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My bank card never arrived. I called the bank and, after being redirected through several departments, was assured that it had been mailed. Then we argued a bit about what "7 to 10 business days" meant, we were already on day 14. We ended the call by agreeing to disagree. Eventually, I did get my card. But it wasn't the mailman who delivered it. Instead, it was my neighbor from two streets down. On the envelope, my address had been crossed out, and the word "incorrect" was handwritten beside it....

Be healthy, be young, fall ill. You have a great job of course, you have insurance. It would be ok if the worst thing about health insurance in America was it is hard to navigate. No! The actual problem is that your insurance is incentivized not to cover you at your most vulnerable moment. You pay them every month. That's money that goes from your paycheck, into their pockets. Now if they cover you, that's money that leaves their pocket, and go into your treatment. There are two ways they can ma...

This is a blog where I talk mostly about programming in the workplace. These past few years the subject has often been AI, because it affects everything. From the hiring process to the very code we type. AI might just replace me mid-sentence... So when a subject that affects us all dominates the world, I want to give you my perspective. I may not be your source of political perspective, but here goes. Right now, we are at war. At least the United States of America is. It turns out, congressional...

If you only listen to spokespersons for AI companies, you'll have a skewed view of how AI is actually being integrated into the workplace. You probably don't need to convince a developer to include it in their workflow, but you also can't dictate how they do so. Whenever I sit next to another developer during pair programming, I can't help but feel frustrated by their setup. But I don't complain, because they'd be just as annoyed with mine. The beauty of dev work is that all that matters is the ...

In the very last scene of The Bourne Supremacy , Jason Bourne calls the CIA from what they presume is a public phone. Landy, who answers the call, instructs her team to trace it. Bourne says he wants to come in and asks for someone specific to meet with him. Landy stalls for time while her team tries to triangulate his exact location, so she asks how she can find the person he's referring to. That's when Bourne drops his famous line: "It's easy. She's standing right next to you." revealing that ...

In chapter 11 of Catch-22 , two captains create a complex set of rules to ensure security in the military. Among them are some absurd requirements just to get food in the mess hall. Everyone knows the process is ridiculous, but they go along with it anyway. To enter the mess hall, you have to recite the pledge of allegiance. To be served food, you have to recite it twice. If you want salt, pepper, and ketchup, you have to sing the Star-Spangled Banner. Other condiments require signing a loyalty ...

In many sci-fi shows, spaceships have a teleportation mechanism on board. They can teleport from inside their ship to somewhere on a planet. This way, the ship can remain in orbit while its crew explores the surface. But then people started asking: how does the teleportation device actually work? When a subject stands on the device and activates it, does it disassemble all the atoms of the person and reconstruct them at the destination? Or does it scan the person, kill them, and then replicate t...

For me, being part of an online community started with Digg. Digg was the precursor to Reddit and the place to be on the internet. I never got a MySpace account, I was late to the Facebook game, but I was on Digg. When Digg redesigned their website (V4), it felt like a slap in the face. We didn't like the new design, but the community had no say in the direction. To make it worse, they removed the bury button. It's interesting how many social websites remove the ability to downvote. There must b...

On the first day of my college CS class, the professor walked in holding a Texas Instruments calculator above his head like Steve Jobs unveiling the first iPhone. The students sighed. They had expected computer science to involve little math. The professor told us he had helped build that calculator in the eighties, then spent a few minutes talking about his career and the process behind it. Then he plugged the device into his computer, opened a terminal on the projector, and pushed some code on...

When the news broke that Meta's smart glasses were feeding data directly into their Facebook servers , I wondered what all the fuss was about. Who thought AI glasses used to secretly record people would be private? Then again, I've grown cynical over the years . The camera on your laptop is pointed at you right now. When activated, it can record everything you do. When Zuckerberg posted a selfie with his laptop visible in the background, people were quick to notice that both the webcam and the m...

