It’s hard to believe, but Bridgy is 14 years old today. I launched the first version of it way back in 2012. Happy birthday, little project buddy! 🎂🎈🎉
_Ceci n’est pas une poste._ 
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> Have you ever alphabetized your hard drive?
– _Makers_ , Cory Doctorow
“You’re absolutely right” 😕
> This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.
– Woody Guthrie
is it complex, or is it complicated
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Does a given word rhyme with itself?
Eg, does _kitten_ rhyme with _kitten_?
Quick appreciation post for checklists.
I had to do a delicate migration in prod recently, so I did the usual SRE thing: step by step checklist, minimize the critical section where things are down, lots of sanity checks throughout, dry run before the real thing. (If I was really serious, I would have found someone to watch over my shoulder too.)
First time through, one of the sanity checks in a critical section failed, so I immediately aborted and rolled back. Turned out to be a trivial bug, but it would have been ugly if I’d continued and didn’t catch it until later.
Fixed the bug, started the procedure again from the beginning, everything worked fine this time through.
Kudos to the humble checklist. Far from the first time it’s saved my ass.
11 year old: “The best thing about Santa Claus is that I don’t have to write him a thank you note!”
pave the cowpaths
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> Democracy is the worst form of government…except for all the others.
– Winston Churchill
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Fun fact: “six seven” traces its roots all the way back to Old English in the 1380s. Geoffrey Chaucer coined it in his epic poem _Troilus and Criseyd_ :
> But manly set the world on sixe and sevene;
> And, if thou deye a martir, go to hevene."
200 years later, Shakespeare picked it up and used it in his play _Richard II_ :
> But time will not permit: all is uneven
> And every thing is left at six and seven
The common English phrase “at sixes and sevens,” from an early dice game that preceded craps, is unrelated.
> It is thought that the expression was originally _to set on cinque and sice_ (from the French for five and six). These were apparently the most risky numbers to shoot for (‘to set on’) and anyone who tried for them was considered careless or confused.
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> You should consider that the essential art of civilization is maintenance.
– Pete Seeger
TIL: "free driver"
opposite of free rider
"...geoengineering’s economics are almost the exact opposite of climate change’s: While global warming is a “free rider” problem, where countries must collaborate to avoid burning cheap fossil fuels, solar geoengineering is a “free driver” problem, where one country could theoretically do it alone."
🏇
If this grabs you, I wholeheartedly recommend the short story "Coding Machines" by Lawrence Kesteloot. I re-read it every few years, and it throws me for a loop every time. https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
Lately I’ve been thinking about orphaned code. Code that’s still running, live, with no remaining developers or users.
Forgotten hardware devices. Deserted VMs on cloud free tiers. Smart contracts whose DAOs disbanded years ago. Old school internet worms. Abandoned, starving Tamagotchi.
Can you think of other examples?
There are obvious conclusions here about maintainability, ecosystem security, etc, but I’m not here to lecture, I have no particular conclusions. Just a vibe.
The history of coffee is basically one long quest to make it taste as good as it smells.
oof, yeah. I don't envy you the CSAM scanning etc
"These two statements are both true: 'all accidents are preventable' and 'we cannot prevent all accidents.'"
– Timber Stinson-Schroff, Safe New World, Summer of Protocols
https://summerofprotocols.com/safe-new-world-web#footnote-012-backlink
I'm a big fan of harm reduction. Passkeys are *better* than passwords. Nuclear power is *better* than coal or LNG. Vaping is *better* (maybe?) than smoking.
Harm reduction isn't perfect. It's often not even good enough. But it's better then the status quo, and that's important.
Yes, moral hazard and risk homeostasis exist. We should always work toward improving things; adopting a better solution isn't an excuse for complacency.
But better is still better. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Incremental improvement is real improvement. Embrace it!