“Michael Crichton, psychology, and AI - Austin Kleon”

https://austinkleon.com/2026/11/10/michael-crichton-psychology-and-ai/

Le temps qu'il fait, des fois !

Be like the developer of Dome Keeper, who keeps adding idle animations for their pixelated cats, and stay esoteric

We're extremely happy to welcome @MaddieM4 to Librecast.

She's working with us to finish up our @NGIZero Core work and will be helping us to design and develop Librecast Studio. 🎉

https://lists.sr.ht/~librecast/librecast-announce/%3C9993da2e-d430-432e-bad4-322b83b0c7d6@librecast.net%3E

RE: https://mastodon.art/@JenJen/117596790624374131

@robodoll

So, I learned. I learned from interviewing the customers, I learned from the senior members of the development team, I learned from books. I wrote a bunch of code to automate certain processes.

And it turned out… some of those processes didn't make sense. They weren't repeatable; they didn't actually make sense. At one point, I had an argument which was almost *exactly* the famous bodybuilding forum "how many days are in a week" thread. With a customer who owned a $30MM business.

For an example: Story time.

Once upon a time I worked at, let's say, a vertically-integrated business process automation vendor. Our customers were running hundred-year-old businesses, and we had to codify their business logic into software.

I, as a scrappy youth with _zero_ experience in the relevant problem domain, had to learn a bunch of stuff about how their businesses were supposed to work in order to encode those rules.

One of the recurring tropes that bums me out *so* much about the process of AI sludge devouring software _specifically_ — with practitioners of the craft enthusiastically participating more than the practitioners of any other — is that the *self*-developmental potential of writing software is completely ignored.

I couldn't really fit this in to my blog post "Programming Isn’t Special" https://blog.glyph.im/2026/10/programming-isnt-special.html although it touches on many of the same themes, so that's good background for this.

Maybe Pete Hegseth will be impeached after all, despite last night’s vote failing.

It appears, Pete Hegseth was only saved from impeachment in last night's vote because 11 Democrats were absent, of which several claim that a police escort of a bus blocked traffic, preventing them from reaching the Capitol.

Nancy Pelosi was in San Francisco receiving an award. One Democrat was recovering from a medical procedure.

It all now depends on Thomas Massie bringing his resolution to the floor again.

:bugcatflower:

#Alonzo news (3rd time today): I've now implemented enough of System F Omega to define a checked-null type! Like Haskell's `Maybe`.

Took me a bit to figure out why I had false positives in these unit-tests, but turns out I forget to implement the logic for typechecking the function calls.

I think tomorrow I'll unittest that it can handle Either & List types!

And I've got some things to investigate regarding my (literal) wiring for my merephone project...

It really bothers me how my brain can come up with such horrifying nightmares :(

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117475066389746858

The post-mortem has finally confirmed my intuition that this was a classic “confuse first byte of array for whole array” data processing bug.

A few people were weirdly hostile about the suggestion that it was probably the same way we’ve been corrupting numbers for 50 years and not the newest, least efficient way to corrupt numbers. Unfortunately, gaining a dreaded new Nemesis has not made all of software engineering’s boring old rogue’s gallery retire

you ever think about the dreaded biclops, which is a cyclops but with two eyes

How Silent Hill: Townfall's developer created a fictional town that's still real—'It exists. It's there' -- by Fraser Brown https://www.pcgamer.com/games/horror/how-silent-hill-townfalls-developer-created-a-fictional-town-thats-still-real-it-exists-its-there/

I would quite like tech things to stop having security incidents for a little while please.

I need a robot body I need a robot body I need a robot body

#Alonzo news: Took me all day to figure out how to approach it, but... I've now implemented typechecking primitives for something akin to Haskell's `Nothing`!

That is: I can now typecheck calls to constructors & a `forall` clause.

Now to tackle a `Just` unittest... This one takes an argument...

cOntAct uS