Tootfinder

“The barrier to creating software has genuinely dropped. That is not hype. What it means for professional engineers is not that their skills are less valuable, but that the skills that matter have shifted up the stack, as they have in every previous transition.
The developers who thrived after the move from assembly to C were not the ones who could write the most clever assembly. They were the ones who understood what the machine needed to do and could express that intent clearly in a higher-level language. The developers who thrived after the move to managed languages and frameworks were not the ones most resistant to garbage collection. They were the ones who saw the freed-up cognitive capacity as an opportunity to solve harder problems.
The developers who will thrive in the agentic era are the ones who understand this as another step in the same arc and invest accordingly. Not in resisting the tools. Not in deferring to them uncritically. In developing the judgment, clarity, and systems thinking that make the tools maximally effective.
That means writing better specs. Investing in test infrastructure. Developing genuine architectural understanding rather than surface familiarity. Building the taste to evaluate output rigorously. Practicing problem decomposition until it becomes second nature.
The era of programming as primarily a keystroke activity is over. The era of programming as primarily a thinking and judgment activity has been accelerating for decades and just shifted into a higher gear.”
#AITransition
#
https://addyosmani.com/blog/factory-model/

I'm thinking that people had it tough in medieval castles. Just imagine your phone falls into the WC… not much will be left of it all the way down.
#shitpost

Dave Farber - Grandfather of the Internet - is reported to have died.
I was never his student, but I learned my way of thinking about networks, as distributed systems rather than collections of connected machines, from his early DCS work (via my friend and Farber student, Frank Heinrich.)
I had the good luck to interact with Farber many times. I have several hours of unpublished video in which we discussed the history of the internet (and other matters) - I remember that day: We…

1. Plan going to Opole, via Kościan.
2. When you enter the train to Kościan, you discover that the change to Opole is delayed 15 minutes already. Consider changing in Leszno instead; if the delay increases, you'd have more options there.
3. Discover that there aren't any more options in Leszno today. Your change is delayed 30 minutes already. Return the reservations, and take one the other way, to Poznań instead.
4. Train station in Kościan. The displays aren't showing any delays, trains are announced normally. Tell people about the delays, so they won't stand in the -10°C waiting for the train to arrive.
5. Take the train to Poznań, and try to figure out what to do next.
6. Discover that the only reasonable choice going forward is Inowrocław: no delays and good return connection. It's the same train, so take another reservation. Your current seat is already taken there, so move elsewhere.
7. Your train should be followed by another one in the same direction, that departs from Poznań 6 minutes later. However, your train ends up waiting for another delayed train, so the other train goes first. The delay further increases as your train needs to slow down after the other train.
8. Reach Inowrocław 10 minutes later. That's not a problem, since you didn't have enough to see for all the time there anyway.
9. Discover that the town is more interesting than you thought, and you'd use more time.
10. When you almost get to the station, discover that your train is 10 minutes late. Not that you have any use for that time at this point.
11. When you're at the station, the train keeps increasing delay while waiting at the previous station, in Bydgoszcz. The station displays are completely useless, as they show only a random subset of regional trains, for no apparent reason. The announcements include all trains, but are rarely given.
12. The delay keeps increasing. Start thinking about getting a reservation for the next train to Poznań, in case it arrived first. You can't return the reservation after the planned departure time, and you can't have two reservations simultaneously, so reserve the seat from Mogilno, the next station.
13. The next train arrives first. While on board, you discover that you're not going to have any train home for 1.5 hr. Take another seat reservation to Leszno, where you can change into a suburban train and get home 15 minutes earlier than from Poznań. This time, your seat is still free.
14. The train departs 15 minutes delayed from Poznań. After all, you're changing trains in Kościan.
So I was going to go south, to Opole, via Kościan. Instead, I've ended up slingshotting north to Inowrocław, and getting back home via the same train as if I were in Opole.
#rail

"Another way to look at it is, what was the biggest battery in the world a few years ago, which was the Hornsdale South Australian Tesla big battery … households right now are installing the equivalent of a Hornsdale big battery every three and a half days."
https://www.

Household battery uptake booms on back of 'game-changer' rebate
Battery uptake is booming since the federal government rebate came into effect in July. Here's what you need to know if you are thinking of joining the thousands of Australians adding a battery to their home solar systems.

thinking of writing a cli tool with an interactive prompt and/or tui, and I'm questioning the need for non-tui interactive mode, it feels like an artifact of the teletype era.
weak justification: tui removes information from screen, which you might need. this is not a big deal in window systems, but console ttys are still useful.
maybe instead of a full tui it can just tui the 5-6 lines it adds. this is not supposed to be doable in terminfo/curses, but everyone is ansi-termin…

the future is not a countdown — https://www.brichapman.com/p/the-future-is-not-a-countdown?utm_source=bri-mastodon&utm_medium=social

Chronos vs Kairos: Rethinking Time, Change, and Leadership in a World of Uncertainty
We’ve been taught to see time as running out — every crisis a countdown. This essay reimagines time through Chronos and Kairos, exploring impermanence, systems thinking, and ethical leadership. The future isn’t a deadline — it’s a field of possibility we can participate in.

This was written by an old friend and I found it pretty packed with good info. It’s also an example of using NotebookLM for research and content development. I found this inspiring enough to give it a try. I’ve found that it is a “Centaur" enabling tech that helps one to create on their own the overall content and leaving details to the NotebookLM tooling.
——
SLOs Can’t Catch a Black Swan: A Classification Framework for Thinking About Incidents -Geoff White
"Your SLOs can be green, and your systems can still be falling over. That doesn’t mean SLOs are broken. It means they were never designed to describe every class of risk we encounter in complex systems.
I’ve released version 1.0 of SLOs Can’t Catch a Black Swan as an open, living framework hosted on GitHub.
This is not a book you read once, and it’s not something you consult in the middle of an outage. It’s a way to think more clearly about incidents—across the incident lifecycle.”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/slos-cant-catch-black-swan-classification-framework-thinking-white-ybc0c/?trackingId=ShCzMMVCQTChcTi8xT19tg==

You are in a train compartment with two couples. You're thinking: if I were with someone… no, we wouldn't be talking to each other. We would be looking at each other meaningfully, commenting on how noisy the others are.

the future is not a countdown — #climate

Chronos vs Kairos: Rethinking Time, Change, and Leadership in a World of Uncertainty
We’ve been taught to see time as running out — every crisis a countdown. This essay reimagines time through Chronos and Kairos, exploring impermanence, systems thinking, and ethical leadership. The future isn’t a deadline — it’s a field of possibility we can participate in.

Canadians.
Is it time for Canada to ramp up its own defense industry?
We may not be capable of building the really large stuff. But I am thinking a focus on the essentials, mainly defensive or dual use.
Drones. (Land, sea and air)
Air Defense systems.
Armoured Personnel Carriers (we already do)
Ammunition
Artillery.
Small Arms.
We already produce some of this. We could produce more. Do we produce Air Defense systems currently?
Unfortunately the world is in need of more, not less, arms.
#ukraine #russiaukrainewar #canada #canpoli #cdnpoli
https://mastodon.social/@MAKS23/115752916537770053

For a long time, I thought activism had to mean constant urgency, burnout, and despair. But what if there’s another way—one rooted in love, not just resistance?
I started this Substack to explore activism that nourishes instead of depletes. You’re welcome here. 💖 https://substack.com/@bricchapman

Bri Chapman | Substack
➡️ systems thinking ➡️ multi-passionate leadership ➡️ climate change solutions ➡️ success, impact, and meaning