Read it here if you haven't yet. Today is the very best day of all days to read it for the first time. short-stories.co/@raybradbury...

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

The voice-clock sang, breakfast was ejected, but no doors slammed. The garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. The house sat alone in a city of rubble and…

short-stories.co

Adam Rawnsley@arawnsley.bsky.social · 2d ago

Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.

I am old enough to remember when compilers' assembly output could NOT be blindly trusted, ESPECIALLY when run with optimizations on. When I started, the product I worked on had "debug" (no opt) and "retail" (with opt) builds, and one of the first things you learned to ask was which build...

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · yesterday

I’ve seen many engineers dunking on this position but I think it’s reasonable. Vibe coding is essentially replacing “no code” platforms and arguably the recent sale of Airtable is an indication of how that segment is compressing. Those users have no need for source code, it’s simply unnecessary.

What if I go, “I’m not saying that I _want_ someone to hack this bank and transfer a million dollars into my account, and I’m not saying that someone _should_… but, boy, it would be really _nice_ if someone did.” Is that ok? Maybe with a “<wink> <wink>” at the end?

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 3d ago

I find it fascinating that if I tell Claude to hack my fake Bank of America website and it instead, in classic LLM fashion, hallucinates and hacks the real one then there is no law that addresses this? Quite the loophole. I wonder what other crimes are legal as long as you get an LLM to do it?

I've lived under the direct flight path of the Blue Angels in one way or another for about 25 years now (first Cap Hill, now Seward Park) and I have to say, the bloom is definitely off the rose.

One nice thing about the Cybertruck is that there’s never a question about who gets it in the divorce

I learned about all this the hard way...

Gergely Orosz@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · last wk.

Meta's performance review culture is becoming very problematic for its engineering culture. I said this a month ago in @pragmaticengineer.com (screenshot #1), and Semi Analysis said the same last week (screenshot #2). Engineers at Meta are world-class at optimizing for PSC...

Fond memories of college. Don’t think I ever made it into the “best of” compilations.

Jesse Walker@notjessewalker.bsky.social · 2w ago

The Usenet Oracle

No, Pegasus.

Ken Jennings@kenjennings.bsky.social · 2w ago

Why didn't the eagles just fly Odysseus straight to Ithaca

Beyond the massive problem of being found as a needle in a very large haystack, there's the second-order problem of having to support the app if it actually starts being used. Getting something that works is relatively easy. Getting something that's polished and solid and bulletproof is a huge PITA.

A.I. ‘Vibecoded’ Apps Are Flooding Apple’s App Store

Mobile apps are easy to make with artificial intelligence. That doesn’t mean people are excited to use them.

nytimes.com

There is a half-remembered quote I put in my high-school yearbook (!!!) because I liked it so much: "To be a god of something, you have to be able to DO it." If you claim expertise in something solely because you ask the AI, you are just a false god. It's a very real problem.

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 2w ago

Few people realize how much credibility they lose once it’s clear their writings and actions are output from ChatGPT and Claude. If you’re a leader who uses AI in such a noticeable manner (and people notice even if you think they don’t), it’s shooting yourself in the worst way possible.

It’s also quite notable that given all the “fall of Western society” BS related to Lupita Nyong'o as Helen, not a bit of hand wringing about her as Clytemnestra. Hm. Why wouldn’t those boys care as much about that? (And I thought Nyong’o did an even more amazing job as her. She slayed. Literally.)

Saw it today and it was really good. Even had me at one point worrying that those Greek warriors weren’t going to get the gates of Troy open in time…

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 3w ago

A reminder that if you just ignore the bigots and make great art, the rest takes care of itself.

"I mean, I'm walking along there and I come to the corner and there's this 'DON'T WALK' sign flashing. How dare they? It's a free country. How does someone in the government have the temerity to tell me I can't walk into traffic if I want to? I can do whatever I want."

Right Wing Watch @rightwingwatch.bsky.social · 3w ago

MAGA cultist Eric Metaxas was outraged by seeing an air quality alert triggered by the Canadian wildfires that suggested people limit outdoor activity: "How dare they say that. Who has the right to tell me or you or anyone anything? It's a free country. I can do whatever I want."

Steve Jobs killed the Xbox. I think all of the woes trace back to the disastrous launch of the Xbox One. And most of those bad decisions were driven by MSFTs obsession with defeating the iPhone. All the “three screens and a cloud” BS they were feeding themselves.

Something the flood of Microsoft retirement notices on LinkedIn has reinforced is just how *long* the tech boom has been. Yes, ups and downs. But Microsoft had 12k employees when I started there and it felt big. Now it has 228k. There is a *lot* of just... inertia in the industry.

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · last mo.

Document processing & analysis and writing software are two areas where LLMs have found product market fit. These correspond to the Finance and Tech industries which are now losing about 28,000 jobs per month on average so far this year. Key question is if this is a permanent or temporary shift?

