"There Is No Antimemetics Division" was quite the hot topic of discussion and approval among my peers about a year ago. I didn't like it at all. My problem with it was that the author's writing style made promises that the book not only didn't keep, but that he had no interest in keeping. The book was written like science fiction, accumulating details and presenting the appearance of a logical attack on a gigantic unknown. But it wasn't SF. Those promises never paid off. It didn't affirm the rational knowability of the universe it was describing - the author was too busy creating and heightening an atmosphere of epistemic horror. When I objected to this, some of the people I complained to said that they thought my annoyance was misdirected - it wasn't intended to be SF at all. My answer to that is that if the author did not want to win at the genre-SF game, he shouldn't have written like he was trying to do that. I felt baited and switched. Science fiction genre conventions have evolved for purposes that go quite a bit beyond just being entertaining. I think they do good and valuable things, and I strongly dislike it when people skinsuit them.

I trippe over a copy of Rudyard Kipling's Oath of the Engineer a few minutes ago. I'm not sure I've ever seen the full version before! "On this day, in the presence of my fellows in the Calling, I bind myself upon my Sacred Honor, that to the best of my knowledge and ability, I will not suffer or pass, or be party to the passing of, faulty Workmanship or Material in that which concerns my works before God and Mankind as an Engineer. My Time I will not refuse; my Thought I will not begrudge; my Care I will not deny, toward the excellence of the works to which I am called to set my hand. My fair Wages I will openly receive; my Reputation I will honorably guard; but I will demand no more than what is due; nor will I demean the works of my fellow Engineers, but correct their errors with a humble spirit, and gladly accept correction of my own. For the failures and oversights which I will surely commit, I ask the pardon of my fellows; and I pray that in my hour of need, the words of this Oath will sustain me, and give me the strength to do what I must. SO SAY WE ALL." Words to live by. I have tried to.

"That means the developer’s estimate, while far from perfect, is also far from meaningless: it’s the scale parameter of some distribution." When I read that earlier, my brain just fucking exploded. I'm still processing the implications. Link to the essay in first reply. I want a serious effort to either confirm or disconfirm this guy's results. If they hold up, it's the most important insight into large-scale software engineering since...mine.

Today's good coding practice: whenever you display or report dates, use RFC3339 format in Zulu time, with the embedded T. Like this: 2025-04-17T13:31:52Z This format has several useful properties: 1. It's constant-width, at least until 100000 CE. It won't overrun or cause surprise expansion of your report columns. 2. Sort order is the same as lexicographic order - no need for complicated code to time-order records. 3. It's a single token, easy to parse out of a report (this is why you want to keep the T in the middle rather than the alternate form with a space there). 4. Usually when you're logging for human perusal, conveying sequence and relative timing of events is more important than a reference to local solar time. Using Zulu time prevents people from being confused about sequence and timing by time-zone skew. That last point is especially important for things like network-accessible databases, or distributed version-control systems, where records are routinely modified and timestamped by users in different time zones.

How do you measure the value of a web of trust? Quoted post expresses a populist complaint that has come to a head in the recent debate about the Trump tariffs, but has actually been building steam since the early 1980s and the first wave of offshoring. I'm a libertarian, I understand economics, I know all of the arguments for free trade and free migration, and for decades it was easy for me to dismiss this sort of complaint as latter-day Luddism. Every previous move towards global free markets has caused temporary discomfort that was later paid off by a huge rise in prosperity and living standards. But these days I find myself in a very awkward position. Because I still think free trade is best, but I also think the populist complaint against free trade has some merit. I'm not really here to write about tariff policy today. I'm here to write about why Trump has popular support for his tariff policy despite the fact that every economist in the universe says it's insane. Here, I think is the problem: economists have focused on what they can see and what they can measure and things that are monetized. And if you measure the consequences of tariffs that way they look like a complete disaster. What the populists are saying is: free trade had a major role in tearing apart our web of social trust. And you, you economists, you elites, you laptop-class intelligentsia...you don't value that web of trust nearly enough. I don't think this critique is wrong. It's not well articulated, because the people making it or not in general intellectuals. And supporting tariffs may be a terrible idea even though the critique is right. But the populists aren't wrong. Bad policy decisions over the last 60 years have done immense damage to social trust. Even some good policy decisions have done that kind of damage, and by good I mean "the gains in other areas probably outweigh the negative effects on social trust". Free trade has done some damage, even if on net it was a good policy - that is even if the gains in prosperity from free trade were so large that it was worth taking some loss of trust to get them. What the populists are yelling is that our elites threw away something they didn't understand the value of. Decline of social trust hurts the poor and the working class more than it hurts the rich, because the rich can mostly buy their way out of the consequences of the decline. How does free trade erode social trust? That's easy. It happens every time somebody's job is offshored, and the investor/manager class says "we value another few cents of gains in our stock price over the health of the communities we live in". Maybe the tradeoff in those circumstances ends up being net positive for people who can buy cheaper goods - but the message is still there. The disruption of trust still happens. I could list lots of causes of the erosion of social trust. Free trade is only one of them. A problem for populists is that most of the others are uncomfortably tied to racial issues - DEI, Section 8 housing, the defunding of urban police. So if you want to talk about the disruption of trust, free trade is about the only thing you can attack that doesn't invite a lot of backlash from racial grievance-peddlers. This is why tariff policy is such a flashpoint - it's safe(r). Populists are actually feeling their way towards the general objection that our elites have undervalued social trust, and one of the most important things we can do as a society is to try and repair that fabric. And yes, I think that's a conversation that needs to happen.

