Lawrence Brass

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

@JLM73TX Happy 4th señor Jeff, have a great day!

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

Hypothesis: Modern AI tools may promote intellectual herd mentality, affecting design and tech publications.

[Air Forces Southern @AFSOUTH]

A Chilean air force KC-135E Stratotanker refueled the @usairforce F-35 Demo Team over Chile on the way to #FIDAE2026, marking a key milestone in fifth-generation integration and interoperability in the region.

🔗 https://t.co/tu9sb80Ov0

@Southcom @FACh_Chile @aircombatcmd

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

@itsfoss linux

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

@BrianRoemmele This is a profoundly beautiful concept

[Chris Bolton @CcibChris]

Sleek, swift, and timeless – the Spitfire remains one of the most beautiful fighters ever built.
credit Heritage aircraft

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

@engineers_feed Propietary chargers, plugs and cables

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

@steeve @aiDotEngineer always cool to see the humble noctuas doing their job

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

@NVIDIAGeForce Battlefield 6 for the chill and then play more tweaking local LLMs.
GeForce RTX PC Week

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

@Jonathan_Blow Apple acquired Siri at the time, they could acquire Anthropic now while it is possible. I see OpenAI as Microsoft and Anthropic as Apple in the Al wars, focusing on product and culture overlap.

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

Scientific proof demonstrates that frequent use of AI tools like chat gpt can reduce our cognitive performance.

https://t.co/TOPihT6eRl

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

So sad about the aviation accident in India. I have always considered the Boeing Dreamliner a work of art and engineering and admire its almost perfect track record.

A successful flight is a combination of many factors, technical, procedural, human.

Praying for the families.

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

@Jonathan_Blow I dream about liquified, bubbling, multicolored polyfill dripping out of the UI walls…

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

🫡 https://t.co/rFhw23KYSB

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

Freezing dependencies, which is shipping the libraries the programs depends on alongside the program, may function as anti-aging, using containers may work as well for those who like them.

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

Constant changes in the environment produce the effect of aging in untouched software. The more exposure to its environment a program has, dependencies, the more prone to aging the program is. This is why technology upgrades are so painful.

[Jonathan Blow @Jonathan_Blow]

I read this article about software development, which I knew about because I saw Prime reacting to it:

https://t.co/oXYuMTRXs0

For the most part I think it is fine: a relatively young programmer is doing the healthy work of introspecting on what he should really be doing.

But there's one part of the article that I think is a deep mistake, and the author doesn't know it's so wrong because he has never experienced the alternative:

"Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists. Not now, not later, but eventually. Libraries deprecate. APIs change. Performance regressions creep in. Your once-perfect tool breaks silently because https://t.co/KC2vCoIkWK is now https://t.co/KC2vCoIkWK.2. 2

I have had scripts silently fail because a website changed its HTML layout.
I have had configuration formats break because of upstream version bumps.
I have had Docker containers die because Alpine Linux rotated a mirror URL.

In each case, the immediate emotional response was not just inconvenience but something that moreso resembles guilt."

Yes, this is true in much of the programming world. But there is another world in which people build things that last much longer. I have done it many times. I shipped a binary for this game Braid in 2009 that you can still download and play on Steam 16 years later. If you are pretty young (like 35), you can run binaries on Windows that were compiled before you were even born, which is amazing given how hard they have been trying to f up Windows lately.

On an emulator like MAME, you can play arcade games programmed in 1979. If today's software "technology" is so much better, why does it fall apart like tissue paper?

The author is not wrong about the cited decay. But this decay is not inherent to the practice of software. It's due to choices made, usually foolishly, by the people designing the systems being interacted with. And, it's due to a lack of knowing better, non-exposure to the sector of programmers who are very concerned with their code lasting a long time, actually.

The way you make code last a long time is you minimize dependencies that are likely to change and, to the extent you must take such dependencies, you minimize the contact surface between your program and those dependencies.

The actual algorithms you program, the actual functioning machinery you build, is a mathematical object defined by the semantics of your programming language, and mathematical objects are eternal, they will last far longer than your human life. The goal then is to avoid introducing decay into the system. You must build an oasis of peace that is insulated from this constant bombardment of horrible decisions, and only hesitantly interface into the outside world.

This means, for example: If you are shipping on iOS, you only reluctantly use any functions iOS gives you, because when you use them, Tim Apple will come along and break your program next year for arbitrary pointless reasons, because Tim Apple does not respect you or anyone you know.

This means a program cannot last forever on iOS, because Tim Apple likes breaking your things and watching you submissively clean them up. But the core of your program, which could be 95% of the code, is fine, and you can deploy it elsewhere.

This means you have to insulate from Linux userspace, because of all the jackass decision making that introduces constant incompatibilities while somehow never making the system better.

Using a library dependency to do font rendering or sparse matrix math? That dependency gets checked into your source tree, a copy of exactly the version you use. Ten years later you can pull down that source and recompile, and it works, because your program is a mathematical object. If you want to upgrade to something newer that has bug fixes and so forth, you are free to do so, but you are also free not to do so, and your program still works. (And how many of these bug fixes do you really need? Your program worked correctly when you shipped it to the greatest extent you could measure, because you are a skillful software engineer who wants to ship things of a high quality).

Everyone who got into programming for the joy of it knows, at some level, that the magic of programs is that they represent complexity that is replicable over time (and thus they exist outside of time). But the trashy programmer culture of the past 20 years stopped aspiring to this, and now has forgotten it is even possible.

And so long as people have forgotten, decisions will continue to be made that make the problem worse.

There are programmers who only write glue code, and who think that's what programming is; to these people what I have written above will not make sense. But the good news for that contingent is, they can always just stop writing glue code and start doing something else! If today's software "technology" is so good, why do you think it needs so much glue? Maybe there is a stylistic problem.

So if you are looking for what to do in the world of software that can represent a lasting contribution, maybe this is food for thought.

@NotAShelf @ThePrimeagen

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

The beach and the sea… memories of the happiest times and an infinite source of new, replenishing energy.

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

First autumn showers

[Lawrence Brass @lawrence_brass]

@engineers_feed Dedal, in Spanish.