#WATCH: "Having a communal space that everyone can go to and have access to knowledge. We do tend to live in a really separate world now, so those public areas are really good." rnz.co.nz/national/progr…

Another meeting that could have been an email.

New blog post for those of you struggling with a slow WordPress instance: "Solved: AMR iCal events WordPress plugin out of memory; my website is slow" blog.pearce.org.nz/2023/04/solved…

I was walking the dog tonight with my daughter, saw the space station fly overhead. Was pretty cool.

My daughter’s phone… didn’t come with an MP3 player installed. I feel old…

one way i measure my impact as a principal engineer is the number of kafka topics i've eliminated from architecture diagrams. just a little "do we actually need that" or "what problem is this solving" dropped at the right moment does wonders.

I once priced out a design using AWS Step Functions. Quickly became clear it was prohibitively expensive. Went with Lambda + S3 + SQS + DynamoDB. Cheap, and great dev ex. I think Step Functions are the problem with the serverless Prime Video case study, not serverless itself.

We had to invent AI in order to actually understand ffmpeg options

I drew this 12 months ago, as LLM code assistants were just becoming available. Has it held up?

I used to find it mind-boggling that some people are vehemently opposed to meritocracy. Why would you be against being rewarded for how skilled and hard-working you are? And then I read the previous sentence back and it all suddenly made sense.

Let me get this straight… the Taoiseach of Ireland is saying a small developed tech-centred island off the coast of a larger country it used to be part of - should be subsumed into that country without regard to the wishes of its people?

While GenAI is fun, I think its economic value is grossly over estimated, because it’s unreliable, risky and expensive to make and serve. It’s fine for creative tasks, but not (yet) autonomous agents

Who knew so many experts on piloting large cargo ships were on Twitter?!?

Just walked past my son playing a FPS, recognized the level he was playing on was a clone of de_dust, a Counter Strike level. It's been 20 years, and I still recognized it. Oh my misspent youth.

I really enjoyed this sober look at the ways Molly White found generative AI could be useful—for proofreading, as a more dynamic dictionary, and for coding assistance—if it didn't prop up and validate a reckless, extractive, and profit-hungry industry: citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useles…

I've been to Australia. That was their best dancer.

It’s amazing how a Python project left to sit just seems to rot!