Himalayan Goose: “Honk! Honk!”

Mountain Climber on Everest:

“Get back here…”

Takes breath of oxygen

“…you son of a bitch!”

In the immortal words of the Ecclesiast, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity. …there is nothing new under the sun.”

The state of Texas is being used to hide and smuggle migrants into the US and I hereby call on the Trump administration to secure our border by removing Texas.

This makes me think of a conversation between my wife and daughter a while back.

Daughter is angry with her BF and frustrated that he seems oblivious to that

Wife: “Oh honey, no. It doesn’t work like that. If I’m mad at your dad for something I just have to tell him. If he asks if I’m OK and I say, ‘I’m fine’, he takes that at face value. He’s very literal.”

Daughter: “Ugh. Doesn’t that frustrate you?”

Wife: “It was weird at first but once you get used to it it’s actually really nice. You just have to learn to talk to him.”

Me: “Wait, I did something right?”

Wife: “You do lots of things right babe.”

Yeah, I think she likes me.

Go team!

I honestly don’t care if we choose permanent standard time or DST. Either one would be better than having to switch twice a year. I’ll even propose a compromise: we can try one for a year, try the other for the next year, and see which one works better.

Not doing either because we can’t agree on which one should be permanent seems like the worst option.

One time I worked in this IT department where, for the first six months, they literally didn’t give me anything to do. The department head would come check on me multiple times per day, to the point of being really annoying, but not give me any tasks even when I asked for work to do. This guy had been Peter Principled a long time ago.

I knew how IT Ops works so I started finding problems that I needed his help to fix and politely hounding him about it until he he got me what I needed. It didn’t take him long to start avoiding me.

I do not miss that place at all.

Edit: They even gave me a promotion with a kind of implicit understanding that I was supposed to somehow manage this guy even though I was one of his direct reports. Turned out management was incompetent all the way up the ladder. If you find yourself in that position, GTFO as soon as possible. It will make you miserable.

If you asked the president of the United States to point to Denmark on a map, you would be lucky if he hit the correct continent so… I’m going with “plausible.”

Any idiot can write code. “Vibe coding” is just the new pasting code from stack overflow. For that matter, a lot of LLM generated code probably came from stack overflow.

Your value as a developer is not in your ability to rapidly pump out code. Your value is in your ability to design and build complex systems using the tools at your disposal.

As an industry, software engineering has not yet been forced to reckon with the consequences of “vibe coding.” The consequences being A.) the increasing number of breaches that will occur due to poor security practices and B.) the completely unmanageable mountain of technical debt. A lot of us have been here before. Particularly on the tech debt front. If you’ve ever been on a project where the product team continually pushes to release features as fast as possible, everything else be damned, then you know what I mean. Creating new code is easy. Maintaining old code is hard.

Everything starts out great. The team keeps blowing through milestones. Everyone on the business side is happy. Then, a couple years into the project, strange things start happening. It’s kind of innocuous at first. Seemingly easy tickets take longer to complete than they used to. The PR change logs get longer and longer. Defect rates skyrocket. Eventually, new feature development grinds to a halt and the product team starts frantically asking, “what the hell is going on?”

A question to which maybe one or two of the more, senior devs respond, "Well, uh, we have a lot of technical debt. I mean A LOT. We’re having to spend tons of time refactoring just to make minor changes. And of course, unplanned refactoring tends to introduce bugs.

The product team gets an expression on their face like Wyle E. Coyote as the shadow of a falling ACME anvil closes in around him. At this moment, they have two choices. Option A.) develop a plan to mitigate the existing tech debt and realign the dev teams objectives to help prevent this situation again by focusing on quality over quantity. Option B.) ignore the problem and try to ram feature development back on track by sheer force of will.

Only one of these options will achieve meaningful outcome and it’s not “B”. Unfortunately, in my experience that’s often the chosen option. The product team does not understand that while Option A impedes feature development, it’s only temporary. Option B impedes feature development permanently.

We’re going to see a very similar cycle with vibe coding. It just takes time to materialize. Personally, I think the tech debt for vibe codes projects will be compounded due to the sheer verbosity of LLM’s and the fact that no one actually understands a vibe coded project well enough to fix it.

That said, these issues are rooted in hubris and ignorance. Failure to appreciate the “engineering” part of software engineering. This is not something you alone can change.

