Cheap software still needs someone behind it
Cheap software still needs support, proven behavior and someone accountable when it fails. Reconstructing a mature product remains real engineering work.
Lynn Cole / Writing
Writing
Essays, thoughts, and technical notes.
Software, social capital, and the failure of clone sites
I spent two years building clone-site software. The missing ingredient was the trust, relationships, and audience around it.
Hubnot: taking collaboration history with the code
Hubnot keeps issues, discussions, governance, and collaboration history alongside your code in Git. The 0.0.3-dev release strengthens portability and cross-platform testing, so you can leave a development platform with everything.
NoAI: protect your voice, remove your words
For too long, the conversation around artificial intelligence has rested on an unexamined assumption: that the internet should remain useful.
Gibberish, crawler traps, and the anti-AI web
Scrambling web text creates a cipher and exposes its visual key. I contrast that approach with a crawler honeypot that records visitors to a forbidden endpoint.
Deterministic generators and the twentieth modification
Deterministic generators offer predictable output; agents handle interpretation and exceptions. The revealing test of that combination is the twentieth modification.
Classifiers, procedure, and judgment
Let classifiers evaluate conditions, deterministic software manage the branches, and a reasoning model make the final judgment.
A bad week for programming-language runtimes
A dated roundup of runtime-security failures across PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Go and Java, and what they suggest about the cost of finding and fixing bugs.
Weekend notes: software distribution, painting controls, and Petrolina
Weekend notes on software distribution, Kinetic Painter’s control system, software reconstruction, recursive training and a new donor truck for Petrolina.
We are the children of Dada
AI is incidental. The kangaroo court is in session, dissent is participation, and this court finds itself in contempt.
Software products are relationships
A software product is a relationship. Understanding users, giving them a reason to care and making a living are part of the same work.
Field notes on software reconstruction and a new donor truck
Field notes on reconstructing complex software and finding a donor truck to keep the talking-vehicle project alive.