Weeknote #75 (20260301-20260307)

meta

This was (for a variety of reasons) a fairly long, fairly frustrating week …and (for a variety of reasons) I can’t really talk about it.

did

Gymed twice, rowed once, and had a lovely massage on Saturday — maybe the high point of the week? Other than that, and work, not much else went down.

read

  • Don’t read this for the AI parts; just read it for the five bottlenecks bit: “What DevOps Already Knew About AI Development”

  • Pretty much what it says on the tin: “A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4,000 Developer Machines”

  • “What is a token” (via @chrisjrn)

    Thus far, I find AI code generation merely unimpressive. It just doesn’t seem like much of an advancement over the normal tools I was already using every day. This covers narrowly scoped code generation and targeted refactoring. But a great deal of the broader social conversation centers on much larger scale code generation. This is the so-called patterns of vibe coding, or agentic generation. These patterns give me pause. That’s partly based on my understanding of how this all works, which I’ve just explained. And it’s partly based on my understanding of the way human minds and brains work. The human element is an extremely broad topic, of course, and not one I’m qualified to wrap up in a 2 page summary like with NLP. But to pick out a couple of specific points that concern me, I worry about anchoring, and vigilance.

  • This was a good read: “What Is Negative Engineering?”

    Negative engineering is the time-consuming and sometimes frustrating work that engineers undertake to ensure the success of their primary objectives. If positive engineering is taken to mean the day-to-day work that engineers do to deliver productive, expected outcomes, then negative engineering is the insurance that protects those outcomes by defending them from an infinity of possible failures.

  • Look, you’re either the type of person who finds the idea of a mollyguard for the F1 key hilarious or you’re not. If you are, read this: “Make a tiny box that fits around your F1 key.”

listened

elbow do a lovely cover of U2’s “Running To Stand Still”

watched

  • We watched all of Shrinking S2, and back looped back to Murderbot, which we had started a while back and then stalled out on.
  • This amazing alternative version of “the angel of 8th ave” — this is already a bit of a gut-wrenching song, but the violin accompaniment and David Le’aupepe’s voice elevates it even further. Highly recommended.

cooked

looking forward to

Some time off, later this month