I wonder if we'll start seeing more cases where the product is the tests. Go generate your own code. saewitz.com/tests-are-th...
26.02.2026 16:17
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I wonder if we'll start seeing more cases where the product is the tests. Go generate your own code. saewitz.com/tests-are-th...
I see we're now entering the era of "Claw."
Confusing outcomes with output. And boy are LLMs good at output. So enticing to focus on tools and process right now rather than outcomes because the tools are so rough, but also so promising.
Rediscovering Test Driven Development...
"Verification > intelligence for reliability. A modest model operating inside strict, deterministic tests will beat a stronger model operating without tests, because failures are detected and bounded."
www.sentienceapi.com/blog/verific...
www.clubofrome.org/wp-content/u...
I'm glad I ran into "The Scope of Evolutionary Thinking" by @thomasreydon.bsky.social before my long-planned reading of "An evolutionary theory of economic change" and not after.
www.cambridge.org/core/element...
Love it. I used to tell people I was a magazine columnist and get into the most amazing conversations despite the fact I wrote about software engineering. When I would tell lay-people I was a software engineer, conversations always devolved to "Can you fix my broken windows machine?"
Timing matters in business.
No expert on carpal, but after decades of keyboarding, started having hand issues. Took a while to figure out ... swapping a rectangular table for oval in the kitchen combined with WFH laptop. Straight table = no problem; curved table = hand pain. Took six months to heal up once I realized.
Two photos of a velvet surface, one with cat hair, labeled "before" and one without cat hair and a brush labeled "10 seconds later."
Based on experience, I believe the captions on these photos have been reversed in this version of @buzzfeed.com's daily "98 vaguely thematic things we hope you will buy" listicle.
"pay no attention to the man behind the curtain..."
arstechnica.com/information-...
Self-confirming bias. After a while all your best employees would love blue, it's what they all have in common, so clearly that's what you should look for. (All your worst employees would love blue, too, but maybe those are just the ones that deep in their hearts didn't love blue enough?)
The types of questions you ask in an interview creates a signal. I would react negatively to a personality test. Do you really want to only hire people who have a positive reaction to personality tests? What if your process was to ask people what their favorite color is and then only hire "blue?"
Accidentally declared tab bankruptcy this morning. Feeling a wistful sense of relief.
Turns out, our process was filtering out iOS developers. Standard Facebook Interview Question: “Design Facebook News Feed, including the backend” iOS Developer Answer: “I don’t care about the backend” Interview Notes: “1) TC does not understand basic Computer Science concepts. 2) TC has a bad attitude. Rejection!”
The more experience I gain in interviewing, the more I worry about accidentally weeding good people out, rather than accidentally hiring someone bad.
Exactly this.
cory.news/posts/2025-0...
Have you ever been given a PowerPoint presentation on the rules of guest bathroom towel usage? Asking for a friend.
SF Gate reported an estimate of as many as 100,000. SF Standard reported 50,000. I haven’t heard anything official. For comparison 50,000 marched in the 2024 SF pride and one million attended. 100,000 were in the women’s march in 2017.
Published recipes have become more precise over the years. Older recipes presume the reader has more experience. But coleslaw is not baking, precision is unnecessary, a flaw even. The less experienced the cook, the less likely they are to own a scale. What does 10g of carrot look like? New problem.
Some people’s primary experience of remote is the most extreme and difficult form. For example with team members in SF and India there is a maximal distance, maximal time difference, plus cultural or possibly language differences. Three orders of magnitude harder for communication.
New Montgomery street was new in the 1870s. Spotted some further edits last night.
“Two positive non-work interactions per week” is minimum to build trust. Forgot where I heard this, but I’ve used this guideline for a long time. In-person, this comes for free. Remote, you have to deliberately engineer these interactions. Doing this authentically is a learnable management skill.
One problem with the Viable System Model is that every article has to use 80% of its word budget to re-explain it, badly. Language like “system 3*” and “algedonic” creates a low r0 meme-deficiency. Is the lack of accessible pedagogy a fundamental property of the VSM or can it be overcome?
For comparison the recipe from culinary textbook “On Cooking,” fifth edition p 1077 reads: cook sugar until dark brown caramel … remove from heat … slowly add butter and cream
A failed recipe for butterscotch caramel sauce
“Butterscotch caramel sauce” ChatGPT tells you to melt the butter first in various prompts for this which will result in a burnt mess. Melt the sugar first, finish with the heat sensitive ingredients.
It seems like there may also be under-reporting in these statistics. www.bostonfed.org/publications...
Thanks for responding. Surprising clear trend with respect to education and age, but perhaps it may not follow from most are higher educated to “most are highly paid?” www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-econo...
What is your source for the assertion that most two-jobbers are highly paid?
Ignoble research idea: What percentage of business articles contain a variation of the phrase "In today's changing environment?" Key aspects: (1) Now (2) The World (3) Changes. How has the use of this phrase changed over time? Hypothesis: use is constant over time.
And that’s how the board of our HOA operates. Tried to move to Google sheets. people kept asking, “which version of the sheet is this?” I’m like “the newest one, it’s always the newest one. That’s the point.” They also print out web pages and sheets and pass them around at meetings.
I was on a team that built custom ERP for $1b annual sales company for 1/10th the cost of typical commercial ERP. Primary reason was so the software was designed to fit a very specific business vision rather than having generic commercial software dictate business process. Very successful.