markjeee retweeted
Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
markjeee retweeted
America teaches us to look down on someone and blame them for their station. It's a cheap way to feel better about our own place, however low. The fantasy of meritocracy is rooted in both judgement and punishment.
Yet we depend on "low" stations more than most of the "high" ones. It's the essential worker revelation all over again.
markjeee retweeted
🔐 What a nice day to ship some security fixes!
Gammu 1.45.1 is out, fixing potential buffer overflows when parsing crafted files and Siemens modem responses.
github.com/gammu/gammu/relea…
markjeee retweeted
Istanbul Tűrkiye - 12 days in 10 neighborhoods, meeting up with 30 local people for 60 hours of conversation: sive.rs/met/at-16
markjeee retweeted
Лучшее, что я видел за последнее время — чел пилит ASCII MMORPG, в которой вся графика состоит из букв и символов.
Да, буквально весь мир, персонажи, окружение и спецэффекты нарисованы разноцветным текстом.
Автор сейчас экспериментирует с магией, визуалом и боссами. Я прям залип на то, как из нескольких десятков символов получается такая красота.
Буквально сны при температуре 37,2.
Via: tiktok.com/@Ansenjeo
markjeee retweeted
12 days in 10 different neighborhoods in Istanbul, meeting up with 30 local people for 60 hours of conversation
markjeee retweeted
Yann LeCun, one of the world’s foremost AI, machine-learning and robotics researchers, an engineer, NYU professor and ACM Turing Award laureate, has been torn to pieces today by Elon Musk fans for daring to inject some reality into the Tesla Roadster debate.
The objection isn’t that the technology isn’t impressive. It is how these capabilities are being marketed, with deposits being taken on the basis of what we’ve been shown.
The physics remain the problem. A production car carrying enough compressed air to deliver those levels of thrust would face enormous compromises in weight, storage capacity and recharge requirements. At best, you’re looking at seconds of extreme thrust, followed by specialist recharging that can absolutely not be integrated into the car - literally impossible because of the weighty equipment needed & the energy required for that equipment to compress 600L of air for a few seconds of thrust.
And let’s not forget that the Roadster 2.0 was announced in 2017. Nine years later, instead of finally putting that car on the road, we’re watching a new version of the same old story.
This isn’t hate. It’s realism based on experience, engineering and physics.
And when someone like @ylecun makes essentially the same observations, the response shouldn’t be “What have you ever achieved?” or "what do you know?" - sure, use that one on me, but not on Yann.
I'm definitely not anti-achievement and never criticized real achievements, including by Elon.
I even own two Teslas.
I do expose marketing stunts that, while cool on the surface, are not the achievements they are claimed to be.
Compressed air thrusters might give you acceleration boosts in any direction.
They might even make your car hover for a couple of seconds if you accept replacing the passenger seat by a 400 liter high-pressure air tank.
But they are not a path to actual flying cars.
The same way Burt Rutan's SpaceshipOne was never going to be a path to orbital flights (just bunny hops out of the atmosphere).
I am anti-Musk when it comes to politics. His political actions, the massive dissemination of disinformation through X and other channels, and his support for authoritarian regimes and racist ideas have the effect of weakening democracy and weakening human decency and social progress around the world.
markjeee retweeted
A middleware engineer in South Korea wrote to me, seeking help on what to do now that their manager is "blinded by GenAI hype" and set an "AI token usage" KPI. This eng is using v little AI, so manager is poking them to use more.
My response: your manager is trying to help you
markjeee retweeted
Autodesk saw how well it’s going for Adobe to bully its customers (who turn from the biggest promoters to the biggest and most vocal haters after what feels like abusive behaviour from the vendor) and decided to do the same.
Penny wise, pound foolish as the saying goes
This is a wild approach, @autodesk.
We’re a small business paying $380 per user, per month. We’ve been paying customers for over a decade, and we make a deliberate effort to honor the license agreements for every product we use. Your software already requires authentication and an assigned license. What, specifically, prompted this email?
Earlier today, I had two conversations on two separate podcast episodes about your direction with Fusion and why cloud-based API access makes sense for agentic MEP workflows. I was making the case for Autodesk. I think the product direction is right based on recent posts from @andrew_anagnost.
Our company has been deciding where to invest our development effort: integrate our custom cloud agent harness into Autodesk, build on an open-source platform, or adopt one of the emerging cloud alternatives. That decision will lock in years of internal development and software spending. This decision is also central to our plans to expand @PermitZIP nationwide.