The AI hype is going to disappear. Probably sooner than later. Just like every other tech hype cycle before it. But, LLM’s are probably here to stay so we have to make the best of it. I don’t usually use LLM’s for code generation. There are better tools for that already. I do use them frequently for research. Honestly, using an LLM with search incorporated is often a lot faster than scouring dozens of websites to figure out how to do something. You still have to take the information with a grain of salt as much as you would with anything on the Internet because LLM’s have no understanding of the text they spit out and will feed you incorrect information without missing a beat.

If I were you, I would focus on quality over quantity. Closing tickets faster is pointless if you’re introducing a bunch of new bugs. If your bosses don’t know that already, they will learn it soon enough.

Residents of Northwest Arkansas: “First time?”

You mean social media in general?

Typically, social media serves one purpose: to make money. This is done primarily in two ways: selling user data and selling advertising. Both of these require user engagement and unfortunately the philosophy of all the major players has been engagement at all costs.

The impact on society at large has been overwhelmingly negative. I could go on at length about the numerous ways I believe social media has been a detriment but that would make for a very long response.

I remember before Facebook started tailoring their algorithms to maximize engagement. Your feed was just in chronological order. It wasn’t too bad. After the first algorithm change – 12ish years ago if I remember right – it started to go downhill very quickly. My feed became extremely negative in a relatively short time. That’s why I ditched Facebook and pretty much every other mainstream social media platform.

So the main problem with mainstream social media is that it’s driven by greed. That has created a whole host of other problems.

If you want to do resource profiling, Visual Studio can do that out of the box. For simple benchmarking, specifically for seeing how long certain calls take, I just just the Stopwatch class and ouput the result to a log entry. Assuming you’re using C# that is.

If I caught someone, who had already molested my child, in the act of abducting said child, I would probably have done the same thing.

Edit: For anyone who didn’t read the article…

The Wade Knox Children’s Advocacy Center later interviewed the man’s daughter, and authorities obtained a warrant to arrest Fosler for one count of rape and one count of internet stalking of a child – two felonies. Police arrested Fosler, and his bond was set at $50,000. He was released on July 17, 2024.

In October of that year, Heather Spencer, Aaron Spencer’s wife, called 911 to report her daughter missing. She said her bed had been made to look like she was asleep in it, but her daughter was not there.

Aaron Spencer told police he later got into his car to look for Fosler. He spotted his vehicle, a white Ford truck, on the highway with his daughter in the passenger seat. The father then turned his car around and went after the vehicle. He began honking and flashing his lights to get Fosler to stop, court records state.

After following Fosler for 6 miles, Aaron Spencer hit the truck with his car, causing the truck to run into a ditch and strike a wooden entry gate post. Aaron Spencer then got out of his car and started firing a gun at Fosler. He fired 16 times, court records state, noting 15 bullets hit Fosler.

After firing the shots, Aaron Spencer pistol-whipped Fosler in the face, court records state.

The father then called 911 and said, "Michael Fosler is (expletive) dead on the side of the road for trying to kidnap my daughter. I had no choice,

It’s a bold strategy, Cotton.

I once had a neighbor tell me they “didn’t agree with liberal views on vaccines.”

You know, like germs give a flying fuck about your political views.

The irony? This person is a nurse.

You joke but…

Second Protectli. They are solid little x86 boxes with no moving parts.

Friend: "So, how are you?

Me: “Worse.”

He began yelling: “Your nerves, Hell, you are just a goddamned coward. Shut up that goddamned crying. I won’t have these brave men who have been shot at seeing this yellow bastard sitting here crying.”[12] Patton then reportedly slapped Bennett again, knocking his helmet liner off, and ordered the receiving officer, Major Charles B. Etter,[23] not to admit him.[12] Patton then threatened Bennett, “You’re going back to the front lines, and you may get shot and killed, but you’re going to fight. If you don’t, I’ll stand you up against a wall and have a firing squad kill you on purpose. In fact, I ought to shoot you myself, you goddamned whimpering coward.”[24] Upon saying this, Patton pulled out his pistol threateningly, prompting the hospital’s commander, Colonel Donald E. Currier, to physically separate the two. Patton left the tent, yelling to medical officers to send Bennett back to the front lines.[24]

The beatings will continue until moralle improves.

It’s got wheels and everything. You can literally just roll it right to the scrap yard.