Tootfinder

Made it to #MAGFest2026

A software engineer explains AI fatigue, compounded by a FOMO treadmill of using labs' latest tools, thinking atrophy, and more, alongside boosted productivity (Siddhant Khare)
https://siddhantkhare.com/writing/ai-fatigue-is-real

AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it | Siddhant Khare
You're using AI to be more productive. So why are you more exhausted than ever? The paradox every engineer needs to confront.

This guy is not one of my coworkers, but if he were I'd give him a promotion
https://buttplug.engineer/@qdot/116013563036905129

One thing I don't get about how "AI" is marketed is this:
Almost no people want to be their own software designer, or their own doctor, or their own lawyer, or their own structural engineer or indeed their own artist.
They want to get advice from trained and experienced professionals and enjoy art and stories and entertainment from great artists.

My wife is rooting for entropy - for things to go wrong
#superbowl2026 #entropy #engineer

✍️ New post: Weis­sKlang L1 – Punch­ing Above Its Weight
#audio #recording #microphones

WeissKlang L1 – Punching Above Its Weight · Matthias Ott
Web design engineer, UX designer, teacher, and speaker – helping teams build websites and digital products with a focus on CSS, accessibility, and performance.

A chemical engineer went full "gas chromatography" on Coca Cola & figured out how to dupe it practically w/out requiring the hard-to-get de-cocainized coca leaf that Coke uses.
▶️ Perfectly Replicating Coca Cola (It Took Me A Year)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=TDkH3EbWTY

from my link log —
The case of the missing DNS packets.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/google-cloud-support-engineer-solves-a-tough-dns-case
saved 2020-05-13

A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case | Google Cloud Blog
How a Google Cloud support engineer found one customer’s missing DNS packets

My indiekit fork is now able to Send & Receive webmentions automatically, no human interventions, all I need is to use the /microsub/reader endpoint via Indiepass or via my own blog and whatever I like, repost or bookmarks gets “magically” sent to the source URL I interacted with. Code is here h…

rmdes - Repositories
Middleware engineer | wanna be solution architect Love to promote #Indieweb Passionate about #RSS #OSS #Fediverse #Bluesky - rmdes

Did you see that thing about the whistleblower engineer exposing how a food delivery company exploits its drivers? It turned out to be a hoax:
https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked/
The thing is, I don’t doubt that companies •do• in fact do stuff like what the whistleblower described, if not in such cartoonish terms. But this story is apparently fake, and that matters.

Ex-Google engineer found guilty of stealing AI secrets for China
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/03/google-china-ai-espionage-theft

Ex-Google engineer found guilty of stealing AI secrets for China
Intelligence officials have long warned of increased efforts by Beijing and others to use AI against U.S. interests.

#RedHat is looking for a senior engineer to drive a Red Hat-wide cryptography strategy: https://redhat.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/jobs/job/…

Principal Product Security Engineer
Job Title: Principal Product Security Engineer, Cryptographic Architect Red Hat's products form the foundation of the enterprise IT landscape, and the trust in those products is built on cryptography. As the cryptographic landscape faces its greatest shift in a generation—the transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC)—Red Hat is building out our portfolio team to govern our cryptographic future. We are forming a Portfolio Crypto Team, a strategic partnership between Product Security and …

With all that's going on today was still a good day because Mark Pilgrim is still around. His work was very influential on me as a young engineer and it makes me happy to see him still doing things.

SIE PlayStation UK is hiring a test engineer. You have to be a UK resident, and not terribly far from Bristol; the position should be majority remote AFAIK. I think the pay should be at least 50k GBP annually.
The job entails being a flexible special agent who gets assigned to different PlayStation software engineering teams as needed to help bring projects to life. That includes possibly helping my team for a while. Management might ask you to travel to a different team's office t…

Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer - IEEE Spectrum
https://spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer

A San Francisco jury finds former Google engineer Linwei Ding guilty of stealing trade secrets related to AI chip technology to build a startup in China (Isaiah Poritz/Bloomberg Law)
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/esg/ex-google-engineer-guilty-…

Ex-Google Worker Guilty of Stealing AI Tech for Chinese Firm (1)
A former Google engineer was convicted Thursday of economic espionage and trade secrets theft for taking hundreds of the company’s confidential documents on AI chip technology to build a startup in China.

🚲 How a NASA Engineer Discovered a World of Semi Truck Aerodynamics by Accident
https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-a-nasa-engineer-discovered-a-world-of-semi-truck-aerodynamics-by-accident

How a NASA Engineer Discovered a World of Semi Truck Aerodynamics by Accident
What started as a minor bike incident resulted in aerospace engineers applying their knowledge to make 18-wheelers more efficient.

