Delighful Derek

How do people in the suburbs genuinely look forward to Friday night on the couch, Saturday morning at Costco, and call that a weekend? Like you really moved out of the city just to LARP as your parents at 34?

Ridiculous. To witness a perfectly usable operating system nosedive in quality over the past 5 years, has been painful. W11 is pathetic in so many ways, the fact that you have to debloat, "winhance", and more, just to make the damn thing work. W11 is a mirror of everything that has gone wrong in the software side recently. And yes, I'm a daily power user.

So glad Pavan is restarting this push! Back in the day Jeff Johnson and I had this 20/20 project: reducing Windows' idle memory consumption and the fresh install size on disk by 20%. We never got to finish - great to see this focus on fundamentals again.

i had to retire my favorite technical interview problem so it is time to ask it to my loyal followers (solution in replies) given a stream of N not necessarily distinct integers from an O(N) sized universe, for some massive N, find a way to estimate how many distinct integers appear, only using O(log(log(N)) persistent storage use 5 lines of pseudocode there was a time in my life where i wouldn't work with someone who couldn't answer this

We all pay 6.2% of every single paycheck to Social Security and MOST of us will NEVER receive a Social Security check when we retire because Congress has screwed us all over so bad that Social Security is going to be completely insolvent by 2033, which is in 7 years. Oh and they aren’t even talking about fixing Social Security. America Last Members of Congress can’t even fix our healthcare and figure out how to reduce the cost of health insurance and Mike Johnson lied for months claiming he had a plan. Still no plan! So if you have been slaving away your entire life and watching 6.2% for Social Security plus 1.45% Medicare (7.65% total FICA and your employer matches it with another total 7.65%) of your paycheck getting deducted every paycheck and you think “well at least when I’m retired I’ll get it back when I receive a Social Security check”, it’s a LIE. Social Security is getting robbed and all your money is being spent on all the stupid bullshit that never benefits you, for example like Trump’s current war or Armageddon or whatever this crap is. So for all of us in GenX, Millennials, and GenZ, that 6.2% for Social Security, plus the other 6.2% your employer matches, stolen from us “for Social Security” is basically a tax. Another fucking tax. So while you’re pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, you better save for your retirement because you can’t count on even receiving a measly Social Security check one day even though you paid into it.

there are 78,000 employees at META they could dump 40% of the workforce and nobody would notice 72k at salesforce 15k at palo alto networks 3.8k at klarna 4.5k at pinterest 740k at accenture everybody getting fired

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes. As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now. It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

"I train like I’ve never won, and I compete like I’ve never lost." - Eileen Gu 100% Mindset GOLD 🥇

Be Alysa Liu. Her dad, Arthur Liu, an immigrant lawyer, reportedly spent $500,000–$1,000,000 on ice time, coaches, travel, and competitions. 2019: 13 years old, the youngest U.S. national champion in history. 2020: 14, wins it again. 2022: 16, medals at Worlds… then shocks the world by retiring to chase personal freedom. Then she disappears to live like a normal kid. College. Driver’s license. Quiet years. 2024: 18, she announces she’s coming back to compete. 2026: 20, comeback and wins Olympic gold like it was just another practice. That gold ends Team USA’s 24-year drought in women’s figure skating. And her Instagram goes from 300K to 5M. “I connect with everything, but I’m not attached to anything.” — Alysa Liu