pukomuko

The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them. In summary, https:// and two dollars will get you a bus ticket to nowhere.

Rather, I’m saying that the shock and awe of Day One has largely buried under rubble the pretense of a negotiation by Steve and Jared, a negotiation that was either so incompetent as to be worse than useless or — probably more likely — a negotiation that was so incompetent by design, to serve its paymasters. Steve and Jared are both so venal it’s hard to pinpoint their agency.

I believe there are millions, maybe billions, of software products that don’t exist but should: dashboards, reports, apps, project trackers and countless others. People want these things to do their jobs, or to help others, but they can’t find the budget. They make do with spreadsheets and to-do lists. My industry is famous for saying no, or selling you something you don’t need. We have an earned reputation as a lot of really tiresome dudes. But I think if vibe coding gets a little bit better, a little more accessible and a little more reliable, people won’t have to wait on us. They can just watch some how-to videos and learn, and then they can have the power of these tools for themselves.

If you can push a button and get content, then that content is a commodity. Its value is next to zero.

Answering that question would require the harvesting of many fucks, and you will note that my field is barren.

But in fact I think it’s much more straightforward and doable than the quest for the perfect set of techniques, the perfect environment, or the perfect system. That quest is endless, and will torment you forever. Whereas self-mastery – or presence of mind, or whatever you want to call it – can only ever happen now. You’re forgiven all the times you failed in the past, and needn’t worry about the times you might fail in future. You just need to give it a shot now, accepting that it’ll probably make you feel a bit queasy: to choose the healthy option, close the social media app, write another hundred words, really listen to the other person, and so on. As soon as you try, you’ve succeeded – and along comes a fresh moment in which to try again.

unscheduled updates

Of the Soviet Union’s fourteen non-Russian successor states, none was more important to Moscow than Ukraine. With more than 40 million inhabitants, a strategic location on the Black Sea, the world’s most fertile farmland, and a military-industrial sector deeply integrated into Russia’s own, Ukraine was in many ways the former crown jewel of the Soviet Union. It was also home to Sevastopol, where Russia operated its most critical warm-water naval port. “It cannot be stressed strongly enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire,” wrote Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Polish-born former U.S. national security advisor, in 1994. An Oxbridge don put it in less delicate terms: “With the Ukraine, Russia is a USA; without, she is a Canada—mostly snow.”

Other forms of engineering have to take into account the variability of the world. A structural engineer builds in tolerance for all the factors she can’t measure. (I remember being told early in my career that the unique characteristic of digital electronics was that there was no concept of tolerances.) Process engineers consider that humans are executing tasks, and will sometimes be forgetful or careless. Software Engineering is unusual in that it works with deterministic machines. Maybe LLMs mark the point where we join our engineering peers in a world on non-determinism.

We’ve been living in the science fiction condition for a long time. To the point where sf written even at the turn of the century feels like of quaint and confused now.

The first child, as we observe it from our lofty parental peak, always has a fierce time of it. The parents are fighting through to a new understanding; they are pioneering (as one day you will see) into a new area of life; they have this extraordinary first child, and they want to do everything right (thus very frequently doing much that is wrong), and so a mutual torment occurs. Parents watch a first child more jealously, with greater anguish and concern than they do their succeeding children. The first child, on the other hand, reacts to this lack of experiences on the part of parents with certain protective devices necessary, I daresay, to the situation. Indeed, I sometimes think that a first child is regarded with so very much affection (and with such timidity) by its parents that the love itself must often seem to the child a reversal of love.