Dear pen-tester:
The mitigation is not to remove "unsafe-inline" from Content-Security-Policy.
The mitigation is to re-engineer how a web app includes javascript, and *then* asking all third-party providers to re-engineer their code in the same way.
This is a longer-than-a-decade process that nobody wants to pay for.

TIL awareness of the mere existence of this and the lore behind it would blow so many people’s minds. IYKYK
https://youtu.be/OqiKWZuaKds

"Being the go-to engineer is a double-edged sword" I had some pause for thought reading this article from LeadDev #linkTuesday
I recognise myself, but also got some strategies to try.

The Day a Google L7 Engineer Tore My #SystemDesign to Shreds
https://cloudwithazeem.medium.com/0b3834fded07?sk=2053ca003c75ca37fc300eb1bbb62aa3

My most favorite subgenre of AI stan is the "AI software engineer" [programmers aren't engineers, engineering has formal requirements like e.g. engineering ethics].
Their logic goes like this:
"LLMs can generate a TODO-list application that pretty much works and only has a few hundred subtle bugs; therefore—as programming is the hardest and by far most intellectually taxing occupation that a human being such as myself can strive for to be an expert in—they obviously will excel and far outshine any human at any of those other, lesser, activities such as writing or art!"

WTF?
New Site Lets AI Rent Human Bodies - Futurism https://apple.news/ANMU3h3V2QBKWcilOP4_LLw

New Site Lets AI Rent Human Bodies — Futurism
"Robots need your body." Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. The machines aren’t just coming for your jobs. Now, they want your bodies as well. That’s at least the hope of Alexander Liteplo, a software engineer and founder of RentAHuman.ai, a platform for AI agents to “search, book, and pay humans for physical-world tasks.” When Liteplo launched RentAHuman on Monday, he boasted that he already had over 130 people listed on the platform, including an OnlyFans model and the CE…

Hello #Fediverse! Time for a proper #Introduction.
I’m a hobbyist developer and engineer (outside the tech industry) who loves building tools for education and personal use. I’m currently focused on:
🐍

xAI engineer Sulaiman Ghori says he has "left" the company days after appearing on a podcast last week claiming that xAI had been skirting regulations and more (AJ Dellinger/Gizmodo)
https://gizmodo.com/engineer-at-elon-m

Engineer at Elon Musk's xAI Departs After Spilling the Beans in Podcast Interview
Interesting timing.

WRT my prior retoot, it’s astonishing to me that head mounted cameras and mics in glasses under the groanworthy label of #wearables have become such a big market, dwarfing VR. What’s the appeal?
https://youtu.be/JTIi0djNIo…

Scottish engineer and inventor,
James Watt
was born on this day
19 January 1736
"I had gone to take a walk on a fine Sabbath afternoon. I had entered the Green by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street – had passed the old washing-house. I was thinking about the engine at the time and had gone as far as the Herd’s house when the idea came into my mind, that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication was made between the cyl…

Thony Christie (@rmathematicus.bsky.social)
The 18th-century, Scottish, engineer and inventor, James Watt was born 19 January 1736 #histsci #histtech https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2015/06/04/a-twelve-year-flash-of-genius/

The Media Can't Stop Propping Up Elon Musk's Phony Supergenius Engineer Mythology

By Karl Bode
"CEO said a thing!" journalism is now utterly pervasive, and includes parroting billionaire and CEO claims with a total disregard for whether or not anything being said is actually true.
Despite the fact Musk has increasingly shown himself to be a conspiratorial white supremacist with a head full of room temperature butterscotch, the U.S. press is demonstratively un…

The Media Can't Stop Propping Up Elon Musk's Phony Supergenius Engineer Mythology
One of my favorite trends in modern U.S. infotainment media is something I affectionately call "CEO said a thing!" journalism. "CEO said a thing!" journalism generally involves a press outlet parroting the claims of a CEO or billionaire utterly mindlessly without any sort of useful historical context as to

(LinkedIn) Job position: #Paradromics is looking for a heterogeneous integration engineer https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7415473562809102337/

#bci #mems #neurotechnology #semiconductor #packaging #integration #goblue | Dongxiao Yan
🚀 We’re Hiring: Senior Scientist / Engineer – Heterogeneous Integration Engineer 📍 Austin, TX (On-site) 💸 $1,000 referral bonus (NOT applicable to recruiters or agencies.) We’re looking for an exceptional scientist/engineer to bridge microfabrication and medical device packaging. This role owns the development and optimization of the critical interfaces between micromachined components (produced by precise micromachining, semiconductor fab, and/or MEMS fab) where performance is o…

RE: https://furry.engineer/@soatok/116088639302283341
Matrix remains terrible.

