326 entries from "Germany"

UI/UX Benefits and Trade-Offs of Local-First Apps

[Beware generic solutions: they don't know your needs.]

[Instead of directing users to "please resolve this conflict", the UI could say "Bob made a different suggestion"]

15 years of Local First: a best-of report from the field

[When humanity's achievements are tabulated a hundred years from now, the Ebola vaccine will be listed, and I'm proud that our work with CouchDB and offline-first software helped make it happen.]

[Documentation is a 10x multiplier for your development speed.]

noticing a reflexive relationship between publishing a website with tools, and then wanting tools to consume what was published as objects

llms have made me smarter because my distrust in them increasingly causes me to figure things out for myself

How do I count all commits in a git repository?

# count for in branch alfa
git rev-list --count alfa

# count across all branches
git rev-list --count --all

How to cherry-pick commits from another repository in Git

# add the other repository's commits
git remote add alfa ../bravo
git fetch alfa

# show commits from branch charlie
# (note/copy the ones you want to merge or the start and end)
git log alfa/charlie --oneline

# apply commit 789c05c
git cherry-pick 789c05c

# apply commits 789c05c to fd1b130
git cherry-pick 789c05c..fd1b130

clown core: Diarrhea Inferno Welfare Burrito

gradual voice-leading and suspensions with fast-paced drumming

clown core: existence

wild creepy sensory overload

always bet on text

Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing, structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything. There is no equivalent in any other communication technology for the social, communicative, cognitive and reflective complexity of a library full of books or an internet full of postings. Nothing else comes close.

Provisional Guidance for Users of LLM-Based Code Generators

I’m sure there will be links like “Court Rules AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted” aplenty. They will be wrong. The court didn’t rule that AI art can’t be copyrighted. It ruled that copyright requires human authorship, surprising approximately zero copyright lawyers…or people who have read the Wikipedia page.

If you’re looking for a “simple legal rule” so that you can game it, nitpick its terms, or run right up to its line, you’re looking for trouble. Don’t blame me when you find it. But if you’re a realistic player just looking for a sense of odds so you can place wiser bets, the amount of output you accept from an LLM into your codebase at once, and the extent to which it makes what look like implementation choices, rather than simply invoking APIs or established boilerplate, probably represents your best intuitive heuristic. Your working sense of whether it looks like code completion, template-based code generation, or what coders used to have to unavoidably think through and type for themselves, before Copilot and the like came around, can serve as first-pass proxy for legal peril.

If it’s what everybody else checks in to use the same APIs, that’s unlikely creative expression that anyone can claim to own and see infringed. The more specific, creative routines that go within that boilerplate? Yes, potentially. The rigging, patterns, and boilerplate everybody else is filling in, too? Not so much.

the newer a novel, commercially relevant phenomenon, the less specifically-worded, algorithm-like rules determine outcomes at law, and the more important the purposes behind more generally worded rules become. Lawyers call abstractly stated, syllogism-like rules “black letter law” and the more generalized purposes “policies”. When how to apply black letter law isn’t clear, we cite and fight about policies in arguing how to read in context.

When you prompt and take big chunks of code from LLMs that rate high on the intuitive completion-generation-authorship scale, document your code input state, prompts, and further edits. Create a written record of your innocent use of LLMs.

If you were going to code a key part of a project ten years ago, and worried you’d be accusing of plagiarism, the natural advice would’ve been to document your process. Don’t just phone it in with an “Implemented $foo” commit message. Write a nice long one, and maybe blog work in progress or keep a “lab notebook”, too.

How Indian students end up exploited in Germany

[Indian students come to Germany sold on a vision of prosperity by expensive private university marketing, then find themselves unable to leave and forced into delivery work.]

[Delivery companies like Uber Eats and Wolt rely on 3rd party agencies to recruit and hire drivers as 4th party contractors. These agencies interact anonymously through WhatsApp numbers, make arrangements to pay in cash at sketchy locations (often less than anticipates), and regularly declare bankruptcy before starting the scheme again avoid paying taxes and social security.]

Running out of narratives

Crypto is here to stay and it’s big! But it’s mostly a financial asset class built on narratives, self-referential applications, and a side order of niche use cases. The killer use case is stablecoins. That’s pretty boring.

Bitcoin is not a viable high-volume payment system. It’s not a safe haven. It’s not a hedge against a weak USD or inflation. It was a risky asset. But then it didn’t rally when every other risky asset in the world exploded higher. It was digital gold. Then gold and silver doubled and tripled and bitcoin stood still, looking on with jealous awe.

