Idk who Denis Stetskov is, but there’s a lot in here that resonates.

When you need $364 billion in hardware to run software that should work on existing machines, you’re not scaling—you’re compensating for fundamental engineering failures.

Maybe tech is ripe for disruption along the lines of efficiency — ironic, no?

The pattern is clear: ship broken, fix later. Sometimes.

I’ve seen this a lot. Build it first. Make it efficient later. “We’ll just buy more compute” is the reasoning.

But are we “building sustainable systems or funding an experiment in how much hardware you can throw at bad code”?

Speaking of sustainable:

Companies are replacing junior positions with AI tools, but senior developers don't emerge from thin air. They grow from juniors who:

• Debug production crashes at 2 AM
• Learn why that "clever" optimization breaks everything
• Understand system architecture by building it wrong first
• Develop intuition through thousands of small failures

Like a lot of things now-a-days, it’s harvest the forest and extract the value, worry later about how the forest got there in the first place and what will happen when we don’t have a forest.

AI can't learn from its mistakes—it doesn't understand why something failed. It just pattern-matches from training data.\

Hey, that’s what we as an industry do: pattern-match on the solutions of others and fail to understand our mistakes — lol.

Loved this article’s introductory quote from Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money:

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.”

Like that famous quote, “How much is enough? Just one dollar more.”

There are many kinds of value. Time, space, personal freedom. Monetary worth is only one. You choose what holds the most weight.

Mundanity and profundity often arrive hand in hand.

Withhold judgment...Think of all the people, shows, stories, and experiences you’d miss out on if you never gave them a chance. Give the world an opportunity to surprise you.

Fear is a yield, not a stop sign

The exploiter simply hears music, sees the reaction the music has on other people, may have no real idea why that music is good, but they try to mimic the circumstance that created the value from the music.

The exploiter simply sees the web, sees the reaction the web has on other people, may have no real idea why a website is good, but they try to mimic the circumstance that created value from the website.

Quoting Tim Berners-Lee:

One of the beautiful things about physics is its ongoing quest to find simple rules that describe the behavior of very small, simple objects. Once found, these rules can often be scaled up to describe the behavior of monumental systems in the real world. […]

If the rules governing hypertext links between servers and browsers stayed simple, then our web of a few documents could grow to a global web. The art was to define the few basic, common rules of “protocol” that would allow one computer to talk to another, in such a way that when all computers everywhere did it, the system would thrive, not break down.

Turns out tags, folders, comments, stars, hearts, upvotes, downvotes, outliners, even semantic triplets, they’re all just links.

Sarcasm can be the cheap way out:

Sarcasm “works” because it alludes to a critique without ever actually making it. It shifts the burden of substantiating the criticism as an exercise for the audience and further suggests that if they don’t already understand it then they are deficient. Making a critique implicit is an unassailable rhetorical position. The most socially acceptable response for the group is to go along with it, as you have given them nothing specific to challenge. And if someone does challenge it you can simply demur and say it was “just a joke.”

Create some value:

If you want to make a critique then do it explicitly and earnestly. Take a position of your own and defend it. It takes a lot more work but in exchange it holds the promise to create a great deal more value for society.

Also a good tidbit for front-end folks:

On any topic of substance there are bound to be valid critiques of any given position. Real questions are almost never settled in terms of right or wrong but rather how best to balance the competing equities of various solutions. 

the most essential aspects of writing: grappling with uncertainty, confusion and insecurity, and allowing time and space to consolidate ideas and form new associations.

As appealing as the prospect of an automated writing assistant may seem, far better would be a writing coach that resists the impulse to spoon-feed us ‘the answer’. A coach prompts us to pause, reflect, reconsider, revise. Lex is a far cry from the ‘thought partner’ it claims to be. It more closely resembles Gmail’s Smart Compose: someone always ready to interject with sensible, middle-of-the-road suggestions, foreclosing possibilities before we have even had a chance to consider them.

We create AI — and automation — to do hard things for us instead of help us do hard things.

If we want to make sense of what we are writing, and why, we can dispense with pseudo-oracles imposing their ideas on us. We have to think for ourselves which, by extension, means writing for ourselves.

Writing is refined thinking.

It is insidious the way that truth and falsity are so thoroughly and authoritatively mixed together.

Large language models are not databases. They are glommers-together-of-bits-that don’t always belong together.

In truth, there is no secure software supply-chain: we are only as strong as the weakest among us and too often, those weak links in the chain are already broken, left to rot, or given up to those with nefarious purposes.

