loumf

Also cash? Scammers will (and do) send a mule to your house to pick up boxes of cash.

I’m sure the source is LinkedIn ultimately. They reference my job and things from there and pretend to have carefully considered my posts (just LLM generated BS)

I am saying that 70 emails would be 70 seconds of time, so not a big deal. I can usually tell from the sender that it won’t be real and it takes just a couple of words to prove that. The good thing is that they tend to get to the point quickly, which works in my favor.

I get about 10 AI generated spam emails a day that get through my spam filter. It takes about 10 seconds to block and mark as spam. I barely read the first three words of each.

It’s been known for decades that you should never put your current directory in your PATH. There are endless opportunities for vulnerabilities then. I learned this in college in the 80’s (by not following it and getting owned).

For me, it feels like a prompt injection based security nightmare.

Literally every file on my mac and every site I browse is potential malware.

Edit to add: every email and text message as well.

Wins for "devices owned", but not necessarily for customers, which depends on the product/service.

The OP has said they have fallback to SMS/RCS.

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

The threat is that you depend on this library or use the VS Code Extension.

This is great. Now we won’t have to fix y2K36 bugs.

https://loufranco.com

I recently switched to Linux for all development. I still use my Mac for everything else.

The main reason was to protect my personal data from possible supply chain issues or LLM agent mishaps.

I’m 99% in VSCode, a browser, and a terminal. There’s hardly a difference day-to-day.

I have recently gone all in on Python. Before I decided this, I was using Python for projects where I needed Pandas or numpy. I used React/TypeScript/Node for web applications. But, I moved to Django/HTMX.

The main reason is to avoid npm, but also, I wanted something with more built-in defaults (my web apps have simple needs). It has nothing to do with the language -- it's more the ecosystem for me.

I considered Ruby/Rails, but it didn't seem enough better than Python and can't replace the Pandas work I need to do.

When you do regular updates, they are quick. But also, you can timebox it and then back out and plan a harder than expected update.

Also, it keeps you in touch with your deps so you can consider if it’s even worth it. My favorite update was removing the dep (or starting a plan to remove it because it was interfering with regular updates)

I think of it a different way. The consumer market (if Microsoft doesn’t value it) is holding them back from paying tech debt. The fear of regressions is a good reason to not touch stuff.

If you do value a market and ignore this, the consequences can be fatal (see Sonos). But if you don’t, then doing the minimum is rational.

Wanted to share some stats and thoughts about Show HN's impact on my book.

But, then where would you host your website?

Looking at your source, I was introduced to Odin -- now I want to hear a lot more about that.

My priority is Kindle, then print. Then I will look into other formats. At that point I will have a PDF (that was used for Print) and an epub, so it will primarily be driven by interest.

The best way to be notified by it is to be on my list at loufranco.com or reaching out to me.

Thanks. I hope it’s useful to you

Thanks. That’s my belief as well. I would have loved to come up with a better term.

In the next two parts of the book I try to convince managers to give some autonomous time to engineers to do whatever tech debt projects they think is best. With some constraints and accountability.

Thanks! You can buy it now for a buck. But, if you are waiting for print, that will be about a month later.

Love that book. Also, "A Philosophy of Software Design" by John Ousterhout

Agreed. I am pretty sure that they are going to look at it though. I am in close contact with them.

For some debt, yes, it starts with a shortcut. I want to talk about other kinds of debt-like problems that have nothing to do with that. Where you did everything right, but the world just changed.

I find helpthisbook.com to be helpful in getting comments on the book and sharing it. I'll send this feedback to them.

I struggled with this. I didn't have the guts to not use "tech debt" in the title and throughout the book. I wanted to coin a new term, but didn't find anything that worked.

There are parts of the debt analogy that (I think) really hurt getting it dealt with. I think that explaining it like that to non-engineering decision makers will make them think they understand it and then quash projects based on some kind of ROI analysis of debt payments. They'll be happy to have the debt.

I do wish HN had a culture of being ok with linking to supporting material on our own sites. I have been blogging for 20+ years -- some of those posts are relevant (and I think useful).

I also mostly write for myself, but I want to get more of it out there because I think it's useful.

No worries at all. I really do appreciate constructive feedback. I put every draft of the book out there that I could, and this is my best version of making the book I wanted to make that resonated with at least some people.

I totally get that it's not for everyone.

This is why I shared half the book. I will probably continue to do so for at least a few months (even after the book is launched). I am sharing a lot of the content of the next six chapters on my email list and will probably always have that archived for them.

I really don't want people to buy it if they won't like it.