Weeknote #56 (20251012-20251018)

meta

Funemployment, week 1… go! (In retrospect, I think we’re gonna chalk this week up as “rest and recovery”; I had some grand plans but I also apparently had a need to sleep in pretty much every day…)

did

  • Spent most of Monday and Tuesday working on a Hack Salem announcement bot for the Fediverse — I got about half way done, and ran out of time, so I ended up writing (and then delivering) a talk about it at Hack Salem on Wednesday
  • MrsGenehack headed off to Hofstra, for Parents Weekend, very very early Thursday morning
  • Aside from some administrivia for the new gig, I didn’t accomplish much beyond some light videogaming…

read

  • “The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe”

    We’ve created a perfect storm: tools that amplify incompetence, used by developers who can’t evaluate the output, reviewed by managers who trust the machine more than their people.

    …

    When you need $364 billion in hardware to run software that should work on existing machines, you’re not scaling—you’re compensating for fundamental engineering failures.

    …

    The solution isn’t complex. It’s just uncomfortable.

    Accept that quality matters more than velocity. Ship slower, ship working. The cost of fixing production disasters dwarfs the cost of proper development.

  • “choosing friction”

    This last sentence resonated:

    But the fun thing about reading anthropology is learning how much humans have always been Like This™. There were tribes who refused to adopt agriculture not because they didn’t know about it, but because the tribe up the road does agriculture and they’re not like them. Groups that refused to domesticate cattle because it was important to their group identity to see bulls as wild and untamed. I refuse to use generative AI because I simply don’t want to be the kind of person who uses generative AI.

listened

  • Japancakes covering “Loveless”

    Japancakes cover My Bloody Valentine’s classic Loveless record from start to finish with pedal steel and cello in place of vocal and lead melodies.

watched

  • More S6, Criminal Minds

cooked

  • Sunday: roast pork belly, green geans
  • Monday: chili dogs (well, I had chili dogs; my two co-diners just had dogs)
  • Tuesday: chickens wings, corn