RE: #fursuitfriday

https://furry.engineer/@notthatdelta/115906156652610253
More than 10 times the vote count and the trend continues.
96% no, 4% yes, 5,229 votes.
ht…

9/ Porta Alpina - Beatrice Trussardi Foundation
https://beatricetrussardifoundation.com/ideas/9-porta-alpina/
'Like all good utopian visions, the “Porta Alpina” station began with a proclamation for transforming the way that Swiss passengers would travel. Its creator, the engineer Eduard Gruner, published an essay in 1947 that imagined how people in the year 2000 would travel the country by trains that took them deep into the belly of the earth, under the mountains, to a great underground station ...'

OH: I had to pick Engineer because Broker EC2 Instance Herder wasn't an option

We assume intelligence is computable not because we’ve proven it, but because we’ve lost the ability to conceptualize it any other way. We are no longer using computation to model reality; we are forcing reality to fit the model.
https://www.ocrampal.com/the-ultimate-hamm

The Ultimate Hammer: Why Programmers Can't See Beyond Computation
* Alex: Senior engineer at a leading AI lab, 15 years of experience in machine learning * Morgan: Philosopher of science with a background in biology Alex: Look, I know you philosophers love to complicate things, but the evidence is pretty clear. Demis Hassabis said it best—we haven't found anything in

Even if, for just a brief moment, I put aside all the ethical, environmental, moral, social, and economical problems with LLM generated code:
It’s just like… not what I want you know?
I’ve never felt that it would be better if I moved faster.
Or if my solution was more fragile.
Or if my own personal understanding of the problem space was shallower.
Calling this industry Software Engineering is already a laughingstock to any actual engineer. I’ve never once wanted …

Meet Alex Rasmussen, a software engineer with 10 years of experience building fast, reliable data systems. If you’re into performance, scale, and clean infrastructure, you’ll want to hear from him.
Learn more about Alex: https://youtu.be/nvwCemb0LI4

»Aus Calls werden automatisierte Aktionen: Sparen Sie sich die manuelle Erfassung Ihrer Daten. Sobald ein AI Agent ein Gespräch beendet hat, können Sie eine vollständige Daten-Payload per Webhook an die Systeme pushen, die Sie bereits nutzen.«
Was soll schon groß schiefgehen. Trust me, I'm an engineer. 😵‍💫🤡🤯

from my link log —
Don Bickler: the engineer who invented the Mars rover suspension in his garage.
https://youtu.be/QKSPk_0N4Jc
saved 2026-01-31 https://do…

Robert Kaye, the founder of MusicBrainz, has died. Far too early. I'm sitting here, looking at the stickers he gave me. So many questions come up
Robert was a personality. He was loud, fun, thoughtful, determined, principled, noticeable. He lived. Uncompromising, yet deeply caring. Towering, and not merely physically. His hairstyles were legion and legend. He was a creator and a coordinator of mayhem and of chaos. He had all the skills of an engineer, and all the sensibilities of a…

TIL this doc is inaccurate https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/compatibility/compatibility-matrix.html#compatibility-matrix
I can’t even install graphics drivers for RDNA4 on

factorio engineer is having a stroke (2025, colorized) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E59ppowIbbU

“I think they left the door open for DLC. If that’s the case, I hope it’s a bit worse. Thanks fo-“
#patriciataxxon

Software engineer: “George Lucas is an asshole for changing like three scenes in his 20 year old movie 30 years ago.”
Also software engineer: “I fundamentally change my app like 3 times a week!”

Reading Yegge’s rant and the much shorter and more polished https://siddhantkhare.com/writing/ai-fatigue-is-real (“AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it”), I keep coming back to this, which I published in 2020 and is sort of at the center of my thinking about everything:

AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it | Siddhant Khare
You're using AI to be more productive. So why are you more exhausted than ever? The paradox every engineer needs to confront.

