It’s frustrating that Tim Walz is about to get killed for saying “Expanding the risk pool is critical to affordability” turning this into “supporting and individual mandate” (ooh scary words). Meawhile, Vance is trying to rewrite history and give Trump credit for being blocked by congress.

Whatever Apple did to notifications in Sonoma, and we know it is very little, somehow, they are worse.

I saw someone on the internet call him “Kelly Brims” and that is now his name forever.

Oh no, today we rapidly came upon the part of the year where it starts to feel like it’s much later than it is because it’s getting dark so much earlier.

Home alone, no car, little food, random desire for baked pasta. I must admit, I love radiatori.

TIL: Definitely do not forget to run analyze after upgrading major versions of PostgreSQL.

I have an expensive OLED TV and an expensive AppleTV and still there are scenes in S2E1 of Rings of Power that are far too dark to make out a damn thing. What are we doing, people?

(Also this show remains way more expensive than good)

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.