reference: Your Liberal-Arts $ at Work. The punctuation in dialogue is fascinating. Not only because it just seems like arbitrary rules, but also because it’s completely different in German writing, or French.
• David Senra interviewed Travis Kalanick. Listened to the whole thing and still don’t know what to think of Kalanick. There’s some good entrepreneur porn in there (“I can take more pain than the other guy”) and Kalanick obviously loves big statements and big visions and big numbers, but I found some half-sentences here and there surprisingly nuanced and interesting. And how he thinks about “work” vs. “management capacity” matches what I think we’re seeing with AI now: you still need humans, you still need to hire humans, because, yes, the AI can do the work, but you only have so much management capacity to manage that work.
• Derek Sivers is “building my dream house without predicting - by living in a bare cabin in the woods, then adding only what I find I actually need.” Here’s my bet: there are at least (!) six paragraphs in there that will make you go “wait, what”, each one with more incredulity than the last. But then at the end, you think: what a guy, I’m glad he’s out there and doing this and writing about it.
• People of ACM - Russ Cox. “Ousterhout introduces the term ‘tactical tornado’ for a programmer who churns out tons of working but overly complex code that doesn’t fit well into the existing system. Worse, a bad manager often sees a tactical tornado as the most productive programmer on a team, failing to recognize the complexity and code debt left behind for the rest of the team to clean up. If we aren’t careful managers, AI agents can easily become the ultimate tactical tornadoes.”
• Really, really enjoyed this Invest Like The Best episode with Ben Thompson. Listening to Thompson speculate on token prices and talk about depreciation of GPUs makes me happy.
• Do this for me: open the Bun 1.4 release notes but before you do anything I want you to look at the scroll bar. Yes, that’s a single release. I bet that whole post is AI-generated, but that’s also probably the whole point of this post.
• Same: I’m becoming AI-blind. We’ve had Amp post messages into our Slack when something went wrong or when something was shipped and it took just a couple of days for everyone to glaze over them. Disabled it right after someone mentioned it.
• Very good: Responsibility Is Taken Before It Is Given.
• Dan Luu: There’s no reason for software to be slow anymore. That’s right. As I was saying: if you have more bugs due to AI now, that’s on you, not the AI. Dan also quotes Marc Brooker who talked about “workload-specific optimizations”, i.e. optimizations of a program for a particular customer and workflow, and, man, right! AI and agents could be super compilers!
• Gabriel Valdivia’s beautiful personal timeline. Go and open this in a desktop browser, hover over the age in the top right corner, and then slide left and right.

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