Ben Meier

AI is an apocalyptic technology. “Apocalypse” doesn’t mean “end of the world”. It means “revelation” or “disclosure”. AI will expose every crack in our society that we have heretofore more-or-less successfully papered over. Nothing will be able to stay as it was. (And that’s (bad | good).)

One of the most important pieces of AI commentary: "software brain" is important to understand if we want to get through this era with our humanity intact. werd.io/the-world-is...

Good planning requires more than just a spreadsheet.

The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by myself and @chris.blue, is finished and sent off to the printers! Ebooks should be available in the next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. 😅 (BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)

Dependabot security alerts have terrible signal-to-noise ratio, especially for Go vulns. That hurts security! Just turn it off and set up a pair of scheduled GitHub Actions, one running govulncheck and the other running CI with the latest version of your deps. Less work, less risk, better results!

📄 New blog post! AI will soon write most distributed code. Distributed code is where our worst bugs —Heisenbugs— live. The real lever isn’t “test more,” it’s **aim better**: AI should target frameworks where correctness contracts are explicit and checkable. jhellerstein.github.io/blog/codegen...

Hahaha "All encryption is end-to-end, if you’re not picky about the ends."

Ooo the new gig laptop is a custom 48GB 14" M4 Pro which is pretty nice 😎

Quite enjoyed this post www.joanwestenberg.com/thin-desires... > The person who bakes bread isn't trying to fix the world. They're not making any attempt to either dent or undent the universe. > They're trying to spend a Sunday afternoon in a way that doesn't leave them feeling emptied out.

These last few weeks have been the first time really contributing to a React code base for more than just a few adjustments. And I'm getting it now. I can also see how much discipline you need to keep things tidy. I'd still try and use HTMX first so I can lean more on my backend experience.

Excited for what the new year will bring: a new role!

If everything is a top priority, then everything gets done quickly. That's basic management

Wonderful weekend mornings. The bad: toddler wants to wake up and play at 4 am. The good: they fall back asleep by 6 and everyone including the dog can have a lie in.

Copilot go brrrrrrr

Ooh, that frame.work desktop is very neat. Hopefully next time I've got time and a need for a desktop it'll still be an option 🤞

Managing VPCs and subnets and routing tables feels so old school and cloud 1.0. I wish the industry had moved on further from this by now.

The days' mission, platform engineering example for a Score → AWS lambda and Valkey setup.

Remember, kids: A real big goal of "AI" is to entirely sever capital from labor, and no, there will be no universal basic income, you can all just starve and die, thanks www.axios.com/2025/08/26/a...

Manager: "What's this milestone about ..'Living on a prayer'?" Lead: "That's the documentation deliverable" Manager: "What's the status of that?" Lead: "We're halfway there" Manager: "Why is progress so slow?" Lead: "You fired Tommy" Manager: "So?" Lead: "Tommy used to work on the docs"

Stumbled upon a signed copy of @benaaronovitch.bsky.social 's Stone and Sky in Bristol today, good start to the PTO week 👍

Grated my finger instead of the cheese today. Nice one.

Why do payment processors have such obscure URLs for 3d secure or credit card info. Like, why do I want to put my details into `live.opacy.eu.elavon.com/....` o.o

This is very good from @werd.io werd.io/evaluating-ai/

Build stuff you're proud of.

LLMs are rapidly normalizing us to just overlook trivial errors and mistakes. And that's treated as a feature.

I've spent the last week and a bit designing and building an authn+authz stack from scratch with users, oauth, developer tokens, memberships, and invites. Something that's been done thousands of times before but is still fun and fulfilling to implement again.

Basically impossible to get anything done in Europe between mid-July and September.

Implemented user sign up with google oauth, login, logout, and session token based authentication today, and it's a nice comprehensive story to test and demo together. Nice to do it with minimal dependencies too.

The little air conditioner that could.

DEDUPLICATE (your rabbitmq messages)

This train trip would be much more productive if I had the AI agents running in a remote machine rather than on the laptop where the internet connection keeps dropping due to tunnels, trees, fields, stray sheep, etc. 🤔

Nightmare trying to get the baby to sleep in these temperatures 😣

I know JIRA rants are a bit of a flogged horse by now.. But really. How can such a complex product be so bad at satisfying day-to-day kanban development and prioritisation.

I don’t know who did this awesome clip but yeah, scary stuff … #AI #ArtificialIntelligence

Sweet sweet 150kW charging.. And oh god my wallet.

Why are they reporting it like it's a paramilitary coup?

The umbrella distribution protocol. Whereby rain protection devices distribute themselves evenly throughout the corners of high street shops when humidity is high.

😠 The two required questions after any llm answer.... "are you sure?" and then "great, are you sure now?" Mad how many times the answer just flips around.

Oh boy!

Urgh, LLMs get so distracted summarizing documents or working with text that contains html-like blocks `<thing>` even if not used in that way at all in context. The models are so tuned to consider these blocks as informative that they end up dropping them from output summaries.

Does the baby's nursery need about 4 temperature, 3 humidity, and 2 co2 sensors of various kinds? No, but that's where we are for some reason.

Never underestimate the skill of a local neighborhood seamstress at extending the life of old worn clothes. Resisting the urge to buy new.

`ON DELETE RESTRICT INITIALLY DEFERRED` — love the small of data integrity in the morning…

Meta AI logo hovering front and center in WhatsApp.. smh.. No way to disable or hide it.

"You think AS I was building this, I should have been setting up CAMERAS?" // Wondermark #1548; Spring Forth, My Creation

April

Cable car to #kubecon. It's CNCF #Score today

There are too few stickers on my laptop so I'm heading to London for a sticker convention. Oh and talking CNCF Score and platform engineering. See you there #kubecon!

Ouch