The-Medium-Is-the-Message

One of my more popular open source projects is Shell Bling Ubuntu, which, contrary to its name, actually supports many different operating systems these days: modern macOS, Alpine, Fedora 40 and up, Rocky Linux 8 and up, WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), and so on. But while I feel the project is in a much more advanced state than it was four or five months ago after all that hardening and robustness work, I haven’t seen much extra marginal uptake or additional stars on GitHub as a result. I think the reason is actually quite simple: I replaced the README with a much drier one, driven by LLMs (Large Language Models), and people (correctly!) read that as a negative signal of care compared to the previous one.1 ...

Scan the Quick Response (QR) code above with your favorite Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) app. You should get a six digit number, rotating every 30 seconds, that looks something like 1 2 237601 # as of Wed May 20 09:44:53 AM EEST 2026 If you then take the secret key that QR code maps to, say ...

I use Claude Code. I like Claude Code. According to Steve Yegge’s Eight-Circuit Model of Claudesciousness, I’m a pretty solid Stage 6, edging into 7 on heavy days. I think most engineers, most of the time, can get most of their work done faster with one of these tools than not, although the force multiplier of that speedup is probably not as extreme as it is in my case. Why is that? ...

1 2 3 4 5 +--------------------------+------------------------------------------+ | L2, fixable | L1, intention | +--------------------------+------------------------------------------+ | L2, fixed | L1, (fixable -> fixed) explanation | +--------------------------+------------------------------------------+ The above 2x2 layout for Anki cards, which I call a “comprehensible delta”, is one of the best things I’ve happened upon in a while for learning another language. Let’s say you are learning Finnish, and you want to say ...

Consider the problem of “how do I run more than 1 terminal at a time”. At this moment, I have at least 5 different ways I can effectively solve this issue: I can, from a different physical computer, SSH in to a new session. I can, from the same physical computer, switch to a different tty session with … C-S-F2 through 6 or something. (Rare, but sometimes it comes in really handy.) I can, in the same user session, open 2 separate windows of a terminal emulator. I can, in the same terminal emulator, open a new tab. I can, in the same emulated terminal, run tmux and open a new pane. There are yet more exotic options like Serial over LAN that I’m only theoretically aware of. ...

This week I achieved a modest personal dream of mine I’ve had since I was a high schooler: I purchased a proper standing desk, with a low-profile treadmill underneath. The total cost for a setup here in Finland came out to only about $350, something I can easily afford with a week’s take-home pay. The primary hurdle for me was psychological: How could I justify spending so much money on a more ergonomic setup when I’m not even sure this whole “software engineering” thing will work out for me? Nevermind that I taught myself to program at 14 from a Civ 4 hacking tutorial, nevermind that I’ve been living my life as a budget cyborg for the last 15 years, nevermind that every job I’ve ever had post-college has been at least 60% WFH – how could I be sure this investment in my home office will pay itself back? ...

There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions. The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the app. You’re 80% sure you know how to handle the infra you’ll need to get it online. And you’re 70% sure you know how to get your first customer. What is your chance of successfully going from zero to first customer? 0.9 * 0.8 * 0.7 = a little over 0.5. That’s … a lot less encouraging than any of the previous numbers, if you buy my multi-step modelling. ...

Imagine you had the Most Complicated Program On Earth (MCPOE), with 1,000,000 dependencies. Every dependency must be build correctly exactly right or the MCPOE will fail to compile. MCPOE’s 10x dev team chose their packages so that each dependency has only a 1/1,000,000 chance of having something go wrong when you’re installing them - maybe a whitespace character snuck into the wrong build script, maybe solar wind hit the build computer. What are the chances that you will install MCPOE correctly? ...

The law of diminishing returns needs no introduction. Your second slice of pizza is less satisfying than your first. Your second million dollars is less valuable to you, personally. If you think econ 101 has any life wisdom to impart, it deserves being elevated to the status of “life heuristic” - especially because, unlike some other concepts in econ 101 (comparative advantage anyone?) it feels true in a boring way, not in an actively counterintuitive way. ...

Here’s a secret. If you have Vagrant and VirtualBox installed, and your colleague does too, then you can both bring up an near-totally identical blank slate Debian 12 Linux VM by running 1 2 3 4 5 6 mkdir tutorial/ cd tutorial/ vagrant init debian/bookworm64 vagrant up vagrant ssh . This works regardless of whether you or they are on Linux, Mac1, BSD, or even Windows. (Through the magic of aliasing, mkdir and cd even work in PowerShell.) ...