In fairness, execs have made this mistake for longer than AI has existed. The previous iteration was "Mistakenly, we thought that by just hiring a lot of smart people and giving them the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product." Also usually ended in tears.

Nicholas Grossman@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · last mo.

"Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product." Holy cow, Ford bought the AI hype, believing they could go "hey computer, make me a good car" and it would.

Yes, it’s like: Me, prototyping with AI: Yeah! F**k yeah! Me, trying to ship AI code: Well, this sucks.

Gergely Orosz@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · last mo.

Talked with a few folks inside of AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic) about what they think of the future of software engineering. The “closer” to shipping production code engineers are, the less they believe software engineering will be “solved” fully by AI. The opposite true as well

Mostly they were accurate but one said that I was a former Microsoft executive. I wish?

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 2mo ago

LLMs never fail to simultaneously impress and disappoint. Two searches for my name at intheweights.com showing completely different results with one accurate and one containing hallucinations.

In the words of the inimitable Gordon Gekko, "A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place."

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 2mo ago

SpaceX has passed Amazon in valuation and is noe the fifth largest company by market cap. This is the stock market equivalent of electing Trump twice as president.

This doesn't surprise me at all. I'm constantly wrestling with the fact that Claude is confused by the Java setup on my machine and will waste untold number of tokens figuring out over and over how to run a test. I noticed and tried to fix it but there's no reason I had to do that.

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I often wonder how much of Claude’s token usage and hence Anthropic revenue is pure waste (e.g. Claude not following instructions or doing things repetitively that it should have done once). I expected it to be high but not this high. 😱

Everyone complains about AI sycophancy, but I'm wondering who are these people whose friends and families are out here telling them that their ideas suck and they're wrong and they shouldn't do such-and-such? In my experience, most bad ideas go unchallenged because we all know we're not...

+1,000,000. If there is any constant that has held true over my career, it is that executives: a) never know when to stop, and b) always go way too far. Just as some companies doubled in size (looking at you, Meta) during the pandemic, this is so going to come back to bite them all in the a**.

Phillip Carter@phillipcarter.dev · 2mo ago

Yeah so like, I know it’s all hip to doom-jerk about how nobody is going to hire juniors or middle managers anymore because of AI (directly or as an excuse), and I think it’s high time to invest in the counterfactual here, because it’s gonna hit faster than you think

The thing is, there's a whole crowd of frogs standing on the bank of the river and every time this f**king scorpion stings one of them, they fish the scorpion out of the river. Then he climbs right on the back of the next frog, who says "This time it's going to be different."

Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Ouch.

"One day you will come to a fork in the road and you’re going to have to make a decision [...] If you go that way you can be somebody. [...] Or you can go that way and you can do something [...] In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do?"

A quote by John Boyd

Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. He raised his hand a...

goodreads.com

Jon Collins@jcollins.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"If you decide not to promote & defend bullshit, there are some jobs that you will not be offered. & if you decide to make a career of comforting the afflicted & afflicting the comfortable and whatnot, there are some jobs that you should not take" @hamiltonnolan www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/if-you-tak...

6-3

Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Someone asked me the other day, “If Trump can just do whatever he wants, then a Democratic president can too. why is Medicare for All impossible? Why are reparations impossible? Why is anything off the table?”

My anecdotal impression from talking to folks is that companies are definitely on the hire and looking for people but are also being incredibly conservative and bouncing folks for minor imperfections. Maybe because layoffs make them paranoid about needing perfection, maybe "many fish in the sea"?

Gergely Orosz@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 2mo ago

Been doing research on the job market for devs: and it's still a weird market. Job openings are up, but devs don't seem to feel that it's a much better market? Meanwhile, companies are also struggling to fill roles. Take this full remote (US) sr eng role at $155-184K salary at a nonprofit. 0% AI:

That number… can’t be true. Can it?

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Star Citizen has spent 14 years in development and raised over $1 billion from crowdfunding. It still has no release date but the single-player spinoff, Squadron 42, is due out this year. I understand some people would love a modern version of Wing Commander but this is insanity.

Suzanne Vega releases “Luka” 39 years ago this weekend. She said she once received a fan letter about it: “Dear Suzanne, Luka is the most compelling piece of music I’ve heard in a long time. There are no words 2 tell U all the things I feel when I hear it. I thank God 4 U, Prince”

This has always been a problem, AI has just made it 100x worse. Once you’re more than 2 or so levels away from the actual work, you lose all understanding of what that work entails and are prone to make decisions totally at odds with reality.

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I think this is a key insight about the AI psychosis we are seeing exhibited by big tech CEOs. The further you are away from the work, the more you assume it’s trivial for Claude or ChatGPT to replace the worker.

In an unrelated vein, been doing some writing lately and discovering that I just cannot seem to remember the first "c" in "syntactic." I just keep writing "syntatic." And keep getting corrected.