“Daddy, what is class inheritance?”

The perpetuation of class distinctions and oppression through bloodlines over generations. Avoid it.

“I meant in programming?”

Avoid that too.

I keep coming back to tabbed interfaces. https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/tabbed-interface-the-web-component/

Lobbying (Oct 10, 2026)

« Have you tried to explain lobbying to a non American unfamiliar with the concept? »

https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2026/10/10/lobbying.html

Life has thrown me many curve balls in the past several months, and the biggest one hit me two weeks ago. I was laid off from work.

If you or someone you know is hiring a Senior/Lead Software Engineer, especially with PHP, please contact me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcgee/

Deno is joining Cloudflare.

I wrote about Deno's decline a few months ago: I wish Deno would keep doing what it does best. I shared its vision, but I think it never got far because a startup was the one carrying it out. This decision makes me more sure of that.

It also settles something for me. From now on I won't trust a development platform built by a startup, however good the vision. Too risky, too easy to get betrayed.

What I'd rather see is people with strong ideas about development platforms letting go of the impatience and building them as community-driven F/OSS projects instead. Funding is the obstacle, of course. I hope good F/OSS funds like NLnet and the Sovereign Tech Fund keep expanding.

With Windows Search being utterly slow, broken, and unusable, I’ve coded up a little Python script that allows me to use RegEx.

In this comparison I’m searching for all files with the word "Subtractor" and it’s about 100× faster than Microslop. 🤪

#python #windows

The good folks at #Gentoo are looking for new infrastructure sponsors. They're mostly looking for rack-space, power and connectivity and they'll provide the hardware. Preferably outside the US, but not necessarily.

https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/10/07/infrastructure-sponsors-wanted.html

Recommendations wanted:

#Music that can be played as covers by two pissed-off middle-aged women. We have not played together yet so I’m looking for songs we can learn quickly and build a sound with that are inspiring, musical, and open to interpretation. “Get to know each other” songs. Think Angel From Montgomery as performed by Bonnie Raitt.

Instruments:

#Voice - harmonies welcome but we can create them too
#Guitar
Maybe basic #keyboard
Very occasionally smallpipes

Genre:
#Folk
#Blues
#Canadiana
#Gospel
#Indie

Many thanks!

In very sad news for the computer community, Margaret Hamilton has passed away

We’re losing the people who made computer engineering magical while billionaires take over and make it the most boring fascist machine ever

And it all happened so fast

#margarethamilton

Lets Encrypt goes to 64 days of certificate validity in February 2027. And to 45 days in 2028.

This change to 64 will go live on their test servers (staging) next week.

https://letsencrypt.org/2026/10/07/64-day-certs.html

"When I first came up with the term [Software Engineering], no one had heard of it before, at least in our world. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. It was a memorable day when one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone in a meeting that he agreed with me that the process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware."

#RIP #margarethamilton

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton.

she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back.

news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

the scale of software is not and should not be lines written per second, it’s how well the product does on the market, which is a function of its quality, which (oversimplified) is its ability to solve a problem divided by further problems it causes

“code is really cheap to write now that we have LLMs”

[instantly blows $4,629 on tokens]

I interviewed someone today who said they prefer to have tight lint rules instead of automated testing because it's pesky that every time they use an LLM to write code for them, the tests start failing. Then the LLM removes or changes the failing tests. So why even bother to have tests.

The role they were interviewing for is "lead software engineer", which is fairly comparable to staff software engineer elsewhere.

"Yeah, engineering is pesky, so I'd rather just not."

Yes I actually type code and terminal commands with my hands. It works quite well, believe it or not. It's bonkers that this is considered quaint and old-fashioned.

The other day, with coworkers watching my screen, I wrote some code, staged it, typed `git commit`, which opened vim, obviously, and I typed a commit message.

Someone said, "Wait what, did anyone else see what I saw? You just typed a commit message in vim?"

"Hey, could I get another pair of eyes on some code I wrote? Oh, you suggest this other pattern, great thank you for that, I'll just make that quick change and... Yeah, sorry I'm sure it's excruciatingly slow to see me type code on a keyboard with my real hands. Thank youuuuu."

I feel like a dinosaur, but also I understand what I'm writing and why, so... I'm okay with that. I guess I'm old-school.

"s

A configuration profile applies Apple's restriction keys for Apple Intelligence and forces the settings that have no restriction key.
Models are removed through Apple's asset service. System Integrity Protection stays enabled and no files under /System are modified directly.
The profile redirects the download of each removed model to a closed local port, so macOS does not download it again.
Removing the profile restores the previous settings. macOS downloads the models again when a feature needs them.
RemoveMacAI makes no network requests and collects no data.

FAQ

Does dictation still work? Yes. Dictation is a separate setting, and its speech models are not removed.

Do macOS updates undo the changes? No. The profile, including the download block, persists across updates.

Storage settings still lists Apple Intelligence after the models were deleted. Apple's asset service releases the models right away, but macOS deletes the files on its own schedule. Until then, System Settings > General > Storage keeps counting them under Apple Intelligence.

Why is a process named Siri still running? In macOS 27 the Spotlight window runs as a process named Siri. Some system services also stay loaded; they are protected by System Integrity Protection.

What stops working? The features listed above, apps that use Apple's on-device models (the Foundation Models framework and the Use Model action in Shortcuts), Visual Intelligence and natural-language editing in Calendar."
https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI

It's been made clear to me that one of the reasons I was hired for this job is my boss read the README files of some of my OSS projects and was impressed at how clear and detailed a writer I am.

Just in case you thought written-English wasn't a useful skill for a developer: It got me this job. Work on your writing skills if you want to survive in tech.

#Programming #GetFediHired #Writing