Posts by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
(DIR) Post #B153BmfGv56v3l17TM by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2025-12-09T18:34:21Z
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@interfluidity Before I walk my dog, I put on my faux-paws.
(DIR) Post #B1JZuPkSsy9BlPD65g by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2025-12-16T17:36:43Z
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@vkc Speaking as a technologist, these claims are dogshit. They say, "We're putting AI in your browser." I say, FINISH THE PITCH. YOU'RE PUTTING AI IN MY BROWSER SO THAT...GOT NOTHING? SO THAT WHAT‽ SAY SOMETHING TANGIBLE I CAN RELATE TO.This isn't weird granola-munching retro-grouch opposition. These are the questions I was trained to ask as a product manager, and trained to say when speaking to the press.You don't need to be an AI skeptic to recognize shitty leadership choices.
(DIR) Post #B1TWlYUSvO3ISMAHoG by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2025-12-21T13:58:46Z
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@futurebird
(DIR) Post #B1kI9QTMBtYIujtD4y by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2025-12-29T16:04:25Z
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Reminder that America considers both "anti-capitalism" and "ecological sustainability over unchecked industrial growth" terrorist doctrines. I suggest you horde copies of Dr. Seuss while it is still legal to obtain them within America's borders.
(DIR) Post #B1kN9bK4LjqYKuRq2C by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2025-12-29T17:01:14Z
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@futurebird When I was a child, I read a story about a kid who could wiggle his ears. I became obsessed with this, and eventually figured out the necessary muscle isolation.A world where everyone wiggles their ears? Bring it! Let's dance!!
(DIR) Post #B1kSw9dAaznoPaLz6W by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2025-12-29T18:00:51Z
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@mckra1g Kindness is only mistaken for soft by people who are transactional and think the only reason you are being kind to other people is because you crave approval of some sort.We need to disqualify broken people from defining what is and what isn't healthy social behaviour. They only disseminate and perpetuate their own suffering.
(DIR) Post #B1kW1zHoGjvHvdps6y by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2025-12-29T18:24:15Z
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@PamelaDrew We stand in a world trying its hardest to make us fearful, angry, and despairing. Under the circumstances, kindness is punk as fuck. It requires standing up for what we believe in against the tide like a man standing in front of a line of tanks.Cruelty just requires going along, obeying orders, saying you didn't know. It's the weakest fucking thing in the world.
(DIR) Post #B1kbSjSfiFxCRFULdQ by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2025-12-29T19:40:34Z
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@PamelaDrew Yes. We need to scale that moment down to everyday. And many of the most important things we do are in private, and sometimes only within our own heads."Think globally over the long term, but act in the present from the bottom up?"
(DIR) Post #B1mJQEOaplZUeT9sRM by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2025-12-30T15:28:47Z
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@futurebird Next year, come to Toronto for a Polar Bear skate!https://www.torontograndprixtourist.com/2025/12/toronto-polar-bear-skate-2025.html
(DIR) Post #B1yciXSWvOku0xxiEK by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2026-01-05T13:52:00Z
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Not about to write 10,000 words on how iOS 26 marks the death of Apple's human interface leadership or whatever. But this just happened and it made me laugh. Did anyone try iOS 26 on an iPad Mini? How do I use this? I can't see the word it wants me to correct!
(DIR) Post #B1ydMQkRIPUimeMQz2 by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2026-01-05T14:07:44Z
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@aral Turning the tablet so it goes into portrait mode and then turning it back fixed the problem. Tossing salt over my shoulder was a NOOP.
(DIR) Post #B2BFtDNCqlo84DOA9Q by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2026-01-11T16:16:59Z
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@futurebird Software engineering is the stuff around software coding. The AI-vangelists have decided to re-discover the field from scratch, while expressing increasingly hubristic contempt for the lived experience of the entire field.@EricLawton @david_chisnall
(DIR) Post #B2BIAQbR7GG3veNeKW by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2026-01-11T13:52:36Z
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“Code is not an infinitely reproducible machine that requires no labor inputs to operate. Rather, it is a brittle machine that requires increasingly heroic measures to keep it in good working order, and which eventually does "wear out" (in the sense of needing a top-to-bottom refactoring).”— @pluralistic, https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modesThe myth that "old code doesn't rust" persists because it justifies moving fast, breaking things, and leaving it for someone else to clean up the mess.👇🏽
(DIR) Post #B2BIAZVO17lZXUcReK by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2026-01-11T14:57:21Z
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Speaking of the fragility of enterprise software… Here's the robust architecture of an online banking system I used to lead. 3.5 million people trusted this with their life savings.That TUI app written in MUMPS(!) once powered the terminal a bank teller would use to process an in-person transaction. It embodies and unambiguously encodes every business rule for transactions that have been developed over decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS@pluralistic👇🏽
(DIR) Post #B2BIAhwGf41RhBG1ey by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2026-01-11T15:17:20Z
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@pluralistic That bank licensed the MUMPS source code from its vendor and employed a small team that did nothing except keep that MUMPS app alive. Nobody else could touch that code for many reasons, one of which was security. The closest I came was updating the JDBC code in concert with changes the team would make to the app.This is a single—but compelling—example of, “Increasingly heroic measures to keep legacy software in good working order.”👇🏽
(DIR) Post #B2BIApLL8FEkey2eDA by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2026-01-11T15:25:15Z
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Legacy software has many weird things within it that cause it to require increasing amounts of copium to manage. Here's a trivial example from that same code base.The Oracle database had a column for customer zip codes. Just for fun, what was it called?
(DIR) Post #B2DBfk2iZsmRpq2sVM by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2026-01-12T14:34:40Z
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I sometimes have fantasies about what to say should MIT ask me to address the graduating computer science class:"“Those who understand technology and not people, can always count on getting a job working for someone who understands people and not technology. “And yet, the path I have found most fulfilling was to try to understand people and technology and to integrate them together into one understanding of software.”❤️
(DIR) Post #B2LMZ7hGt52VvjjwP2 by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2026-01-16T13:18:52Z
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@Nonilex Fuck around by tearing up everything we've done to build a stringer, unified economy? Find out that we still have lots of friends in the world, while nobody even tells you there's a party.
(DIR) Post #B2NUb4aEcdGGnooEca by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2026-01-17T13:58:20Z
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@futurebird @AnnaAnthro I told my children from a very young age: "Humans are the most advanced form of life on Earth, according to every metric humans have devised to measure greatness."
(DIR) Post #B2NadOBXJXIBtrkDCa by raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
2026-01-17T15:05:25Z
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@futurebird Reminds me of: "A suburb is a place where a developer cuts down all the trees, and then names the streets after them."