PostgreSQL major releases always spark joy.

Holy crap, the new NIST password standards are good?

The best thing about Bad Monkey is how the characters believably care about each other and act in ways that are consistent with their own morality.

Classic combo— get your flu/covid shots, work late, stay up reading late, wake up feeling like a bus hit you.

One thing that’s interesting to watch with high profile rewrites that are struggling— so often, there are usage patterns that rely on non-decisions made by a developer. When rewriting software and coming across poorly defined behavior, the impulse is often correctly to make a decision that fits some kind of logic of how things should operate so that they are predictable and consistent.

The problem is, predictable and consistent existed before— by happenstance. Now you come to learn that your mental model of the application (as the developer) is different than your users, but you have no way to capture how things worked in that “undefined” state. It was, by nature, an anti-design.

A huge part of software change management involves being clear how the application models the domain. How do we think about these concepts? How can we teach people the appropriate amount to lead them to “pits of success”. Preferably, how do we make using the application just “feel right” without having to do a ton of work expressing our intent and design?

All domain models are wrong, and therein lies our challenge.

“Don’t Repeat Yourself” is often taught and shared, but I find it to be not that useful and often wrong. The aphorisms about programming I find myself revisiting are:

First make it easy (warning: this could be hard), then make the easy change.

And

Make it run, make it right, make it fast.

What common advice do you find unhelpful? Which bits do you find yourself often citing and coming back to in your own work?

The new Trips feature in Photos is killer.

I don’t love either of these pictures, but they tell an interesting story. The first one came up as “On This Day” five years ago– back before I knew about my keratoconus and was still using glasses. So grabbed another shot of me today. You can see the aging, and, I hope, the weight loss.

The best neighbors are the neighbors who will split your Taharka Bros order so you only get 4 pints you’ll eat in a week instead of 8.

The Walrus Fundamental Ambient might be the best dollar value guitar pedal ever made.

A blogger whose voice I had missed suddenly started showing up in my RSS again and I’m so glad I refused to remove the feed and that it came back where I’d automatically pick it up.

I always forget how bad device migration is when you have Testflight apps.

The new Apple Watch really feels noticeably thinner. It’s a big deal upgrade.

The week that Apple releases new devices and new operating systems used to be exciting. Now it’s exhausting. ¹

Another year, another event, another set of posts about Steve Jobs. Another set of people furious some bug they face isn’t fixed or some feature they want doesn’t seem to be on Apple’s radar. Another set of people mad that a new feature they don’t have to use even exists. Another set of people mad that a feature came out that is only 85% of what they wanted. Another set of people talking about how Apple is great because they can use ancient hardware. Another set of people lamenting that Apple is terrible, because they love their ancient hardware and software and will never upgrade to the new bad thing.

Has the vibe shifted?² I don’t know. I don’t care. What’s boring is not devices or software but the conversation.

I have been reading various parts of the web in various ecstatic states and I just feel tired. I wasn’t talking about tech, or at least not tech alone, but I can see why I wrote about the perfect thing or being burnt out on contrarians, or maybe just takes that are contrary to my own. It’s all downstream of “You think it’s cool to hate things, but it’s not. It’s boring.”³ I love critique and there are times I love a deep dive. I just can’t sustain a fanatical enthusiast fervor about all things.

This is a few parts getting older. This is a few parts new things becoming important to me. This is a few parts overexposure of certain kinds of writing and ideas that get attention online.

And to be honest, I also think this is a few parts, “people’s opinions feel grossly distorted by the attention bubble and some misplaced reverence for what things were like whenever they liked themselves the most”. I think there’s something going on with me besides just disagreeing with a lot of these takes, but I can’t quite express it, hence the rambling post.

I find myself too old to say it, but deeply resonating with the idea that y’all need to go touch grass.

My computer has been really good for a while. So has my phone. So has my watch. The apps I use are really good. I’m glad they’re still around still being really good. Sometimes they add things that are nice. Mostly they add things that I end up not using or caring about. Sometimes they change in ways that are less nice. Often when that happens, within a few weeks, I forget how things were before. It’s fine.

Almost everyone talking or writing about tech these days feels like the people who spend their time on Threads in 2024 complaining about The Last Jedi.

My parents are in Banff. My best friend is in Switzerland. My text messages are all beautiful pictures of mountains.

Kevin Drum is exactly right on why we don’t have a GOP healthcare plan. The way the GOP elite would like to see healthcare administered in the US means leaving people out of health insurance, full stop. That’s not popular, so they just shit on what we have and stop us from improving it.

The only thing I’d add to Louis Mantia’s summary of messaging protocols on iPhone is that while Google fumbled, a few companies massively succeeded at the strategy they failed at, building cross platform messaging with mass adoption.

Uh, apparently Chili’s is becoming more popular again? That’s… supremely weird. I probably haven’t been to a Chili’s in over 15 years.

The Benny and the Jets bar scene of 27 Dresses is… a lot in the car dealership service center waiting room at 9:40am on a Monday.

I’m “ok, we’re done here, I’m getting in bed,” before 9:30pm, years old. 🤷🏻‍♂️

What’s happening in Springfield now, after Trump and Vance put the attention on them, is the real tragedy. And a signal for the horror and terror that’s about to come if white people elect these racist, fascist, monsters into office.

Because not everyone has Bluesky, I’m going to recreate the content of a post there here.

In a quote post, Gillian Branstetter hits the nail right on the head. She quoted Phil Lewis, who posted a clip of JD Vance on CNN.

Phil wrote:

JD Vance attempts to justify spreading lies about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio:

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Branstetter posts an image in response, quoting Hannah Arendt on The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

This is the state of America. This is what the GOP has become. Just listen to so-called undecided voters. They express exasperation at their inability to sort out truth. They are convinced only that everything they are told is a lie. The media lies and politicians lie. And you see them immediately allow in the most sensationalist ideas as plausible as a result. Because everyone is lying all the time, only the craziest lies might be true because who could come up with that stuff? And when they are shown that the mass pedophile ring of the Democratic Party isn’t true, they move on to Haitians eating pets, and then move on to voter fraud and election stealing, and then move on to Central American insane asylum releasing patients in the US, and then move on to American cities being overrun by violent Black people, and then move on and move on and move on.

When we compare the GOP to Nazis, when we call them fascists, it’s not simply due to their beliefs, as horrific as many of those are. We make this comparison because they are adopting the means and methods of totalitarian and fascist regimes.

When it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck…

Shit— my left ear plug became unlodged at some point during practice and it’s totally fucked up. The only thing worse than tinnitus and hearing damage is unilateral tinnitus and hearing damage.

People think Mastodon is a reference implementation of ActivityPub, a thing that not only doesn’t exist, but is a non-goal of Mastodon.

This tinnitus sucks, and it sucks harder because I have expensive ear protection that fully works. I just must have slipped out on the one ear and not noticed. We hit 119dB at one point so this might go a few days and lead to some permanent loss.