Want to know the only thing worse than worrying a lot? Being really good at worrying.
Most people's worries never come to pass. But when I worry about something, the odds are extraordinarily good it will go exactly as terribly as I feared.
My brother gives me shit because I use my real name on Reddit, but in my mind it's more like I'm playing Reddit with permadeath enabled.
If this is losing, I don't want to win
In Japan, it's common for bars to have a dice game with rules like:
- Snake eyes: free drink
- Even number: half off drink
- Odd number: double size, double price drink
I "lost" with both of these 1L whisky-fruit highballs. I sure don't feel like a loser, though.
A non-zero number of people assume rotary clubs are full of nerds who are really into assessing the authenticity of signing important documents for some reason.
One of the best parts of all these ridiculous side quests I accept is that I never run out of new situations to figure out. This week: how to iron my shirt and press my pants from a Japanese business hotel the day before a meeting.
Thankfully, we have YouTube
Of course, models vary between companies and I actually had to follow this less entertaining video to get figure out what to do with a standing "Twinbird" press (apparently the #1 seller in pants presses):
When I was young and learning how to do my own laundry, I remember always thinking “permanent press” sounded like too much of a commitment.
I'm going away on a trip for an unexpectedly long time, and you'll never guess why! (You might guess why.) Anyway, here's something to remember me by.
If you've ever been worried about whether something you cared about would work out okay, email podcast@searls.co and tell me about it so that I can share your story with a bunch of strangers on the Internet.
Video of this edition of the show is up on YouTube.
References available upon request:
Opinion | Ads linking to paywalled articles are stupid
I saw this promoted post in my Reddit feed and thought, "huh, maybe WaPo is trying to entice new readers with ads pairing gift links to articles and targeted demographics that might engage with them."
LOL, no. You click anywhere on this and you instantly get hit with a paywall.
Who is this for? Current subscribers that don't read the Washington Post? People who planned to subscribe and forgot?
Absolute idiocy.
This one's tough, Sam
One of my favorite things about OpenAI is when they A/B test ChatGPT responses and the computer arrives at two identical responses, but still insist you tell them which answer was better.
I'm feeling the response on the right, personally.
TIL you can create a new rails app inside the current directory without creating a new one! For example, to build out a rails app around them:
$ rails new .
The app module will be named after the current working directory.
I really hope that for the next Vision hardware release, Apple makes the light shield (functionally) optional. The original is so much more productive and pleasant when you remove the light shield and retain your (human) peripheral vision and airflow over your face’s skin.
Been “vibe coding” (ugh) all afternoon, and 3 hours into my agent building an agentic REPL (I know), it decided to just remove all human-facing output because it figured out how to read underlying logs I don’t have (apparent) access to.
Was like that scene in Her when the AI just decides to peace out and go do its own thing. Welp.
The pope’s death today is absolutely tremendous news for VOD rentals for Conclave. Great movie!
Radioactive Condos
Searching for real estate in Japan has been a humorous lesson in the differences of how we market things here. You’d think of all countries, Japanese developers might be sensitive to promotional images that make their brand-new condo building appear to be radioactive. ☢️
Your favorite podcast about nothing continues to find things to talk about.
Whatever you do, DO NOT e-mail me at podcast@searls.co or else I will read it on air and tell everyone how smart you sound and how good you look.
Video of this edition of the show is up on YouTube.
Links to follow:
As an angry old man, I'm always eager to shit on whatever "the kids" are excited about, and this month that's been the phrase "vibe coding". But today I was feeling a vibe myself, and decided to delay recording of v35 of Breaking Change and just do my first-ever vibe coding session on camera instead.
The only rule: AI only. I didn't touch a line of code in the editor window. That's right, after over 2 years of using GitHub Copilot, I got to be copilot for once. 😎
Stuff you'll learn in this 90-minute video:
- How Japanese real estate listings work
- That a "mansion" in Japan is anything BUT a house
- How well GitHub Copilot's new agent mode performs with GPT 4.1
- How amazed I am by a computer doing what I tell it to do
- What it looks like for Copilot to get sleepy and decide to call it a day
- That the code GitHub wrote is now available on GitHub
- Update: that they already fixed the issue that caused Copilot to take a shit at the end
Oh, and if you're an AI skeptic, you might appreciate that this screencast has ZERO cuts. It's one continuous unedited vibe party, and you're invited.
Don't have 90 minutes? Check the chapters—most of the real action happens in 30 minutes in the middle. But I hope you'll pour a beverage and sit down and vibe with me for this one. ☮️
Welp, this is a first. Prepping for v35 of Breaking Change and there's not a single email in the mailbag. Write to podcast@searls.co in the next hour and I'll talk about whatever you want!
Matthias Endler wrote up a list of traits he sees in great developers, which I read because Jerod linked to it in Changelog's newsletter. In his blurb, Jerod called back to the conversation he had with yours truly on a recent podcast episode, which is also the first thing I thought of when I read the post.
As lists go, these traits are all great things to look for in developers, even if a lot of it is advice you've seen repeated countless times before. This one on bugs stands out:
Most developers blame the software, other people, their dog, or the weather for flaky, seemingly “random” bugs.
The best devs don’t.
No matter how erratic or mischievous the behavior of a computer seems, there is always a logical explanation: you just haven’t found it yet!
The best keep digging until they find the reason. They might not find the reason immediately, they might never find it, but they never blame external circumstances.
Something I've always found interesting: when users encounter a bug, most blame themselves; when programmers encounter a bug, most blame anything but themselves. And not because programmers are trying to evade fault (although that's indeed a factor in lots of shitty work environments)! I believe it's because the prospect of spending hours and hours chasing down the cause of a bug—and with no guarantee you'll be successful—is so dreadful. Happens to the best of us: hundreds of times, I've witnessed a novel bug while pairing on something else and told my pair, "let's pretend we didn't just see that," in order to keep our productivity on track.
Anyway, if you're asking me, the single best trait to predict whether I'm looking at a good programmer or a great one is undoubtedly perseverance. Someone that takes to each new challenge like a dog to a bone, and who struggles to sleep until the next obstacle is cleared.
Until mid-2022, you could absolutely have a successful, high-paying career as a programmer if you lacked perseverance, but I'm not sure that's going to be true much longer.
Reddit really didn’t like my HomeKit post. One of the best things about being me is that I had the privilege to spend half a decade unwinding myself from the soul-crushing responsibility of giving a single flying fuck what randos on the Internet thought. ✌️ reddit.com/r/HomeKit/comments/1jynr4v/i_made_a_guide_fro_making_homekit_backgrounds/