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I admit it. I took the bait. Charity Majors made an appearance on Gergely Orosz’s show called “Stop being skeptical about AI for development”. I listened to the podcast—I don’t listen to many tech podcasts—and I don’t think she ever said to stop being skeptical. Not directly anyways. Great title, though. Good for engagement. “Stop being skeptical” is a phrase guaranteed to rustle any skeptic’s jimmies. A whole lotta provocation, not a lotta substance. 10/10. No notes. ...

At the beginning of this summer, I told myself and my 3 readers (Hi, y’all! 👋) that I’d publish something every week. I have not achieved that. Not even close. Screw it. That was an overly ambitious goal. I’m not experienced enough to write anything worth publishing at that clip, and I’m not enough of a shoot-from-the-hip kinda guy to just spray half-assed ideas into the ether. But I don’t feel bad about trying, as at least having the goal in mind has kept me on the habit of writing, and that is really what matters to me. It was enough to break me out of the perfectionist rut that high-conscientiousness folks often fall into. Just the idea that I must publish kept me on track. ...

I know I’m really late to this party (like, over a whole year late), but I still think calling chatbots and robots clankers is really funny. As a vehicle of expressing hate, “clanker” has got a lot going for it. It has not one but two /k/ sounds, which we all know is the funniest sound. It reminds you of broken devices driving you insane with their incessant clanking. It’s easy to use in anger, with that nasaly central vowel able to carry a sharply acrid and venomous tone. Goddamn clankers again, you can imagine saying, with all the vitriol you can muster. You really clanked it up this time. ...

Working in technology is weird. My work and home realities can seem like different planes of existence. Some of this is just the nature of the job. Distributed systems design and cloud computing management simply don’t have that many analogs in my family life. But it’s not just the domain. It’s the socially constructed reality: the shared consensus view of what the world is like. On the one hand, I live in the real world, where I spend time with my family and do normal house stuff. I run errands and go to the store. I try to fix things around the house. I cook. I clean. I spend time with friends and we discuss these ordinary minutiae. We complain about how expensive things are getting and how bad the roads are. We talk about sports or the weather. Our lives do not appear to be changing that dramatically. ...

Sometimes I craft a sentence that makes me think I could be a Great Writer. This is a curse. Thinking that you could be great is not an inherently bad thing. It can be genuinely motivating. But it’s a slippery slope from there to thinking that you should be Great, and I’ve never been able to keep my footing on that particular hill. The first time I sense that I might be Great, I begin to assume it’s my right, and if I fail, it’s only because I’m not trying hard enough. This is incredibly self-defeating. Not only does it fail to allow for the kind of practice it takes to develop actual Greatness, it activates a really nasty self-critical part of your brain. ...

The standard-ish Unix shell is a disjointed monstrosity riddled with incongruous features agglomerated from inconsistent design decisions made at various times for unknown reasons by a unknowable multitude of developers. It is also one of the most important pieces of software in the world today. Sure would be nice if it didn’t suck. Digital wizardry Early in my Unix journey, I was in awe of the shell. Watching my friend who had grown comfortable with the shell was like watching a master work with his tools. The data yielded to his precise commands like putty in his hands. The arcane symbols and abstruse output flew by, totally unintelligible to me, but clearly full of meaning for him, as he worked to configure some webserver on a Linux machine. Was he a wizard? No. He was a hacker. I wanted to be one too. ...

Nix N00b Notes Series This is part 1 of a series where I try to learn to use Nix to manage my Mac laptop. Yes, I can think of better things to do with my time, but I enjoy inflicting this specific type of pain on myself. ...