Irving Ziller, one of the original members of the FORTRAN team, describing the resistance of early programmers to the introduction of a compiler: And in the background was the scepticism, the entrenchment of many of the people who did programming in this way at that time; what was called hand-to-hand combat with the machine. From [ ]
Title: The League of Dangerous Young Ladies Publisher: Penguin Random House NZ ★☆☆☆☆ I am historically terrible at giving up on a book, but I am trying to call it earlier when a book is going nowhere. This book Was going nowhere I cared about. I originally bought it on an impulse because I thought [ ]
Title: Stuff the British Stole Author: Marc Fennell Publisher: Penguin Random House NZ ★★★☆☆ This book is interesting and easy to read, but I can t help but feel like sometimes it lacks depth of analysis. It certainly lacks any form of supporting references, which I have come to expect in books of this type. Now, [ ]
A few times now I have worked for organizations that are basically IT shops that is, their core business now depends on being very good at doing Computer Things. However, many of these places were pretty terrible at computers. Let s keep picking on Telstra, because its an easier example. Telstra was originally a part [ ]
Ok, so in a recent post I summarized some reading I had recently done about security harnesses. When I say security harness think thingie which orchestrates many many LLM sessions to turn tokens and environmental stability into zero day vulnerabilities and dopamine . That is, as Claude Code is to code generation, a security harness is [ ]
All signs exist for a reason. Making a sign (or a policy) takes work. Therefore, this work is only done when some incident has caused someone somewhere to decide that the correct response is to expend effort ensuring this thing does not happen again. Now, one issue with this is that it is also a lot [ ]
Title: Machine Learning Author: Hugh Howey Publisher: Self published Release Date: 2017 ★★★★★ This book is a delightful collection of short stories by Hugh Howie, mostly not about actual machine learning or AI. What else can one say about a book of short stories with no overarching theme? Was good. Did enjoy.
Increasingly I am being told to use a security harness when analyzing code for potential vulnerabilities, but what is a harness and how does it differ from just running Claude Code and asking it nicely to find me some sweet vulns? This post is literally my notes on reading up on this topic via a [ ]
This is just a delightfully retconned note to say that Divergulent 0.1 was released on this date. Checkout GitHub for the details.
Title: The Chairman s Lounge Author: Joe Aston Publisher: Simon Schuster Australia Release Date: 2024 Pages: 359 ★★★★★ This is the story of the downfall of an Australian business hero, the destruction of an iconic Australian brand, and hubris. In a mere four years Alan Joyce when from hero status in Australia, to literally hiding [ ]