Simon says:

[Douglas A. Boneparth @dougboneparth]

To the person who fixed Outlook on a Friday, fuck you.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

We're still so small but I'm loving the team we've got at Superlogical. They're so talented and kind and love their craft. It's a different era of software development and our expectations and practices reflect that. I want to share a bit about how we work.

First, everyone is trusted to push to main. We do machine-aided code review pre-push and human plus more machine-aided code review post-push. Limited to no PRs.

Culturally, we've all agreed that if we ever hire someone who we DON'T trust to push directly to main, then they probably aren't the right fit for the team (so far, not an issue).

Some common sense here: if someone is stepping outside their lane or comfort zone, we'll open PRs. For example, I'm pretty trash at macOS/iOS UI, so I'll open PRs for UI-affecting functionality and ask for eyeballs/help. But for business logic and internals, I push to main.

Second, everyone can cut a release. Our release process is fully automated and when you start a release (for any platform) it triggers a Slack notification and a 15 minute countdown.

The 15 minute warning is a final gate that allows people to review plus collaborate on a changelog. During that 15 minutes, anyone in the company can pause the release rollout. After 15 minutes, the train leaves the station. You can't override the 15 minutes (except to pause). It gives everyone a chance to step in.

Third, we avoid synchronization through fast remediation rather than through planning. The server and clients on various platforms ship features as fast as they can. We use post-hoc human review and AI-assistance to identify feature mismatches across products ("Windows has support for X and Mac doesn't." or "Mac and Windows differ in their behaviors for Y in this way.").

This avoids expensive "sync" meetings and coordination. We trust that producers of features are mindful of what they're producing and we trust that adjacent product lines will self-synchronize quickly. In practice, we see feature parity across platforms within 24 to 48 hours.

All of this works on mutual trust. It ONLY works with mutual trust.

Everyone at all times has to trust that they've got each others back:

1. Push to main only works if you fix your mess, or if you don't, that someone else will quickly but that you'd do the same (and generally in equal amounts).

2. Anyone can deploy only works if you trust everyone to cut at the right time, with the right changelog, and that people will respect the 15 minute timer.

3. Sync through fast remediation only works if you trust other teams will pick up and integrate your work quickly, which only works if you would too. It also only works if you are fairly producing mismatches (e.g. not constantly).

We've got a great team. I know we're still small and that these practices will change in many ways as we scale. But this is already a markedly different practice than what I would've done 15 years ago.

In general, we are building from day 1 on a foundation of mutual respect, excellence, and trust. And it's been awesome.

[Simon says: @LeventeAttilaS]

@levelsio Lemme know when in Romania

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

I hope Microsoft lays off Teams.

[Simon says: @LeventeAttilaS]

@thdxr Can i haz android app?

[Vlad Mihalcea @vlad_mihalcea]

This is a great quote from Morgan Housel's first book, The Psychology of Money.

If you haven't read his books, I totally recommend them. I learned a lot from Morgan, and he has a rare talent for distilling difficult topics into simple words.

[jessicat @jessi_cata]

Fantasy computer security problems: "Maybe by sending packets and detecting the timing of the vibrations of the computer case, it is possible for an attacker to gain information about the private key."

Real computer security problems: "The private key was 4. Not 4 digits. 4."

[hannah @erhannah]

one day you wrote console.log("here") for the last time and didn't even know it

[Antonio García Martínez @antoniogm]

The europoor meme can be funny, but it's also midwit and wrong.

As someone with both EU and US passports who's lived in both sets of elite poles (SF/NYC and BCN/BER/PAR), let me just give you the TLDR:

-The percent of GDP spent on welfare in the US is the about the same as the EU (smidge under).

-The effective tax rate in the coastal US is about the same as the EU (smidge under).

-Both are (former) middle-class societies where much of society feels the social contract is broken. In the US, elites abandoned the middle-class decades ago, and the well-to-do in states like CA/NY have reconciled themselves to paying almost half their paychecks and getting nothing in return, planning to insulate themselves from the suck by paying for private everything: neighborhoods, schools, medical care. If their earnings keep on rising, they're OK with it.

In France, that bourgeoisie hasn't been decimated yet, and they still expect (delusionally perhaps) basic social infra like schools to function (which is what these protests were initially about). The infra in Europe is a lot better than in the US, despite the GDP delta (New Yorkers can only dream of a subway like Madrid's). But that's clearly eroding in time, without the wage growth (or private social infra) to allow for a paid workaround.

-The free healthcare blah blah meme is fake: the public health systems in Europe have collapsed to the point it's mostly a public/private hybrid, for anyone with a solid paycheck, and fuck you if you're poor, go to the public system (which is the ER in the US). Guess what? In Europe you've got deductibles, in/out of network and all the same shit as in the US (though yes, the cost is still lower, though more or less correlated with wages).

-Boomers on both sides of the Atlantic are living in a dated lala land, but they vote to keep the system in place. In Europe it's legislation and printing money to prop up pensions; in the US, it's legislation and printing money to prop up housing prices and the stock market, which is the American 'free market' version of pensions. Rampant inflation and cost-of-living problems in both, with youth locked out of housing and living in precarity.

-Both are struggling with having been historically middle-class societies
US better positioned only because it has more economic growth (hello 80 hour weeks), and (obviously) leadership in critical fields like AI. But the foundational problems of an out-of-touch elite, incoherent immigration policy, and general social malaise that sees no meaning or purpose at the End of History is absolutely the same in both polities.

Americans who mock what's happening in Europe simultaneously believe some X mirage about what Europe is (and have never lived there), as well as don't understand what's going on in their own country. The French Revolution happened a few years after the American one, and once again, the two countries are echoes of each other, as similar countries tend to be. France is probably the most 'American' country in Europe, in all the republican senses of the word (and no the Yookay isn't in Europe).

[Simon says: @LeventeAttilaS]

@thdxr OpenCode Vent

[Simon says: @LeventeAttilaS]

@DanielLockyer Post this every month

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

ai: it's so dangerous to keep moving in this direction but if we don't others will before we do so we have to go full speed ahead to get there first.

[Simon says: @LeventeAttilaS]

@jaydrogers Now do IPv4

[Karthik Hariharan @hkarthik]

I caught up with a friend who was an EM in Big Tech and decided take a sabbatical over the last year. He completely unplugged from tech during this period.

I was explaining everything that happened from the December launch of Opus, getting AI pilled, EMs writing code again, OpenClaw, Tokenmaxxing, and now the Token Budgeting and questions around the ROI of AI.

He calmly looked at me and said "maybe I should take another year off and let the dust settle a bit."

[Katie @ALadyNamedKatie]

When I die, please cover my casket in my sticker collection that I bought but could never commit to applying on things

[Simon says: @LeventeAttilaS]

@0xSero Gimme'

[sam @samdape]

you basically need to be unemployed rn to keep up

[Simon says: @LeventeAttilaS]

@afterredstone @handre @grok what does homeostatic system mean in this context?

[Dmitrii Kovanikov @ChShersh]

How people figured out the tar command to list files by year.

1996:
tar --help

2006:
tar --help | grep “list”

2016:
Google tar how to list files

2026:
tar --help | claude “how to list files?”