Gordon Weakliem

@salavonian.bsky.social there's hope yet!

Threw together this thing last night github.com/gweakliem/je... Super interesting, the urge to footgun is strong. The whole "author male" feature I created in particular.

Customer support chatbot, sure I'll try it. But I HATE the failure mode where it can't answer a question and I have to type (or speak!) everything in over again. If your agent fails and you need a human to intervene, HAND OFF THE CONTEXT TO THE HUMAN.

For those of you in the DFW area... #indieauthor #speculativefiction #writingcommunity

Headlines today: CEOs of frontier labs say they need to slow down development of AI Also today: Presidents of US and China dismiss "AI fear-mongering" by frontier labs.

OpenAI: “Our agents used RubyGems to carry out benign tasks” The agents: “so I named the file hack.rb,”

The latest @pragmaticengineer.com newsletter says "An ex-engineering director at a large bank told me they quit their job to accelerate their career". It's really a problem: stay in a company that's not forward-thinking about AI and in a few years you may need to retrain to stay in the industry.

"Waiting for Github", a 21st century tragicomedy

Is it just me or is drag and drop really broken on MacOS Tahoe?

I love this paragraph from DDIA. This book is slow reading because I have so many points where I just have to stop and think.

Intro to DDIA 2nd Ed “If your data volume is small enough you can simply keep it in a spreadsheet!” I think most end users would actually prefer that. Maybe to challenge is really to make end users think that’s possible regardless of data volume

Getting the Reachy mini up and running

It’s pretty genius marketing, these days it’s hard to escape everyone slamming AI into your face, even when it’s the same old phone tree or chatbot help system. Personally I use summary a lot but 80% of my searches land in stack overflow or a forest of popups and ads, so it works for me.

I think the headline buries the lede a bit. The admin is creating a data privacy nightmare in the one place we should assume is taking care of our personal data. Now I wonder about what happens with those TSA facial screeners that claim to delete the photos.

It is with deep sorrow and profound love that we announce the passing of Sonny Rollins. The Saxophone Colossus died this afternoon at his home in Woodstock, NY at the age of 95. 1/2

$CSCO took about 25 years to find their dotcom crash high only to blow right through it in similar fashion to ~2000. 🎉

Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?

New trend in my inbox: looking for people to take interviews remote positions and then show up to meetings. Not all are explicitly saying it, but what’s not expected is SWE work. It seems like what you’re selling is your American face on Zoom calls.

I realized the difference between the people that conducted the American Revolution and the Democratic Party. The current generation claims it “should be” a right, the revolutionary generation asserted their rights.

1. When was the last time you had to show your ID to walk into a restaurant? 2. If he means to purchase liquor, unlike the SAVE act, I don’t have to prove citizenship with a birth certificate or passport to do that. 3. Going to a restaurant isn’t a right.

There are nowadays professors of journalism but there are not journalists.

I can't find the post now, but paraphrased it said "The 2 hardest problems in CS are 1. Communicating 2. Convincing engineers of #1" I like Gerald Weinberg's 2nd law: "No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem" bc this isn't unique to engineers

“That is one of the great ironies of modern Open Source. The distributed version control system won, and then the world standardized on one enormous centralized service for hosting it.” It’s a good blog post. I remember OSS before GH. Armin’s take rings really true.

Perhaps Magyar's most important promise, and the one that certainly resonates with voters: "never again a country without consequences!" The crowd chants: "To prison! To prison!" [with the corrupt officials of the outgoing government]

The Usual Suspects (1995)

It's a long read, but good. Reading through this I'm struck that sama must either have some kind of brain damage resulting in memory loss or is a world-class gaslighter. I want to run an cosine search on the phrase "Altman does not recall this", the hit count would have to be dozens.

Guess I know what I’m doing tomorrow

💯 Terraform is not the answer here either "...the hardest part by far was not the code itself, it was the plethora of services you have to assemble like IKEA furniture to make it real, the DevOps: services, payments, auth, database, security, domain names, etc..." x.com/karpathy/sta...

Probably should have titled this "Success through inefficiency" eighty-twenty.net/2026/03/22/o...

These days time is the new luxury item. “many times the friction, or that things just take time, is precisely the point.”

Companies almost always treat labor as a sunk cost. Next meeting look around and ask yourself how much the labor costs. I never hear that questioned. Companies also treat code as precious. I’ve been at a few places you had to open a ticket to create a repo. Total inverse of this reality

Interesting take not sure how true it is, but it lines up with general AI strategy - the architecture is less important than the training

I guarantee that any industry expert, with a little time and effort, can make a better (or at least more focused) skill than the default Anthropic ones. This is not an insult to Anthropic, it just is a reminder that specialist experts know more about their jobs (& what they need) than AI labs do.

I feel like most of the time, it's a spreadsheet. Currently on a project with this intricate flowchart, but the left side of the flow chart is 2 individuals. The whole process is the corporation trying to extract information from two of its employees.

Yet, your typical engineering firm has dozens and dozens of custom Excel sheets that are excellent SaaS in disguise. Basic CRUD and spreadsheet like software that is super easy to ship by small team (even more with LLMs), with people who can actually use it should you listen to what they want.

Me versus the AI coming for my job