Jonathon Belotti [thundergolfer]

Tags left in place in a powerplant after it was shut down, decommissioned, and abandoned. For some reason I’m a particularly cautious software engineer. It has its downsides, but one concrete benefit is that when I slip (everyone does), those slips are less likely to cause an incident. Over time I’ve seen slips contribute to many serious incidents, and have come to properly value the role of straightforward safety mechanisms in tools. The most obvious and commonly used mechanism is --dry-run,…

Peter Norvig’s “Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know” are a classic in software engineer training. The original sixteen numbers represent, for programmers, the hard constraints of our hardware. In the early 2000s, if you cared about writing fast code you knew that a disk seek cost about 10 milliseconds. “You don’t have to be an engineer to be a racing driver, but you do have to have Mechanical Sympathy.” Latency numbers are for programmers who want their systems to be fast. Failure…

W One of eight building in the ongoing OpenAI Stargate Abilene project. (Move across the image to slide from ugly to beautiful.) The computer industry has always had a weak relationship with beauty. Recently parts of the valley have become a bit self-conscious of their ugliness. We need a “new aesthetic” and billionaires will grant their couch coins for good ideas. Combine this self-consciousness with an AI datacenter backlash and you get the suggestion: AI datacenters should be beautiful. Can…

Pablo Picasso, Le Taureau (The Bull), 1945–1946 [Reversed] Just after Christmas something changed in the attitudes of the senior engineers I follow. LLM coding took another step forward. Skeptics became converts, and converts became bulls. 'bout half the engineers I admired pre-ChatGPT have become massive coding agent bulls in the past couple weeks. DHH flipped a few days ago. The others may join the mob before Q1 ends. Heady days.— Jonathon Belotti (@jono...