An email like this becomes part of that decision. So does the time we have to spend responding to it.For more than a decade, we’ve paid for anywhere from 5 to 30 licenses each year. Autodesk is our single largest SaaS expense. This is a heck of a way to make our next platform decision easier.
Starting next week, we’ll begin transitioning away from Autodesk products. We have nothing to hide and will cooperate with the audit. We’ll also be directing our future spending toward companies that earn our confidence as partners.
I hope your audit goes well.
markjeee retweeted
The biggest misread of anyone predicting the end of software engineering was imagining that the world only needed a certain amount of software, and bringing automation to the field would reduce the need for labor.
Exactly the opposite is happening where essentially most things are actually turning into software. Because agents can use tools, work with computers, write software on the fly, and process data like humans (but far faster), we can now throw “software” at problems that never could reasonably be digitized before.
What that leads to is the role of engineering taking on greater importance in the economy, because we can now engineer far more systems and processes than were possible before.
If you’re a bank trying to do new forms of trading, engineers are often your first bet. If you are in life sciences, you expect more and more research and lab work to be engineering centric. If you’re in manufacturing, you’re trying to automate more of the supply chain, all that is engineering. More and more work is shaped like software problems.
Yes we’re not going to be coding manually in the future. But almost everything will be code, which means those that understand it are in a fantastic position.
Some observations about the "total" automation of software engineering:
1. There are more software engineers now than in 2025, and demand is growing.
2. Software engineers have never worked harder than they do now.
3. They largely don't write code anymore, agents write ~100% of the code.
4. The bottom line of the companies that employs these engineers and agents (i.e. the terminal purpose of all this code) is typically not budging as a result of AI adoption.
This is why you have to think in terms of systems. Automating one aspect of a system creates its own friction and moves the bottlenecks elsewhere.
markjeee retweeted
A very very interesting and recent book by Dr Cat Hicks (@grimalkina): Pyschology of Software Teams
She makes a good case on how most companies/teams don’t understand how devs operate and think of devs as “brains in jars.” And now we have AI suddenly enter the room…
markjeee retweeted
Today, we're publishing two new findings from inside Anthropic: how work and hiring are changing at a company at the frontier of AI adoption, and how Anthropic staff expect AI to change the economy.
anthropic.com/research/expec…
markjeee retweeted
Anyone I know who has enough software engineering experience to be able to look under the hood and review the AI agents’ work confirms that advances in AI coding will increase the demand for engineers.
AI coding agents are fantastic, but they don’t replace engineers, at least not in any serious project that you want to ship to a large user base or deploy in sensitive operations.
You need engineers to be able to make correct use of the AI agents. And yes, you will be able to do more, which means the cost of software drops and demand for software (and by extension software engineers) goes up.
This is exactly what I see everywhere I go and what I hear from everyone I talk to: they need more people, not fewer.
In fact, many companies are telling me they are stuck because they can't find enough talent in the market.
They are already using the latest-and-greatest AI-thingies out there, but they don't have enough warm bodies to operate them.
These agents aren't magic. They, for the most part, aren't autonomous. They are cool and all, but they need people who know their stuff.
This is even more acute for building software. Yes, anyone can vibe-code simple apps here and there today, but building working software for thousands of user is still very demanding, and agentic coding helps but doesn't work without experts driving it.
markjeee retweeted
a good portion of the best engineers have moved around to companies where they can more directly work with ai
so you see founders of the companies they're leaving posting how they're doing really interesting ai work
but it's futile, competing for talent is impossible right now
markjeee retweeted
perhaps one of the most durable parts of pstack are its engineering principles: very concise skills (~10-20 loc) that distill down good practices into its core.
as models get smarter, i expect most of pstack skills to compress into short principles or workflows (a generic list of steps) and that i will be able to delete a few of them.
how it works is that /poteto-mode contains a short index of available principles and tells agents "In your reply, name each principle that shaped a decision and the specific choice it changed." this is why you'll often see a Principles Named or Used section at the end of the agent's response
many of these principles were extracted from my sessions correcting agents since the start of this year. some are inspired by problems i see people talk about, like Attack the Premise, inspired by @VictorTaelin's post xitter.cf/VictorTaelin/status/20…
you can also use the principles as skills if you want greater control, by invoking /principle-
github.com/cursor/plugins/bl…
I'm a newcomer to @poteto's plist; But it seems to me that there is some very significant wisdom encoded in there. I suspect you could teach a master class on the principles.
markjeee retweeted
Naresh Jain compares coding agents with and without a harness. He found it made a frontier model more expensive in tokens for little gain, but make a weaker (and cheaper) model more effective.
martinfowler.com/articles/ar…
