natbennett

I do this a lot but I use “TK:” with the colon to make it unambiguously grep-able (stands out better visually too)

Headlines and articles are typically written by different people with different goals.

I’ve got a test that checks to see if “Logger” has been imported anywhere in my Elixir project, and if it finds one it prints out an explanation of why this project shouldn’t use Logger and what it should do instead. (Which is— emit OpenTelemetry events.)

The phenomenon this describes is the most important effect of LLM coding tools, and this is my favorite description of it.

This was posted in March 2026.

Oh yeah that’s how you’re supposed to do it. But it’s entirely possible to set up a system that uses RFID key fobs that uh, doesn’t.

In the case where it was most useful to make copies they did eventually replace the system with one where the keys weren’t copy able. Which was better!

Nope! Only occasionally. But it’s handy on those occasions.

Flipper Zero is one of the handiest little pieces of tech I’ve ever owned. Being able to copy RFID keys is occasionally fantastically useful.

This article is at least the sixth restatement of a single Reuters article that has been posted here.

Because no one wants to “turn startups into content.” The point of posting on social media isn’t to post. You need to explain an outcome that someone would actually care about.

Specifically for his private social media that’s a benefit for his paid subscribers. 5 or 6 days of a few hours a day, with Claude.

The category is “Platform as a Service”

Alternative to Fly or Heroku

Here is my source code Run it on the cloud for me I do not care how

In this case it looks like they also bundle together a bunch of the other services you would need to get code onto the platform, monitor it once it’s there and so on

Article and comments are underrating the impact of reputational risk on payment processors and on Kickstarter itself, for hosting/facilitating sexual content.

Some amount of adult comment is CSAM, or otherwise broadly disfavored. Some companies (Pornhub, OnlyFans) are willing to specialize in discriminating between “regular” adult content and the objectionable stuff, and they have payment processors similarly willing to specialize.

Some of that specialization involves being willing to take on political exposure. Mainstream payment processors are unusually exposed to risks like “being dragged in front of Congress” — there are a lot of reasons a politician might want to put pressure on a general financial infrastructure provider. So reducing obvious ways to get embarrassingly dragged in front of Congress is rational.

Like most data entry software there’s nothing that unstructured notes (or paper) can’t handle.

The main useful feature of the apps (or Apple Health’s tracker which is entirely adequate) is that it sends reminders on the estimated period start date, and then a few days afterwards if you haven’t recorded the end date.

Even “regular” periods often aren’t perfectly regular, or can become irregular when they were regular. (Which is often very important health information.)

It also automatically calculates median period length and typical variation/range.

All unnecessary for some people but very useful for others.

A clause like this is pretty standard in software company employment contracts, at least in the California/Silicon Valley zone. There’s sometimes an exception for explicitly named items that pre-date your employment but sometimes they try to claim ownership of stuff you made before joining the company too.

Gelsinger is unlikely to be a good source on this question.

Tim Cook is openly Christian and he has neither written a book about how “Jesus is his CEO” (and should be yours too) nor has he ever (to my knowledge) led his company in singing a hymn.

Not technically a Tracker clone (we don't have points or all of its states) but we're in the neighborhood -- at StoryTime we've been writing about the development process monthly if any of ya'll are curious about what takes the most time in this domain.

https://buttondown.com/storytime-team/archive/

Tracker's basics are pretty simple but getting the details right takes some finesse. Its multi-user update model is deceptively sophisticated -- being very responsive without ever losing data is a bit tricky, and you're probably making some tradeoffs you'd rather not make. The drag-and-drop behavior also took us a while to get exactly how we wanted it.

I prefer ytt for templating and kapp for deployments.

https://github.com/carvel-dev/carvel

Talk to employees working at Federal agencies.

“Food-motivated” in dogs means something more like “can be induced to listen to commands from a human in exchange for food.” Some dogs are only interested in their own plans. Others are only interested in really good food, or are much more interested in some other reward, like having a ball thrown.

My dog for instance is not particularly food motivated. He believes strongly that there is “food” and “better food” and will hold off until he’s really hungry to eat something that’s just food. But he’s very motivated by attention. He will do tricks for treats he doesn’t like and then drop the treat on the floor once you give it to him.

The easiest way is to reach out to consulting companies and ask if they take subcontractors. Second easiest is to ask companies that want to hire you if they’ll take you as a contractor instead.

In the United States you can create a company just by operating as one — “sole proprietorship.” A 1099 can also be issued to an individual.

It’s useful for a variety of reasons to have an LLC or an S-corp but you don’t need one to get started as a software contractor.

Comparative advantage. Even if AGI is better at absolutely all work the amount of work it is capable of doing is finite. So AGI will end up mostly being used for the highest value, most differentiated work it’s capable of, and it will “trade” with humans for work where humans have a lower opportunity cost, even if it would technically be better at those tasks too.

Basically the same dynamic that you see in e.g. customer support. A company’s founder is going to be better than your typical tier 1 support person at every tier 1 support task, but the founder’s time is limited and the opportunity cost of spending their time on first-contact support is high.

Docker was a factor but there's no particular reason why VMware had to take the lead they had in on-prem container platforms and throw it on the floor for OpenShift to pick up.

The best combination I know of "weird" and "can build neat things" is Elm. It has some serious problems for industrial use but they don't really apply to side projects.

Elixir is less Ruby-like than the syntax looks. If you build a multi-user document editor or something similarly concurrent that might fit the brain-expansion mandate.

Yeah I’m all for engineers knowing about the economics of the business but the people saying “this is ridiculous of course engineers should know what things cost” are substantially undercounting the number of engineers who value their own time at $0

This is all publicly available information but:

Advertise prices are not the actual prices that people are actually paying.

RealPage doesn’t just show the prices of other apartments around you. It gives a recommendation for what you should price your listings. The heart of the price fixing claim here is that this price is higher than landlords would select on their own.

Oh this is very cool. It seems like the takeaway for body builders is “you don’t actually have to time protein ingestion super carefully?”

I’ve worked on a large project that got more reliable after they removed the QA team. Removing the QA team was incidental to the quality improvement though — the QA team got removed because basically it was just producing a nightly report of problems that didn’t matter.

What actually improved quality on that project was, basically, architecture improvements. A major subsystem was rewritten in a way that made large classes of important bugs impossible. That rewrite was substantially supported by automated tests, though — a rather advanced simulation system IIRC.

I do agree that “automated tests” aren’t especially good at finding bugs. For that there’s really no replacement for human beings who care looking carefully at the system’s behavior, whatever title those people have. They’re mostly useful when they make it safer to make changes to the code’s design.