So my view is that crypto is maturing into a small but meaningful asset class with some important but kinda niche use cases. That’s about it. Like video games, or 3D printing, or VR. Exciting, useful, and important industries. But not the internet. Not railroads. Not AI. There is no coming wave of innovation that will take it to the promised land. Crypto has arrived. It’s maturing. It’s not early. What you see is what you get.

OAuth, or, The Elaborate Ceremony of Not Giving People Your Password

[Implicit Grant throws your key to you across a lobby full of interested parties. Proof of Code Key Exchange ensures that the one who requested the key gets it. Neither will solve impersonation attacks via social engineering.]

exploring how my cheap ULID's date portion changes by shifting the:

const date36 = e => new Date(e).valueOf().toString(36);

// year
[
	date36('2026-01-01'), // mjuohs00
	date36('2027-01-01'), // myc87pc0
];

// month
[
	date36('2026-01-01'), // mjuohs00
	date36('2026-02-01'), // ml2z56o0
];

// day
[
	date36('2026-01-01'), // mjuohs00
	date36('2026-01-02'), // mjw3xmo0
];

// hour
[
	date36('2026-01-01 12:00'), // mjvc2jk0
	date36('2026-01-01 13:00'), // mjve7pc0
];

// minute
[
	date36('2026-01-01 12:00'), // mjvc2jk0
	date36('2026-01-01 12:01'), // mjvc3tuo
];

// second
[
	date36('2026-01-01 12:00:00'), // mjvc2jk0
	date36('2026-01-01 12:00:01'), // mjvc2kbs
];

// microsecond
[
	date36('2026-01-01 12:00:00.000'), // mjvc2jk0
	date36('2026-01-01 12:00:00.001'), // mjvc2jk1
];

Tactical tornado is the new default

When it comes to implementing a quick feature, nobody gets it done faster than the tactical tornado. In some organizations, management treats tactical tornadoes as heroes. However, tactical tornadoes leave behind a wake of destruction. They are rarely considered heroes by the engineers who must work with their code in the future. Typically, other engineers must clean up the messes left behind by the tactical tornado, which makes it appear that those engineers (who are the real heroes) are making slower progress than the tactical tornado.

How StrongDM’s AI team build serious software without even looking at the code

[Describe tests as 'scenarios' that represent user stories, and 'satisfaction' to quantify that it's happening, then store it where agents can't see them.]

We built twins of Okta, Jira, Slack, Google Docs, Google Drive, and Google Sheets, replicating their APIs, edge cases, and observable behaviors.

Eight more months of agents

I know local models will win. At some point frontier models will face diminishing returns, local models will catch up, and we will be done being beholden to frontier models. That will be a wonderful day, but until then, you will not know what models will be capable of unless you use the best. Pay through the nose for Opus or GPT-7.9-xhigh-with-cheese. Don't worry, it's only for a few years.

The Anthropic Hive Mind

But I managed. People usually figure out I’m harmless within about 14 seconds of meeting me. I have developed, in my wizened old age, a curious ability to make people feel good, no matter who they are, with just a little conversation, making us both feel good in the process. (You probably have this ability too, and just don’t know how to use it yet.)

During Golden Ages, there is more work than people. And when they crash, it is because there are more people than work.

“I AM GOING DOWN TO GET A DONUT NOW,” they will say, and someone will yell from the nap couch, “GET ME A DONUT.” “I AM ALSO DELETING THE DATABASE.” “OK.”

A lot of engineers like to work in relative privacy, or even secrecy. They don’t want people to see all the false starts, struggles, etc. They just want people to see the finished product. It’s why we have git squash and send dignified PRs instead of streaming every compile error to our entire team.

The Settlers of Catan inventor Teuber famously built new games for his own family to playtest for years, before they finally found the formula for Catan through many iterations.

The center of the campfire is a living prototype. There is no waterfall. There is no spec. There is a prototype that simply evolves, via group sculpting, into the final product: something that finally feels right. You know it when you finally find it.

Anthropic’s Hive Mind is described by employees as “Yes, and…” style improvisational theater. Every idea is welcomed, examined, savored, and judged by the Hive Mind. It’s all based on vibes. There is no central decision-making authority. They are just trying everything, and when magic happens, they all just kind of realize it at once.

all companies are asking variations of just the same two questions. They bluster and bluff and try to act informed, but they are all terrified. When you cluster their questions, they break down into, “Will everything be OK?” and “Will we be here in five years?”

We mourn our craft

I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent, reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production.