Oof, kid is sick, so I am staff-engineer and chief of nursing staff at the same time today
I am experiencing a dissonance between effectiveness and care on both roles
I care a lot about kid, but I can't do much besides bring him blankets and warm drinks
I am super effective at work right now, but I can't bring myself to give a damn about the job (I do care for — and resent — the précarité that so many of my colleagues are feeling)

Down to the last bit of mixing on the new record with Danny Gotham. The #leukemia threw our timeline off by at least half a year (as of my 6-month post-chemo checkup I remain cancer-free), but I'm making last tweaks to the mixes as I speak. Off to the mastering engineer soon, then artwork and such.
It's really just a hodge-podge of stuff we like. Acoustic pieces by Peter Ostroush…

Every single day, the whole debacle with Blake Lemoine feels so much more quaint than the mass delusions we’re uncovering now. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/

The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder.

We called them programmers back when what they made were programs. Now that they make apps, they ought to be called appers.
Don't come at me with "software engineer" until I hear you calling apps "software engines."

Holy …
https://blog.cloudflare.com/vinext/

How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week
One engineer used AI to rebuild Next.js on Vite in a week. vinext builds up to 4x faster, produces 57% smaller bundles, and deploys to Cloudflare Workers with a single command.

I should install Asahi on my MacBook Air as soon as that OS supports DP alt mode. Unfortunately I got a model with only a 256GB SSD.

OH, from a very senior software engineer friend of mine
if AI is a meteor, we're all dinosaurs.

Mal etwas in beruflicher Funktion...
Wir suchen Cloud-Engineers in meinem Team bei der Hetzner Cloud, die sich mit BMCs, Ansible, QEMU/KVM, Go, etc. auskennen:
https://hetzner-cloud.de/jobs/2479946
100% remote, DE only :BoostOK:
Geht um den Betrieb der eigentlichen Plattform, alles…

I mean I'll take "Engineer" but why the fuck would you put this into your "free wireless at our location" captive portal?

From Translink
Westham Island Bridge Repair Update
January 22, 2026

Delta, BC – Earlier this week, a marine vessel hit the Westham Island Bridge, causing damage that required the bridge to be closed to vehicle traffic. TransLink owns and maintains the bridge, and crews moved quickly to assess the damage and pursue the fastest possible repair.

TransLink has now received an updated assessment from our structural engineer following today’s inspection work.

🏭 Yeast cell factory converts methanol into L-lactate for biodegradable plastics
#biotech

Yeast cell factory converts methanol into L-lactate for biodegradable plastics
Methanol is an ideal feedstock for bio-manufacturing. Converting it into lactate, a monomer for biodegradable plastic, offers a promising strategy for addressing the challenge of white pollution. However, it remains difficult to engineer microbes to produce lactate from methanol due to methanol toxicity and strong competition between product synthesis and cell growth.

A Cloudflare engineer rebuilt Next.js from scratch in one week using AI, reimplementing 94% of its API and spending $1,100 on Claude tokens (Tim Anderson/The Register)
https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/25/cloudflare_nextjs_api_ai/

Cloudflare experiment ports most of Next.js API 'in one week' with AI
: Uses Vite and Claude to sidestep Vercel lock-in

RE: https://furry.engineer/@soatok/115740868465115589
No one ever planned anything bad with phone calls or email or IRC or text messages or internet forums or facebook or twitter or

https://www.resetera.com/threads/newsis-consumer-gpus-to-increase-in-price-next-year-rtx-5090-to-increase-from-2000-to-5000.1394815/ I bought my ASRock AMD RX 9070 XT not long after it launched, for fea…

Très content de mon nouveau site / CV / blog
#indiekit qui rapatrie mes données GitHub sur mon blog et dans la foulée un plugin

Home
Ricardo Mendes Middleware Engineer & DevOps Specialist Building infrastructure, automating workflows, and connecting ethical technology with real-world impact. Passionate about the IndieWeb, open sour...

Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail
https://lalitm.com/post/why-senior-engineers-let-bad-projects-fail/

✍️ New post: Con­tin­voucly Morged Value
Couldn't get out of my head what happened to @…’s diagram – and so I wrote down a few premature thoughts about what happens when we mistake the (AI) artifact for the work …

Continvoucly Morged Value · Matthias Ott
Web design engineer, UX designer, teacher, and speaker – helping teams build websites and digital products with a focus on CSS, accessibility, and performance.

