It's teaching the monkey to stop typing that's hard.
I've had this discussion a couple of times recently, so let me just repeat it all here. Being a strong individual is generally how you die. Historically, one of the worst things you could do to a person is to ex-communicate them, which is to cast them out of your community. Call it exhile, ostracism, whatever, you're removing them from the support network. In many cases, this is a death sentence.…
I have opinions about LLMs. They're not good opinions, but they're opinions none the less. There are also a few things that I completely understand: Massive LLMs are not profitable , sound for the economy or ecology, and are, at best, a temporary cash grab by billionaires with really bad objectives. LLMs are new tools, and like any new tool, should be treated with caution until we know what…
After more than 15 years, I will be leaving Mozilla on July 21. Friday, June 12th will be my last “real” day, as I am planning on using my 200+ hours of vacation backlog. I've had the honor of working with some of you, and others have no idea who I am, but you might have a sticker of mine. While I have mostly enjoyed my time here, there are a few things I wish to say upon my departure: You Are…
Over at the work site, a few folk have once again brought up the concept of putting services that they run in some form of "Maintainance Mode" / "Sustainability Mode" / "Abandon-it-out-in-the-woods Mode" because even the prettiest toys get old. I was asked if I had opinions, and after having done this for around 30+ years, boy golly do I. Below is the addendum I added to the document. I'm sharing…
Apparently, I have a curse. It would seem that any federation server I set up meets a grisly and untimely fate about a year after I get it running. Ok, fine, the first server died because I was a moron and nuked the wrong partition, but my second server is currently down because of a Hypervisor issue preventing it from properly initializing. Basically, I was in the process of running the usual…
I have made a career out of being the last person out of the room. Whenever there's some project that exists, that no one else wants to deal with, but generally Keeps The Lights On, for a given org, inevitably, it falls into my lap. This is not a place of honor. I have never been lauded as a hero for all the fires I never let start. My job consists of fixing and maintaining stuff. Sometimes that…
2025 was not a great year. I have little expectation that 2026 is going to be better. To be clear, the folk that are currently working overtime to make things worse will continue to do so no matter what we do with our calendars. Just because a digit flipped won't mean that huge companies will stop sinking ludicrous amounts of money into (at best) aspirational tech, instead of actual solutions to…
Recently, there was a post from someone who had been using Apple products for most of their professional life. I will let them provide their own summary: I am writing this as a desperate measure. After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer, authoring technical books on Apple’s own programming languages (Objective-C and Swift), and spending tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of dollars on devices,…
First, I will acknowledge that I am generally skeptical about Large Language Model based AI. I have a number of concerns ranging from the fact that the "training" data set are often collected questionably, the training weights are almost never disclosed, and using an LLM for anything other than general language based taking seems ill-advised. Using an LLM to do things like write code seems to me…
" Do More with Less " is a pretty frequent cheer at a lot of companies. I mean, it sounds really compelling. It's efficient. It drives productivity. It reduces waste. What's not to love? Well, I mean, there is one pretty significant issue that has shown a massive flaw in the past that pretty much everyone on the planet is familiar with. The problem with "Do More with Less" is the same problem as…