duggan

I had no idea the situation for CF had improved so much! In Ireland it’s more common than anywhere else in the world; there were always stories of kids and people in their twenties passing due to it.

I’ve worked in data centres (just the odd day here and there).

They are interesting the first time if you’re in any way curious about technology.

After that they become a bit mundane. Noisy if you’re in the a server room. Toasty if you’re in a hot row.

Hard to imagine anyone else thinking of them as anything other than boring or a bit mysterious. Or even think of them at all.

I imagine anyone who has ever racked a server is scratching their head at the news these days.

Since we're reminiscing, I was working for Engine Yard when Docker was released. I remember engineering and product leadership huddled around a desk wondering aloud whether we needed to do something about it.

In retrospect, of course, it was earth-shattering for the company, despite a valiant effort. The entire expertise of deploying long lived Linux servers and carefully shepherding them through change management with Chef became a relic to most developers. Totally changed the way applications were deployed.

Was an exciting time!

It’s a cool resource, the search could use some improvement.

Reminds me of Sayre’s law[1], about the politics being vicious because the stakes are so small.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

Yeah, I guess now’s time to do the groundwork for building a tattoo empire in Japan.

It is very hard to work with developers who see the type system as a nuisance to overcome.

And in software problems like that tend to compound. It’s hard to imagine how much badly written, poorly performing software there is out there.

The opportunity to do better with AI is monumental; comes with its own problems no doubt, but I’m willing to give it a shot.

Personally I think this problem is being solved the right way from a systems perspective.

Energy production is centralized, so the benefits of it becoming cleaner is spread as soon as it arrives, whereas single-use plastic pollution is diffuse, with compounding damage.

I don't remember energy use being the problem with plastic bags?

It was plastic bags being absolutely everywhere in the environment. Streets, parks, trees. Wrapped around anything sticking out of the ground. On your face on a windy day.

Pollution is the problem with plastic. Probably health, too, now that microplastics are being recognized as an issue.

Hot dog stands don't often masquerade as creative expression.

Whatever they are! Using the literal word "brand" in public messaging is leaking the marketing team's lingo to customers.

For me it's when companies talk about themselves as brands.

Fabulous use of meta-irony, bravo.

Maybe! Too early in the LLM rewrite era to tell whether this requires a LeBron or just someone who takes the local pickup game more seriously.

I do like these sorts of things; decoded a less exciting one from a bottle of wine I found in 2019. Significantly more eye-watering without OCR: https://xcancel.com/duggan/status/1130920846304993282

Interesting. Been to South Africa a bunch but never clocked that they were different from the more common antecedent, the tetrapod[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapod_(structure)

> As part of our ongoing engagement with the U.S. government, we previewed our plans and the models’ capabilities ahead of today’s launch. At their request, we are starting with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners whose participation has been shared with the government, before releasing more broadly.

The clowns in the US administration can barely remain coherent from one sentence to the next.

Having them be the gatekeepers of technological progress in 2026 is fucking lame.

This person should head up writing the next Silicon Valley.

Takes all the fun out of it.

> First nobody sane want to give their domain IP to OpenAI/Anthropic. That's why local AI will eventually prevail and flourish because people who actually have some IP will have no problem to buy 10k+ EUR machine to run some pretty good models on it. However if your main job is just doing CRUD stuff, then you are screwed

Replace OpenAI/Anthropic with AWS and this is not too dissimilar to the arguments in 2009 about cloud providers.

It’s not that there's nobody for whom this is true, it’s just that there’s enough of everyone else to build an empire with.

- FileTranscriber, for getting Whisper transcriptions of media files from the context menu on macOS: https://github.com/duggan/filetranscriber

- usagi, for tracking Claude usage in the macOS taskbar. Lots of these around, but I wanted one that wasn't buggy and constantly adding features: https://github.com/duggan/usagi

- RockstarNinja, for sharing Claude plans and sessions. Since it's a bit of a data hog signups are limited, but me and my cofounder use it all the time: https://rockstar.ninja

- TweetEmbed, for browsing an offline Twitter archive and getting self-contained HTML copy/paste-able cards: https://duggan.github.io/tweetembed/

- bewitch, a terminal based metrics collector and data visualization system: https://bewitch.dev/

Each one of these has been a great way to really push on automating build processes, see what Claude can do for automatic documentation (screen captures, etc), and trying to give a distinct visual identity. In my next project, I'm trying to de-LLMify the prose it generates by using my own blog posts and aggressively pruning and integrating into the prompt.

The biggest change has just been unlearning "cost". Stuff I've subconsciously shied away from since intuition built up over a career has given me a sense of how long things take that just isn't true anymore. Still learning!

I used JetBrains IDEs for years. The refactoring tooling was fancy find-replace as far as I recall? Pretty cool in 2015, though.

LLMs are a force multiplier, not magic. They benefit from good tooling.

The bar for "create software" up to this last year or so was "learn software development" or "pay someone else".

Personally, I think millions more people having the ability to create some subset of software is an incredible shift.

> $200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population.

1. You can build small applications with the $20/month sub, much more with the $100/month. Competition and technology improvements will inevitably improve the price to value ratio.

2. Cable sports subscriptions are in a similar price range. Expensive, but not exclusive to “the elites”.

There are some enchanting non-JR regional trains you can get in Kyushu, too.

Got the Shimabara line[1] last summer and it was this tiny cute little single car sailing through farms and along the coast.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimabara_Railway_Line