Deane Barker

A nice board at Wind River Ranch outside Estes Park, Colorado

TLDR: “A collection of free information” This is a collection of 63 laws and axioms about building software – some serious, some not. Some are wildly obvious and general, others are unknown and specific. Some are genuinely about software development, and other are just about life in general. For example: Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong, will Gall’s Law: a successful complicated system started from a simple system and grew over time; complicated systems cannot start as complicated…

TLDR: “Boring, annoying characters” This is a novel about crappy people. Or, specifically, one really crappy guy named Heathcliff, who is adopted by an Northern English family, treated poorly, and proceeds, over the course of generations, to extract his revenge on them in all sorts of different ways. Nothing acute and immediate, mind you – this guy is in for the long haul, and his revenge takes place over decades. I have problems with classic novels, it seems. I read them, and generally hate…

TLDR: “Interesting and endearing” Steven Adams is only the second New Zealander to play in the NBA. And he’s had a decent career too. He’s never been an all-star, but he had five solid years with the Oklahoma City Thunder, and at one point signed a $100 million contract with them. Adams is known to be one of the nicest guys in the NBA – very friendly, very down-to-Earth. There’s a video floating around of him giving up an easy shot to prevent an opponent from taking a hard fall. This is his…

A detailed history of how a destructive pest was neutralized through sicence and geography.

Let’s talk about a college degree – what is the increase of knowledge comprised of? Meaning, if you take Alice and baseline her knowledge and skill in a subject, then send her to college for two years to get a masters degree in that subject, what are the specific sources of the change? For example, maybe we say this: Reading the required texts: 25% Attending the lectures: 20% Doing the assignments: 15% Completing a practicum: 15% Talking with professors: 15% Networking with other students: 10%…

For a couple of decades, there was a bus service from London to Calcutta, India. It took almost two months.

TLDR: “Uneven, like most anthologies” Appropriately, I started this book just after having returned from five days in New York City. I was there for a two-day conference in Brooklyn, but I stayed in Tribeca, and spent some time walking the streets of that neighborhood and Soho. Between those sojourns and the subway to Brooklyn each morning, I got pretty good dose of a “messy city.” I’m going to document the book in real-time below. It’s an anthology, so each chapter is a self-contained essay.…

TLDR: “Promising but confusing” An antimemetic is an idea that resists spreading. I read an entire book about this last year. But that was about real antimemtics. This is about monsters. This book was an outgrowth of the SCP Wiki which is a community-edited wiki that represents a fake world of monsters and aliens and such that have to be contained. The idea is that there are ideas that are so dangerous that they’re effectively monsters – they could actually kill you. They’re called “Unknowns,”…

TLDR: “Fun, kinda harmless” This was a…nice book. I don’t think it was very ambitious, but it basically just explains why humans love stories. It does this from a few different angles: dreams, games, rationalizing, etc. I can’t really say that I learned a lot from this book. In large part, it was just kind of a confirmation and elucidation of what I knew intuitively. It’s well-written and it’s interesting and I enjoyed reading it. But it’s not a very…challenging book. There wasn’t a lot of chew…

TLDR: “Just didn’t get it” I did not get (almost) any of the stories in this book, and I feel badly about that. The book was recommended highly by Kevin Kelly in Recommendo. They are hard sci-fi, with technically plausible scenarios, played out many levels deep in very consistent worlds, explored by a very fertile imagination. I found more insights per page in Ngo’s The Gentle Romance than in any other book I’ve read for a long time. It’s written by a guy who researches AI. He’s not a typical…

TLDR: “A little tedious, but still interesting” This is a story of a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina. It lost power, was surrounded by water with backed up sewers, and there weren’t enough boats or helicopters to evacuate everyone. Lots of people died. Maybe too many people. When the hospital lost power, all the ventilators shut off. A lot of patients were in immediate distress, compounded by the 100-degree heat and humidity. Conditions in the hospital deteriorated sharply. There…

There’s a specific font that has become associated with the early stages of neighborhood re-development.

A man opened a bookstore in a downtown building and set off a multi-year conflict over a homeless encampment.

Uber drivers in London are embarking on a multi-year journey to pass the black cabbie test, whcih requires them to memorize most of the street in London.

I’m struggling with how much a really like AI-generated music. A lot of time, I just have music on in the background while I work., Instrumentals are great for this. Lately, I’ve been listening to “Spy Jazz” which is some moody stuff that sounds like it’s from the 60s. It’s… mindless. It just plays in the background, like the soundtrack to “Oceans 12,” and I don’t think about it much. But then I found Eddie Dalton. And this has me a little worried. Eddie doesn’t exist, clearly. You can tel...

I’ve never been a big Tim Ferris fan. “The Four-Hour Work Week” just kind of pissed me off, really. But this is a good article, where I feel like he calls himself to account. [The Self-Help Trap: What 20+ Years of “Optimizing” Has Taught Me])(https://tim.blog/2026/03/04/the-self-help-trap/) “You can spend your whole life preparing for, instead of playing, the game of life. But why would anyone, including yours truly, succumb to this? … Subconsciously, it spares you from the messiest but mo...