Bram Geron

I would put more weight on these internal factors than on influence. Especially in an employer’s hiring market. Though I don’t know the importance of influence for attracting staff+ employees

The external post can also be useful docs for coworkers and future employees. External posts warrant more time investment to make them good than internal docs do. And it can help change team culture to work more in the open and invite feedback, rather than isolated from other teams / your peers

From the creator of UML 1.0: “There’s a sweet spot for a tremendous amount of software engineering that does not need the UML”

41:00 "Bill Gates said 'Grady, I'm stepping down and I'd like you to take the role of Chief Architect'. I did some research, and came back, 'Bill, I'm flattered, but you have a profoundly dysfunctional company, and I'm not the one to fix it."

pca.st/w2a6ta7h?t=41m

MCP is a headless scripting language (bring your own syntax)

Not to mean they’re wrong, but I think they misjudged their audience — it was hard for me with 5 years of 🇳🇱 high school chemistry.

And -OH is what turns alkanes into alcohols. It’s -OOH for carboxylic acids 🤷🏼 I guess one O was in the Ac

But then Nebula’s payouts can’t add up to much either with 50% of €3 going to creators…

YouTube Premium makes it a bug-ridden product instead of a super annoying bug-ridden product 🤷🏼

And I have this nagging feeling that creators get very little of my €13/month, instead it goes mostly to music labels (I don’t use it for music). I resent that idea

Someone should compare the environmental cost of letters to receiving GMail when Gemini is active

Favorite jj alias: jj swap — swap the last two commits

Define with:

swap = ["rebase", "-r", "@-", "-B", "@--"]

…and today the blocklist feeds again

I’m sorry you have to go through this 😔

This is a good talk.

The politics in question: “people deserve to live and not to starve”

Data is the new uranium: dangerous and hard to secure

VW leaked car location data — but the real issue is that we store so much data.

If you build software, read this.

👉 ewolff.com/2025/07/3...

And interesting thoughts about Google vs Amazon’s DNA in the full episode

“Just sing out a Te Deum / when you see that ICBM” is one of my favourite rhymes of all time

R.I.P. Tom Lehrer

I know very little about personal branding but “typically humble, proactive, and helpful, without much concern for personal gain” seems like a personal brand to me, and I’m glad that your org supports that

Maybe it’s contrasting to hypothetical CISOs who care about ass-covering and ticking boxes at any cost to the org? And who don’t really care about being helpful

(Just speculating, not speaking from any experience)

On the cultural price of distributed teams

For sure, moddable keyboard have a tendency to be a time sink.

Episode 470: I said something stupid in a meeting and just want to code It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-technical stuff that goes into being a great software dev...

“Contractors are the cloud of people — they’re quick to spin up and spin down”

I need this on my 60% UHK60, but I also get value out of it. It means you can have a 2-key chord for rarer actions like media control, LockScreen, Suspend, mouse.

I guess it’s a bit late, but did you consider a layer modifier button to hide rarer keys behind?

I also see "blocked post". Maybe they set the thread to mutuals only, or so?

I let a goat from my local zoo run SQL commands against prod without protection and it nuked my data

The comments: have you tried this other much smarter goat

Screenshot of article text: “Formal verification today is very useful, but for most systems it’s very difficult to write the kinds of complete specifications that verification needs. However, other kinds of specifications are popular: for example, a test case is a kind of limited, partial specification. The key is that a test case is immediately useful, and doesn’t impose undue costs on the development team. We need to find ways to specify systems that have these virtues, and avoid the trap of imposing a complete and coherent view that fundamentally does not exist.”

Screenshot of article text: “ I’ve come to think writing formal specifications is just a very difficult task. It requires a top-down view of the system that designers and engineers typically don’t have or, more importantly, need. In contrast, informal specifications can be ambiguous, partial, flexible. Informal specifications are intended as communication mechanisms between humans, and as a result they can be ‘wrong but useful’, and elide aspects of the system that are not of interest. This is a strength, but it also results in systems that can’t be easily formalized.”

Screenshot of article text: “ I think systems are typically both designed from the top and grown incrementally. Most systems have some degree of top-down structure, but few systems have a mathematically coherent specification that covers every behavior. The effect is that most systems obey some formal specification for some core functionality, but if outside this core, we rapidly enter muddy territory where it is unclear what the system should do, or whether the designer should even care”

Screenshot of article text: “ It’s a formal verification cliché that writing the specification tends to uncover most of the bugs in a system. To me, this suggests an analogy between specification and programming—both are tools for expressing what we want. In one way, this is a pessimistic thought: no tool can remove the burden of clarifying our ideas. But also, it gives me some hope. Programming is very difficult, but through careful tool design, we’ve made it available to hundreds of millions of people. With luck and skill, perhaps we can do the same for specifications.”

New Galois blog: “Specifications Don’t Exist”. If we want to formally verify more systems, we need formal specifications, but most real systems are hard to specify for very deep reasons www.galois.com/articles/spe...

AI is now significantly weakening Internet security by burdening maintainers

(It may be helpful in other regards, or harmful in more ways than this)

Drive(way) is for being stationary, probably your need Google Park(way)

Header text: "HEY YOU! YES YOU! TAKE THIS SHIT OUT OF LINKS!" This is followed by a couple example urls, with a red square highlighting the sections with source identifiers. The rest of the text is as follows: Source identifiers are used to track your activity on a site. Where you came from, what device you use, and even who you talk to. Whether it's written clearly in the url or tied to a random string of characters, it's assigned to your activity. When you send a link containing a source identifier to somebody and they click it, it signals to the website that you two are connected. And that data goes right back to the website operators, and thus their advertisers. Whenever you select "share" or "copy link" on a social app or website, it creates a link like this. If you give even the smallest shit about online privacy, it's important to remove them. Everything after the "?" symbol can be removed without issue, especially sections starting with "si=" or "utm_source="

I saw an infographic a couple years ago about how to remove source identifiers from links and why it's important, but I can't find it again and too many people I know are sending me links with them so here's an infographic straight from the oven