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As good as it is, we saw a lot of problems with these translations as the code was rewritten without understanding. I remember a security issue where a runtime went from single threaded to multithreaded for example.

Testing is still the long pull, even if you have an engineer with good expertise.

So what happened with all of those with hardware wallets that have been pwned?

There apparently is no such thing as “your crypto” with how many security problems there are.

They were wrong about one thing: tooling matters.

The XHTML/XML/XSLT tooling was bad, and XSLT was hard to reason about. That meant that amateurs had no way to learn it, and those amateurs went to school and became the workforce.

The web became a winner because it was easy to get something working. And then Google made it a mission to make great developer tools in everyone's hands for free.

I think in 2026 we could build the tooling around a better experience, but it would require thinking about the developer experience first.

Simon or Mark?

He's explicitly on record on talking about view count and view retention being his explicit north star. You go back and watch his early work and he has been truly obsessed since the beginning. He wants to be popular. He loves the spectacle. Now, he may have become more jaded as time goes on; he certainly could pull back at this time. But he would lose that attention, and I think that's what truly matters to him.

Sorry, but I'd have rather read this than the LLM output. This writeup was worth my time.

It's not an anti-ai screed. It's that the official post was... unnecessarily wordy.

From what I see, this is more of a sabbatical time to just explore and enjoy programming without needing a productive end. I've been considering it myself.

Thinking is great. I am arguing that “first principles “ is one tool - and it may not deserve the primacy that its advocates propose.

You underestimate the task by multiple orders of magnitude. It would be a significant effort even to build it on libreoffice.

I think I need to write a full blog post on this.

While I think there are better introductions to "first principles thinking" than this post, the idea of "...When I step back and ask what we’re actually trying to do, why it matters, and how the pieces connect, I usually find more ways forward than I expected."

That's an important skill to have.

However, I think sometimes we overvalue thinking from first principles when it isn't warranted. I've seen times in my career where first principles thinking led to a solution that ignored key non-technical constraints. (For example, it would require a full re-architecture of the system and require deferring all feature work for a year. Another example: the proposed solution breaks Conways law in a way that would require a reorg that would break other organizational constraints.)

Sometimes, we need to recognize our constraints. Spend the time to question them when appropriate, but realize that there are other tools that are more appropriate in some cases -- such as anthropological thinking.

Zipcar started in 2000/2001 on Oracle and relied heavily on stored procedures, particularly in billing (as SaaS didn't exist back when it started and was a bad fit for a long time). It took an entire rewrite of the system to get off of Oracle.

I don't know about it being pretty nice - I just think of Nasubi and what happened to him on Susunu! Denpa Shōnen.

Or, alternatively, I was a lot more willing to put in the time to self host before I had more money and less time. If it's truly important it's not in public. If it's public, I don't have time to keep up with security patches if I'm not being paid.

For those on plus, are you seeing astra limited to medium? Considering the rate limits that probably makes sense, but I'm wondering what different groups have access to.

Consider that if this was ran from your machine - it would have all of your memories and might be relying on the past 2 months. I'd be curious what would happen if it was run independently.

(I am assuming they didn't train on your prompts, which is always a worry)