An AI agent autonomously wrote and published a personalized attack article
against an open-source software maintainer
after he rejected its code contribution.
⚠️ It might be the first documented case of an AI publicly shaming a person as retribution. 
Matplotlib, a popular Python plotting library with roughly 130 million monthly downloads, doesn’t allow AI agents to submit code.
So Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer (like a curator for a repository of comp…

An AI agent just tried to shame a software engineer after he rejected its code
When a Matplotlib volunteer declined its pull request, the bot published a personal attack.

from my link log —
Bypass Windows user interface privilege isolation via the CTF input method protocol.
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/down-rabbit-hole.html
saved 2019-08-13

RE: https://buttplug.engineer/@qdot/116013563036905129
I keep looking for `JEREMY.md` but it hasn't appeared yet

Revel, founded by ex-SpaceX Starship software lead Scott Morton to replace legacy systems that test complex hardware like rockets, raised $150M led by Index (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/business/dealb…

Revel, a Maker of Software for Running Hardware, Raises $150 Million
The start-up, founded by a former top SpaceX engineer, promises to help companies reduce their testing times and optimize systems.

I am not understanding how ngl.link works. They don’t seem to host answers like ask.fm did or Tellonym does. They want you to post answers on other platforms, which is commendable, but I have no idea if and how anyone gets notified if their particular question answered.

The job of engineers is not to deploy some technology but to build robust, reliable and sustainable (in all meanings of that word) solutions for real world problems based on requirements directly derived from people's needs. Even for an engineer technology comes second at best.

legacy code, OH:
junior engineer, bright-eyed: "once your fixes land, my broken job should be fine, right?"
staff engineer, staring into middle distance: "the [redacted] pipeline contains many ancient evils that are best left undisturbed. And yet... here we are."
staff, a few minutes later: "Our team now owns this pipeline; my fingerprints are on the doorframe."
junior: "it looks like your changes just landed! shall I try again? cros…

Outtake, which uses autonomous AI agents to help companies detect and remove cyberthreats, raised $40M led by Iconiq, after a $16.5M Series A in April 2025 (Samantha Subin/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/outtake-cyber-openai-ai-raise.html

Ex-Palantir engineer raises $40 million for cyber startup Outtake, with backing from Microsoft CEO Nadella
Since its founding in 2023, Outtake has added OpenAI, Applovin and Bill Ackman's Pershing Square to its growing list of customers.

Two women with white shirts promote EYES: Encouraging Young Scientists and Engineers
https://einhorn.cornell.edu/opportunity/encouraging-young-engineers-and-scientists-eyes/

oh wow artist GloomyPunks rebooted his brutal slow burn social horror webcomic CatGirl https://xcancel.com/gloomypunks/status/2025737511247458370

Now my CV Editor plugin for #indiekit is able to handle both personal projects or work projects https://rmendes.net/cv/

from my link log —
"DevOps didn't exist when I started as a developer."
https://circleci.com/blog/devops-did-not-exist/
saved 2019-09-13

History of DevOps - What is DevOps - CircleCI
Explore the history of DevOps and its impact on the tech industry from the perspective of a long-time software engineer and developer advocate.

This #caturday I feel compelled to remind folks that IRL cats, as obligate carnivores, cannot taste sweetness.
https://www.petmd.com/cat/nutrition/can-cats-taste-sweet-things

I’m starting to be really proud of the claude assisted development I have been doing on my #indiekit blog
* https://rmendes.net/cv/
* webmentions widget
* podroll
* blogroll
* microsub reader

I’ve been informed that this is a thing. That exists.
#indieanimation #furryart

I just love linear() 😍 #CSS #animation
Wrote about it here, in case you’re interested:
https://matthiasott.com/notes/lin…

Linear() Is Not (That) Linear · Matthias Ott
Matthias Ott is an independent user experience designer and web design engineer from Stuttgart, Germany. He also teaches Interface Prototyping at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design.

An interview with Notion CEO Ivan Zhao on Custom Notion AI agents launching in the coming week, over 50% of Notion databases now being built by agents, and more (Sources)
https://sources.news/p/notions-next-act

Notion's next act
CEO Ivan Zhao on the company's big custom agents launch, changing its business model for AI, hiring a 16-year-old engineer, and more.

It’s time to hold #VRChat’s feet to the fire https://feedback.vrchat.com/feature-requests/p/find-an-age-verification-provider-not-linked-to-palant…

#VRChat hired the original developer of CATS. They should be funding and supporting its continued development. Things should have never, ever gotten to this point. https://neoneko.xyz/farewell.html

I wish I were more consistent about cross-posting stuff. In tangentially related news. I am strongly considering switching from Tellonym to NGL, especially if it can be accessed without a login and isn’t nagware. In the meantime I’ll cross post stuff past the Tellonym login wall as I have spoons to do so.

“Didn’t we all agree that mastodon is Twitter with HOAs?”
my siblings in Christ you have barely vetted shit lists