Ben Meier
@ben.bsky.meierhost.com
Principal Software Engineer - distributed systems, go, rust; he/him; Dad; Bristol 🇬🇧, 🇿🇦; Currently enterprise engineering; previously Platform Engineer, VMM, and FaaS data planes. Blog: https://bensblog.meierhost.com
AI is an apocalyptic technology. “Apocalypse” doesn’t mean “end of the world”. It means “revelation” or “disclosure”. AI will expose every crack in our society that we have heretofore more-or-less successfully papered over. Nothing will be able to stay as it was. (And that’s (bad | good).)
Ted Underwood@tedunderwood.com · 2w agoStatus quo bias is right to worry about the future. Where it deceives us is assuming, for the sake of argument, that our current solutions mostly work.
One of the most important pieces of AI commentary: "software brain" is important to understand if we want to get through this era with our humanity intact. werd.io/the-world-is...
The world is not a database
One of the most important pieces of AI commentary: "software brain" is important to understand if we want to get through this era with our humanity intact.
werd.io
The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by myself and @chris.blue, is finished and sent off to the printers! Ebooks should be available in the next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. 😅 (BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)
Dependabot security alerts have terrible signal-to-noise ratio, especially for Go vulns. That hurts security! Just turn it off and set up a pair of scheduled GitHub Actions, one running govulncheck and the other running CI with the latest version of your deps. Less work, less risk, better results!
Turn Dependabot Off
I recommend turning Dependabot off and replacing it with a pair of scheduled GitHub Actions, one running govulncheck, and the other running CI against the latest version of your dependencies.
words.filippo.io
📄 New blog post! AI will soon write most distributed code. Distributed code is where our worst bugs —Heisenbugs— live. The real lever isn’t “test more,” it’s **aim better**: AI should target frameworks where correctness contracts are explicit and checkable. jhellerstein.github.io/blog/codegen...
Coding Agents Meet Distributed Reality
AI is about to write most of the code in the world. Most of the code in the world participates in a distributed system. And distributed code is where our worst…
jhellerstein.github.io
Hahaha "All encryption is end-to-end, if you’re not picky about the ends."
Ooo the new gig laptop is a custom 48GB 14" M4 Pro which is pretty nice 😎
Quite enjoyed this post www.joanwestenberg.com/thin-desires... > The person who bakes bread isn't trying to fix the world. They're not making any attempt to either dent or undent the universe. > They're trying to spend a Sunday afternoon in a way that doesn't leave them feeling emptied out.
Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life
The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger. We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need. We're hungry for less, while more accumulates and multiplies. We're hungry and we don'...
joanwestenberg.com
These last few weeks have been the first time really contributing to a React code base for more than just a few adjustments. And I'm getting it now. I can also see how much discipline you need to keep things tidy. I'd still try and use HTMX first so I can lean more on my backend experience.
If everything is a top priority, then everything gets done quickly. That's basic management
Wonderful weekend mornings. The bad: toddler wants to wake up and play at 4 am. The good: they fall back asleep by 6 and everyone including the dog can have a lie in.
Ooh, that frame.work desktop is very neat. Hopefully next time I've got time and a need for a desktop it'll still be an option 🤞
Managing VPCs and subnets and routing tables feels so old school and cloud 1.0. I wish the industry had moved on further from this by now.
The days' mission, platform engineering example for a Score → AWS lambda and Valkey setup.
Remember, kids: A real big goal of "AI" is to entirely sever capital from labor, and no, there will be no universal basic income, you can all just starve and die, thanks www.axios.com/2025/08/26/a...
AI is already taking jobs away from entry-level workers
Software and customer service are most at risk right now and could be the canary in the coal mine.
axios.com
Manager: "What's this milestone about ..'Living on a prayer'?" Lead: "That's the documentation deliverable" Manager: "What's the status of that?" Lead: "We're halfway there" Manager: "Why is progress so slow?" Lead: "You fired Tommy" Manager: "So?" Lead: "Tommy used to work on the docs"
Stumbled upon a signed copy of @benaaronovitch.bsky.social 's Stone and Sky in Bristol today, good start to the PTO week 👍
Why do payment processors have such obscure URLs for 3d secure or credit card info. Like, why do I want to put my details into `live.opacy.eu.elavon.com/....` o.o
LLMs are rapidly normalizing us to just overlook trivial errors and mistakes. And that's treated as a feature.
I've spent the last week and a bit designing and building an authn+authz stack from scratch with users, oauth, developer tokens, memberships, and invites. Something that's been done thousands of times before but is still fun and fulfilling to implement again.
Basically impossible to get anything done in Europe between mid-July and September.
Implemented user sign up with google oauth, login, logout, and session token based authentication today, and it's a nice comprehensive story to test and demo together. Nice to do it with minimal dependencies too.
