conradev

I love that you are allowed to go off about how we are a worse country without fear of jail or shunning or anything like that. You are using your rights properly!

In Texas and Massachusetts you can actually pick your power provider while paying the natural monopoly for the wires. In time I hope we all can do this.

It is an important distinction.

It’s the same with Facebook selling user data. Neither selling your data, like the carriers do, or selling the ability to target you with your data, like Facebook does, are very nice. But legally they are separate things that need to be regulated differently. As is the case with Flock and Palantir.

I’ve personally had luck at correcting the complex one-off logic the agents produce with the right prompting.

and when I say prompting, I just mean code review feedback. All of this is engineering management. I review code. I’ll point out architectural flaws if they matter and I use judgement to determine if they matter. Code debt is a choice, and you can afford it in some situations but not others. We don’t nit over style because we have a linter. Better documentation results in better contribution quality. etc.

Agent coordination? Gastown? All I hear is organizational design and cybernetics

Use OrbStack. It’s faster than Virtualization.framework because it has its own hypervisor.

This is why Tor is centralized, so that they can take action like cutting out malicious nodes if needed. It’s decentralized in the sense that anyone can participate by default.

It is both the USA and California. California doesn't allow most guns that other states allow and there is a lot of friction between CA and the USG.

Apple moved it there in macOS Sequoia, from Utilities, because they were worried it would be confused with the Passwords app. Apple reminds you that you're actually looking for the Passwords app at every turn:

  Tip: You can find all your passwords, passkeys, and verification codes in the Passwords app on your Mac.

https://support.apple.com/guide/keychain-access/what-is-keyc...

Peter has been prolific and talented long before AI tools. I became familiar with his work a decade ago: https://github.com/steipete/PSTCollectionView

People seem to think that because we all have the same tools and because they’re increasingly agentic, that the person wielding the tool has become less relevant, or that the code itself has become less relevant.

That is just not the case, at least yet, and Peter is applying a decade plus of entrepreneurial and engineering experience.

The courts already have algorithmic oracles for specific judgements, like sentencing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPAS_(software)

It has apparently gotten easier:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/02/03/hom...

A nice “grab their data” button for the current administration.

For example:

  To resolve the problem, scammers would deceive the victims into downloading a malicious app, in an Android Package Kit (APK) file format, sent through WhatsApp.

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/android-users-lose-2-...

Re-creating closed source applications as open source would have a clear benefit because people could use those applications in a bunch of new ways. (implied: same quality bar)

Plastic bottles are discarded because they can be replaced at low cost. Disposable vapes are possible because batteries became cheap enough: the chip is a rounding error.

The same market forces that gave us affordable electric vehicles gave us disposable vapes.

If it goes anything like plastic bottles, there will be a bitter fight for corporate accountability that goes nowhere. It’s especially difficult here because there isn’t a single monopoly like Coca-cola to hold responsible. What is the bottle bill equivalent for vapes?

Construction costs are not "trivial" if each I-beam you're using has a PhD in materials testing.

  Meta's nuclear intention is a perfect example of how tech is willing to pay far more for energy than other customers

I believe their plan is to convert that energy into revenue at a rate that exceeds the amortized cost of generating the energy. It's not a social good project even though you interpret the cost outlay as such?

Diablo Canyon in particular is big (https://www.pge.com/en/newsroom/currents/energy-savings/diab...). It might be too big for their balance sheet. I imagine they picked the most economical sites to expand?

If anything, the limit of RBAC is ultimately the human attention required to provision, maintain and monitor the systems. Endpoint security monitoring is only as sophisticated as the algorithm that does the monitoring.

I'm actually most worried about the ease of deploying RBAC with more sophisticated monitoring to control humans but for goals that I would not agree with. Imagine every single thing you do on your computer being checked by a model to make sure it is "safe" or "allowed".

An article making that case: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...

A rebuttal to that article from Derek Thompson: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-anti-abundance-critique-...

This is so you do not leak the host through TLS. Using DNS to serve an encryption key.

It’s not just encrypted server name indication (ESNI), it is the whole hello now (ECH)! So you don’t leak anything.

This is really cool!

I wonder if it would be possible to live-migrate apps from one machine running munix to another. You could pause, transfer, and resume the virtual machine.

There is a nice co-working space in the Wanamaker building if you need an excuse to visit:

https://www.mindspace.me/philadelphia/wanamaker/

You can likely just take a small open weight language model and use it like a classifier quite easily.

I imagine a coding agent would be great at editing your regex file to maximize coverage.

Just like manually editing Sieve/Gmail filters: I want full determinism, but managing all of that determinism can be annoying…

This really hinges on whether you let state accumulate, and where you let it do so. NixOS generally creates a dedicated user and data directory for its services, for example. I make some of my XDG config directories symlinks to the nix store because I want those configurations to be read-only. home-manager should ask before making modifications outside of the nix store (or make a backup).

This is not only a Nix problem, fwiw. I first encountered this with, say, running ZNC in Docker. It will happily write logs and configs to a temporary directory in the container and get blown away on restart unless you mount persistent volumes in just the right spots. Syncthing can be configured to manage its own config or it can be configured fully by Nix, etc.

He tasked that to his kids:

  He turned 95 years old on August 30. He was 75 when he began giving away his fortune, announcing plans in June 2006 to give away the bulk of his wealth to five foundations, primarily the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He changed his will in 2024, designating 99.5% of his remaining fortune after his death to a charitable trust overseen by his three children and also announcing in June 2024 that donations to the Gates Foundation would cease upon his death.

https://www.omahamagazine.com/giving/buffetts-6b-gift-a-hist...

Searchable transcripts would be a fun addition! I would love to be able to find mentions of specific software (in addition to a formal segment on it)

  After leaving television production, he worked as a consultant for the Internet Archive, helping to preserve and provide public access to cultural and technological media, including Computer Chronicles and other technology programs.

The full archive of Computer Chronicles is online because Stewart put in the work to make that happen. He talks a bit about it (and Computer Chronicles in general!) in a 2013 interview with Leo Laporte on TWiT: https://youtu.be/WdtHS_X1ibg

RIP Stewart – you’ve taught me a lot!

This was a great watch with my family - thank you!

Big pharma has worked like this for a while now

You chose which email to commit with, and GitHub provides you an email you can use if you don’t want to expose your personal email.