Whenever I bring up this topic, someone always asks about money. Oh, money, life’s truest satisfaction!

…but at some point, it becomes unreasonable to ask just a handful of people to hold up the integrity, security, and viability of your companies entire product stack.

…what we’re asking some open source maintainers to do is to plan, build, and coordinate the foundations for an entire world.

Interesting how passion projects are about quality and a sense of intrinsic satisfaction that comes from that kind of slow, artful approach to building software. Throwing money at the issue doesn’t work because people throw money at issues that are sticky and difficult and nobody wants to do. That’s why they pay you to do it.

Future of software might just be like any other item: it’s born, it lives, and it dies. The circle of life:

the maintainers of the Gorilla framework did the right thing: they decommissioned a widely used project that was at risk of rotting from the inside out. And instead of let it live in disarray or potentially fall into the hands of bad actors, it is simply gone. Its link on the chain of software has been purposefully broken to force anyone using it to choose a better, and hopefully, more secure option.

I do believe that open source software is entitled to a lifecycle — a beginning, a middle, and an end — and that no project is required to live on forever. That may not make everyone happy, but such is life.

Speaking about AI tools like chatGPT, Dall-E, and Lensa:

It is no exaggeration to say that systems like these pose a real and imminent threat to the fabric of society.

Why?

• these systems are inherently unreliable, frequently making errors of both reasoning and fact…
• they can easily be automated to generate misinformation at unprecedented scale.
• they cost almost nothing to operate, and so they are on a path to reducing the cost of generating disinformation to zero

I feel like part old-guy-yelling-at-cloud, but I am genuinely concerned about tools like this. Given how poorly we as society have used the tech we’ve created thus far, I’m not sure we’ll do much better with the next round of advancements.

Nation-states and other bad actors…are likely to use large language models as a new class of [weapon]…For them, the…unreliabilities of large language models are not an obstacle, but a virtue…

[they aim to create a] fog of misinformation [that] focuses on volume, and on creating uncertainty…They are aiming to create a world in which we are unable to know what we can trust; with these new tools, they might succeed.

my hopes for web computing always felt limited by both the inertia of what Chrome already was (it’s hard to move the cheese on people), and by Google itself. A company that once oozed innovation now stood in its way. At some point, so much of our focus became navigating a sea of reasons not to innovate, for fear of causing users to see fewer ads. The ads model is an addictive one! And despite my lofty position at the company, this wasn’t something I could change.

Interesting insight (and admission) from Darin Fisher, co-creator of Google Chrome, on why he’s joining The Browser Company.

The news does not matter. It has little, if any real impact on your life besides what you allow it to have. Like a vampire, The news- whether mainstream, alternative, printed or screen-based- is a parasitic force that will drain you of your energy, happiness and rationality if you welcome it over your threshold and in to your life. The key is to simply never invite it in.

That’s a bold statement to an intriguing article. What’s one to do?

If an event is actually important to your real life, you will find out about it. Such news will find you.

Feels like there are some parallels in here to “keeping up with” or “staying informed on” web dev news. Or, as the author calls it, “the illusion of staying informed”.

So how do you bring about change, then? Well, from my experience you ignore all of the things you cannot control and that have little bearing on your life (again, if there is some news that will actually effect your life you’ll hear about it) your focus narrows to your local environment. To yourself and your family and your street and your neighbourhood. These are things you can influence. And from here your influence ripples outwards, and rather than being trapped by impotent rage and fear and confusion, you see that the reality is that you can make things happen. And this is the only piece of news that matters

To be honest, this is part of why I like following individuals over publications or companies in web dev. I get to see the individual behind the writing — the human whose views are evolving, changing, growing, shrinking, whatever it might be. I walk that path with them through their writing. The sensationalism is missing (from most anyway) and you get to see a rough human whose edges are being chipped away and polished as they move through the world.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. – John Gall (Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail)

The author’s mathematical notation of how the foundational technologies of the web fit together struck me as interesting:

• URLs + HTTP + HTML = web
• URLs + HTTP + RSS = Podcasts
• URLs + HTTP + JSON = REST APIs
• URLs + P2P + HTML = Web3

Entertaining (and nostalgic) essay about life before the internet.

I had no influence and never disrupted anything.

The only content users generated was letters to the editor.

The personal brand, that groan-inducing pillar of digital existence

“Groan-inducing”—just love that description of the personal brand.

Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood. Reality, as Philip K. Dick said, is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it, and while the digital and physical worlds may be converging as a hybridized domain of lived experience and outward perception, our own sustained presence as individuals is the quality that distinguishes the two.