This blog runs on two servers. One is the main PHP blog engine that handles the logic and the database, while the other serves all static files. Many years ago, an article I wrote reached the top position on both Hacker News and Reddit. My server couldn't handle the traffic . I literally had a terminal window open, monitoring the CPU and restarting the server every couple of minutes. But I learned a lot from it. The page receiving all the traffic had a total of 17 assets. So in addition to the d...

Andrej Karpathy has a gift for coining terms that quickly go mainstream. When I heard "vibe coding," it just made sense. It perfectly captured the experience of programming without really engaging with the code. You just vibe until the application does what you want. Then there's "hallucination." He didn't exactly invent it. The term has existed since the 1970s. In one early instance, it was used to describe a text summarization program's failure to accurately summarize its source material. But ...

Technology has advanced to a point I could only have dreamed of as a child. Have you seen the graphics in video games lately? Zero to 60 miles per hour in under two seconds? Communicating with anyone around the world at the touch of a button? It's incredible, to say the least. But every time I grab the TV remote and decline the terms of service, my family watches in confusion. I don't usually have the words to explain my paranoia to them, but let me try. I would love to have all the features ena...

I have a hard time listening to music while working. I know a lot of people do it, but whenever I need to focus on a problem, I have to hunt down the tab playing music and pause it. And yet I still wear my headphones. Not to listen to anything, but to signal to whoever is approaching my desk that I am working. It doesn't deter everyone, but it buys me the time I need to stay focused a little longer. I don't mind having a conversation with coworkers. What I mind is the interruption itself, especi...

Last year, I pushed myself to write and publish every other day for the whole year. I had accumulated a large number of subjects over the years, and I was ready to start blogging again. After writing a dozen or so articles, I couldn't keep up. What was I thinking? 180 articles in a year is too much. I barely wrote 4 articles in 2024. But there was this new emerging technology that people wouldn't stop talking about. What if I used it to help me achieve my goal? Have you ever heard of Mo Samuels?...

A new law passed in California to require every operating system to collect the user's age at account creation time. The law is AB-1043 . And it was passed in October of 2025. How does it work? Does it apply to offline systems? When I set up my Raspberry Pi at home, is this enforced? What if I give an incorrect age, am I breaking the law now? What if I set my account correctly, but then my kids use the device? What happens? There is no way to enforce this law, but I suspect that's not the point....

Just like everyone, I read Sam Altman's tweet about joining the so-called Department of War, to use ChatGPT on DoW classified networks. As others have pointed out, this is the entry point for mass surveillance and using the technology for weapons deployment. I wrote before that we had the infrastructure for mass surveillance in place already, we just needed an enabler. This is the enabler. This comes right after Anthropic's CEO wrote a public letter stating their refusal to work with the DoW und...

How do you manage a company with 50,000 employees? You need processes that give you visibility and control across every function such as technology, logistics, operations, and more. But the moment you try to create a single process to govern everyone, it stops working for anyone. One system can't cater to every team, every workflow, every context. When implemented you start seeing in-fighting, projects missing deadlines, people quitting. Compromises get made, and in my experience, it almost alwa...

Let's do this thought experiment together. I have a little box. I'll place the box on the table. Now I'll open the little box and put all the arguments against large language models in it. I'll put all the arguments, including my own. Now, I'll close the box and leave it on the table. Now that that is out of the way, we are left with all the positives. All the good things that come from having the world's information at our fingertips. I can ask any question and get an answer almost instantly. W...

Sometimes, I have 50 tabs open. Looking for a single piece of information ends up being a rapid click on each tab until I find what I'm looking for. Somehow, every time I get to that LinkedIn tab, I pause for a second. I just have to click on the little red dot in the top right corner, see that there is nothing new, then resume my clicking. Why is that? Why can't I ignore the red notification badge? When you sign up for LinkedIn for the first time, it's right there. A little red dot in the top r...