Jake Westfall

I received perhaps the most Dad email that I've ever received from my Dad. No words, just an unsolicited PDF attachment of the Consumer Reports 2026 Buying Guide.

The Consequences of Factory Farming Are Too Large to Ignore Factory farming is often brushed aside as a niche concern, but it's one of the largest—and most ignored—sources of suffering, environmental destruction, and human harm in the world today.

"I don’t care if you’re vegan, vegetarian, flexitarian, or a meat-lover — it’s your motivation that matters, not your diet."

On climate change, animal welfare, the necessity of reducing meat consumption to address both problems, and how massively neglected this problem space is.

A great read.

The next book we'll read in the Software Internals Book Club is Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces.

We'll read it in three chunks. Discussion leaders will be selected only for one chunk at a time and we'll take a few weeks break in between chunks to regroup.

eatonphil.com/2026-ostep.h...

This is really serendipitous. I recently bought this book and just started reading it (I'm on chapter 5). I think this club could help keep me on track

It was a null pointer that caused crash loops that then caused metastable failures. The attempt to recovery unintentionally overloaded the system. I think this case could be added to this paper www.usenix.org/system/files...

This is the best thing written about monorepos I have ever read
blog.swgillespie.me/posts/monore...

delta is the correlation between the latent predictors (T_1 and T_2), not the correlation between the observed predictors (X_1 and X_2). While the reliabilities of the observed predictors would definitely constrain the possible/likely correlations between X_1 & X_2, they have no bearing on delta

Sick of being taken advantage of by OTHER PACKAGES?!

Use python package {tariff} to show those packages WHO IS BOSS.

Make Reinventing The Wheel Great Again!

pypi.org/project/tari...

if you know anyone who claims to be concerned about climate change and still sympathizes with NIMBY arguments, please send them this article

Small Single-Stairway Apartment Buildings Have Strong Safety Record Policymakers could increase the supply of multifamily housing in their states and localities by revising outdated building codes that require more than one stairway in small apartment buildings. If en...

the study on safety of single stair buildings by pew charitable trusts and the center for building in north america (@stephenjacobsmith.com) is now live

www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-...

1/11 Today’s technical post is about Bluesky itself. The platform is close to reaching 32 million users, and with that, it has started facing new technical challenges. cc @calvobianco.com @martinelli.ch @sivalabs.in @iamsoham.bsky.social @dashaun.com @jamesward.com @tomcools.be @ilopmar.bsky.social

Interesting FTC sued Pepsi and not (presumably) Walmart, who almost certainly coerced Pepsi into the deal. I suppose it's easier to prove discrimination by comparing Pepsi's prices across retailers. And it still hurts Walmart by showing other suppliers they'll face consequences for giving in.

Kyle Cascade - How to Actually Migrate Complex Systems in Infrastructure

Kyle Cascade - How to Actually Migrate Complex Systems in Infrastructure https://buff.ly/4g5WgYx

Wow, it's been so long since I touched R, I totally forgot about <-() functions. It seems like such a wild concept to me now

+1, IMO @realpython.com is easily the best web resource out there for Python tutorials. Consistently high quality stuff

Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases | sean goedecke

To be clear, I think "I eat cows but not pigs/chickens/etc. because I think this leads to less animal suffering" is a pretty well-substantiated and respectable choice. Obviously I think it makes sense to go further than that, but I won't criticize anyone for taking a step toward reducing suffering

Well, I don't know that the quantitative "thousands of times" is accepted, but it's certainly recognized that cows in the factory farming system tend to have a much less bad time than other animals

Yes, I think that's widely accepted

Also, about dairy cows, that is, lines of cows bred for milk production. Half of them are born male and produce no milk. They're considered pretty worthless and live short, painful lives, not the 2000+ days shown here. Until there's a way to stop them being born, they should be part of this analysis

I applaud your effort to think critically about what you eat. With that said, some of the assumptions around cows in particular are pretty dubious. Am I reading correctly that you've assigned cows NEGATIVE "suffering per day," seemingly implying that we're doing cows a favor by farming them?

How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths. About how these AI tools really work and how they could be the start of the return of software, as a craft.

Based on a guest post by @addyosmani.bsky.social. Read it here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-ai-wil...

False? I've never worked with a PM that even attempted to demonstrate any of these skills. If you're working with PMs that can do this, or you are one, in my mind that's pretty special

Single Stair, Many Questions The single exit stair debate reveals the tangled intersection between safety, housing affordability, building codes, and politics.

TIL that the NFPA's piece on point access blocks - Single Stair, Many Questions - was their top read article for the entire year.

Good! Codes are a large reason why our housing is so poor in quality and outcomes in the US.

www.nfpa.org/news-blogs-a...

Databases in 2024: A Year in Review Andy rises from the ashes of his dead startup and discusses what happened in 2024 in the database game.

Buckle up because we're banging into the new year with my annual retrospective of the last year in databases! Highlights include license change blowback, Databricks vs. Snowflake gangwar, @duckdb.org's shotgun weddings, and buying a quarterback to impress your lover: www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/...

Diagram with large number: 2.7.123 First “2” is commented: Proud version. Bump when you are proud of the release Second “7” is commented: Default version. Just normal/okay releases Third “123” is commented: Shame version. Bump when fixing things too embarrassing to admit

I propose we replace semantic versioning with pride versioning

I'm not gonna say it's a rosy situation. There are some things you gotta learn or you'll have a bad time. But if I compare it to Java w/ Maven or Javascript w/ npm, the other two I've spent time with... not sure I can say that working with those has been overall much easier or smoother than Python?

My honest opinion on Python installation/environments/packaging is that it's...Not That Bad? But people constantly shit on it, so then I wonder if it's actually that years of figuring out how to deal with it has made me lose all reasonable perspective on how fucked it really is

TIL about python-build-standalone. This part of the linked blog post helped me understand why I should care

Evidence has demonstrated this effect in numerous cities now.

I understand why it sounds weird to say, 'building a bunch of fancy new townhouses and skyscrapers will make housing more affordable!' but it simply appears to be true.