Brian Willis

This piece from Brian Phillips has a decent number of gems, from “please stop asking me to verify my humanity by clicking on tiny motorcycles” to the old chestnut “don’t make me scan a QR code to read a menu”, but I want to call out my personal favourite:

Stop requiring me to have an X account to read the emergency updates that my government posts on X. I am in a hurricane. My house is in a swimming pool, and the swimming pool is in a tree. Emergency services are, for reasons I am not presently at leisure to explore, posting vital safety updates on X. When I try to read the relevant thread, the app tells me I can’t do it unless I create an account, something I would gladly do if a Kia Sorento were not flying at my face. I shall die peacefully here in my swimming-pool tree, knowing that at least I never had to talk to Grok.

If I’ve said it once on this blog, I’ve said it a million times: you have to own your bits. Relying on platform providers to, you know, provide a platform, depends on a system of incentives that will never favour ordinary people and will always favour advertisers and tech companies.

Done well, government emergency update systems should be resilient, lightweight, standards-compliant, and easy for government workers to update. At first glance you’d think that X would be a great choice for this—after all it’s run by a major tech company so even if your city council’s office building gets hit by a meteorite, the distributed network of water-guzzling server farms that power X will still be up and running. It’s also free-as-in-beer to start an X account, which for taxpayer-funded government work is an important consideration.

But then a few years pass and those pesky incentives kick in! Oh capitalism, you dastardly manipulator you! You lose free access to the audience that you’ve built. You no longer benefit from the years that you’ve spent training the public about where to find information in an emergency. People working in bandwidth-constrained environments (because they’re in an emergency situation) can’t download X’s 511.9 MB app in any reasonable amount of time.

Instead you have to do the hard work of building a website. I know it’s more effort, but you get to own your bits, and that means that they can’t be taken from you.

While attaching the word “hacker” to everything even remotely technical is getting a bit tired, there’s plenty of gems in this guide from Dave Kerr. I haven’t seen Brook’s Law since I was at university:

Adding human resources to a late software development project makes it later.

…but experience has shown me that it’s true in practice.

While we’re at it, every new developer needs to know Kernighan’s Law:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

With each passing year, I get a little bit less impressed with clever code. Your first priority in writing code that will outlast you isn’t making it performant, “elegant” (whatever that means), or necessarially even correct. Your first priority has to be maintainability, because if it’s not, your code will be replaced or abandoned before those other things start to matter.

I can’t begin to tell you how happy this makes me. Even well maintained mid-century modern homes usually look tired after decades of use. To see one that’s fresh, and mostly true to the original design (with a few modifications here and there to comply with modern building codes) is indeed a sight to see. All the Wright trademarks are included—compression and release, natural materials left uncovered by carpet or wallpaper, and of course cement floors in Cherokee Red.

Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959 and the American landscape is dotted with his homes and high-rises. Usonian homes like this one harken back to Herbert and Katherine Jacobs, who in the 1930’s challenged Wright to come up with more modestly priced homes for regular people. There’s a great episode of 99% Invisible about Usonian homes if you’re interested in learning all the history.

Now that it’s open for use, the River Rock House has its own website and is available for rent at the completely absurd price of US$1,341 a night. Being so close to the bright lights of Cleveland surely raises the price a bit.

This one has been kicking around on my to-do list for a while now, but I’m glad I finally got to it as part of my end-of-year purge.

Deadlock Empire is a game you can play to learn about locking and parallelisation in C#. If you’re a C# developer it’s worth your time to give it a shot. I’ve not worked with the Barrier Class before, so that was fun to learn about.

Ted Gioia writing at The Honest Broker:

The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers.

Addiction is the goal.

I don’t have a lot to add to this great post, except to say that this worries me too. I used to read considerably more than I do now, but I find that long-form writing is hard to stick with these days.

Last year, I did a month where each day I’d set a timer for a half hour and force myself to read without distractions. I was surprised by how much I grew to resent this exercise. As the month wore on I started to dread doing it. I did make it over the finish line, but didn’t create a new daily habit as I had hoped I would.

There’s a re-wiring of our brains that’s happening here, and it’s not good for us.