Yoz Grahame

of COURSE there’s a technology the left is excited about

Hamsters, Inc.

#changemonstertohamster

Monarch: Legacy Of Hamsters
#changemonstertohamster

Drop an album that wad important to you when you were nineteen.

and an evolution of Inform 7, albeit a profoundly unnatural one

Screenshot of a WhatsApp conversation thread. It starts with the "Today" header, then shows three images. The first image is of a cartoon woman wearing a baseball cap with a unicorn horn on top, a bow at the neck, and lipstick, in front of a repeating pattern of hearts. In the bottom right corner of the image is the logo for Toca Boca Hair Salon 4. The second image is of a scary creature with four long legs, an even longer tail, a jagged spine, pointy cat-like ears, and a mouth that appears to be smiling at the edges but plunges deeply to make a vertically cavernous mouth. It is in front of a plain white background. The third image is almost identical to the first picture, but the woman is in a slightly different pose, with a wider smile. Under these, I have responded: "That is a remarkable juxtaposition."

i love watching my 12 year old work things out

today: the kuleshov effect

and Stanley Tucci

SOFTWARE TEAMS REPORT 5X PRODUCTIVITY INCREASE THROUGH NEXT-GENERATION BREAKTHROUGH CALLED “AN ACTUAL DEBUGGER”

Skeptics Denounce Tech Miracle As “Spicy Print Statements"

A screenshot of a section of CIO.gov's "Accessibility" page. There's a heading: "About CIO.gov Accessibility", in white text on a dark grey background. Under the heading there's a paragraph of text in grey that's only slightly lighter than the background. Within that text there's a linked phrase, which is in black text on dark grey and is totally unreadable. The paragraph, with the linked phrase in brackets, reads: "We are committed to making all of our Internet documents accessible to everyone. To ensure that we meet or exceed the requirements of [the 1998 Amendment to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973], we continually review our site and modify pages to remove accessibility problems for people with disabilities."

Well, they've figured *some* of it out. Either that, or this is a super edgy move to show how little they care about accessibility.

Is my memory failing, or was that also the case during parts of Blair’s reign?

You probably know this already, but Postgate auditioned for The Book in the HHGttG movie. For some reason I have never tried to get hold of the recordings, which feels pretty stupid in retrospect.

Only something like 12 episodes of Bagpuss were made, every one a gem. One my favourite memories is of my son, when he was three or four, and being quite hyper. We put on “Bagpuss” which he’d never seen before, and it captivated him like nothing else. But he probably won’t remember it now.

Post by @yoz 💬 0  🔁 0  ❤️ 0 · Or, to look at it from the other side: people get sad (or mad) when the makers of good things stop making them, or when things that are deemed good by your friends aren’t easy to f…

From, like, nearly twenty years ago:

www.tumblr.com/yoz/93497342...

and @holgate.permanent.red in 3… 2…

(this makes me happy)

hey @phil.gyford.com , looks like we have a new euphemism

Yeah, there's a bunch of us on here who regularly fall into the pros and cons of spreadsheets as software. You're absolutely right about them making usage & changes easier. Unfortunately, we don't have the traditional engineering tools to make them *safer*. Bugs are much harder to spot, debug, test.

YAAAAAY! So glad you liked!

not only does this song play regularly in my head, but I am having baked potato this very night

i should go have it, i'm starving

seriously: it's the best team I've ever been a part of, and there is STRONG competition there (I've been ridiculously lucky in my career). Can't remember another team where I felt so outclassed by people who were still completely lovely to work with

YouTube video by BillMJennWVEVO Bill Medley, Jennifer Warnes - (I've Had) The Time Of My Life (Official HD Video)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BQL...

Amazingly, I have managed to avoid them all, and have never dealt with SAP or PeopleSoft in any capacity

But case/issue/workflow management tools, on the other hand: At least half of my life

That rings VERY true, especially if that 20% includes all the project & people management, QA, ops, etc.

"What if instead of buying software companies build their own software," is not in any way a dumb question. Tens of thousands of people ask it for themselves and their colleagues every single day.

And most of the time it's a fucking disaster. So yeah, if someone can make it easier, we'll take it.

So finally, after all this, we come to: do LLMs actually ease the impl...

actually, no. I started answering that and then deleted it. LLMs are irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make here, which is this:

For a great example of this, see the software fad immediately preceding LLMs: no-code/low-code app builders. They didn't have even 1% of the hype that we see with AI, yet Retool went from nothing to a $3.2bn valuation in 5 years. Unlike most AI startups, they are not a bunch of total chancers.

But the rest of the time, you already have plenty of the expertise required, and the build vs buy decision comes down to implementation & maintenance of each side.

So anything which eases implementation & maintenance of software will eat into *most* areas of enterprise SaaS sales.

But, just in case it sounds like I'm suggesting otherwise: there are many times when YOU SHOULD BUY RATHER THAN BUILD, for a ton of different reasons. Just like guides, software can be seen as a distillation of opinionated expertise. Some of that expertise is too much work to learn for yourselves.

Fortunately, before 18F was killed by you-know-who, some of our amazing people distilled their procurement knowledge into some surprisingly short and bullshit-free guides, such as legislature.vermont.gov/Documents/20...

Also, what Gail (who is far wiser and more experienced than I am about this) says: bsky.app/profile/joyi...

I worked with Gail at 18F, where we tried to help the US Govt save money by making more of its own software, AND by making such efforts smaller, instead of giving billions to implementors

Have you ever heard the saying "every company is now a software company"? Because it's somewhat true: the bigger a company gets, and the more software it uses, the more likely it is that the company – no matter its lines of business – will need to hire software engineers of some kind.