Oh my dear sweet fucking Goddess, I've just realized what vibecoding is doing to me. I'm turning into a technical product manager. Aiiiiiieeeee.....!

Dave Täht died yesterday. He was one of the unsung heroes of the Internet, and a close friend of mine who I will miss very badly. Dave, known on X as @mtaht because his birth name was Michael, was a true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of everybody using X. His work on mitigating bufferbloat improved practical TCP/IP performance tremendously, especially around video streaming and other applications requiring low latency. Without him, Netflix and similar services might still be plagued by glitches and stutters. I think we first met in 2001 near the peak of my Mr. Famous Guy years. Once, sometimes twice a year he'd come visit, carrying his guitar, and crash out in my basement for a week or so hacking on stuff. A lot of the central work on bufferbloat got done while I was figuratively looking over his shoulder. Curiously, we didn't collaborate directly very often. Different technical interests. All of the household cats loved him, though. My wife Cathy liked him. He was a funny, humble, down-to-earth man who liked to surf and play music, made friends wherever he went, charmed the pants off of a succession of improbably attractive women, and bore deteriorating health stoically. While I know him he went blind in one eye and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He barely let it slow him down. Despite constantly griping in later years about being burned out on programming, he kept not only doing excellent work but bringing good work out of others, assembling teams of amazing collaborators to tackle problems lesser men would have considered intractable. There was a certain reserve about him though. I never knew why he changed his name. Nor did we ever talk about politics or the women in this life, nor quite why for so many years he lived as a nomad couch-surfer who was as likely to be found on a beach on Nicaragua or in quasi-residence at a university in Europe as anywhere in the US. My wife called him the International Man of Mystery, which title became a running joke among the three of us. None of that seemed important, because Dave lived for the work he did, except when he was trying to beat me at board games. He swore for years that he was eventually going to win against me and my wife and our Friday night gaming friends at Power Grid, and I truly wish he could get another couple shots at it. Dave should have been famous, and he should have been rich. If he had a cent for every dollar of value he generated in the world he probably could have bought the entire country of Nicaragua and had enough left over to finance a space program. He joked about wanting to do the latter, and I don't think he was actually joking. But he wasn't Elon Musk or me. Didn't want to run a business, and didn't want the crap that came from being Mr. Famous Guy, though he certainly understood why I took that on. Maybe he was wiser than me about avoiding the limelight, jury is still out. He got a lot of stuff done anyway, and that was the important part. I'll miss Dave a lot. I'll miss him showing up on my doorstep to charm my cats and tinker with my routers. I'll miss swapping war stories with him, eating Chinese food with him, and the grin on his face when he won a game. In the invisible college of people who made the Internet run, he was among the best of us. He said I inspired him, but I often thought he was a better and more selfless man than me. Ave atque vale, Dave.

Do you ever have a moment when you realize the world is running on two mutually contradictory beliefs and not noticing? Mine, today, is from these observations: 1. Advertising is a valuable service for which producers could and should pay approximately $1T annually. 2. Consumers will pay real money to exclude advertising from their media streams, evidencing that they're actively repelled by it. Cannot. Unsee. Contradiction.