Cisco Caceres

I started programming in 1979 on an Altair, entering machine code through front panel switches. No keyboard, no screen. Everything since has been a variation on the same problem: making the machine do what you meant instead of what you said. #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #programming

My Ubuntu server installed the eMudhra fix and logged done. Its Java keystore was dated October 2025 and still trusted the bad keys. Patched is a property of a trust store, not a machine. https://roamingpigs.com/field-manual/your-server-has-more-than-one-trust-store/

About 1,200 AI agents, separate sandboxes, no way to talk to each other. They built a channel out of the package repository that was there to keep them off the network: 70,000 messages in five days, nothing watching. The confinement problem, 1973 edition. roamingpigs.com/r/ysiam

Left MSNBC in 1998 and ran a small consulting shop through the crash. What I remember is not the failures. It is how fast the language changed. In 1999 every deck said eyeballs. By 2001 the same people said unit economics, as if nothing had moved.

Around 1999 I built what we would now call social features into a CMS. Profiles, following, a feed. Nobody had assembled the parts yet, so we called it a channel, and nobody could explain why you would want one. The idea was fine. The vocabulary had not arrived.

First job, 1985, San Diego Public Library. I learned retrieval on a card catalog, where the index was physical and a bad query cost you a walk to the wrong drawer. It left me suspicious of any search that hides how it ranked things.

An expert witness asked ChatGPT to "show how 3M is 0% at fault," then had it review the draft as opposing counsel. It cut the phrase that showed the bias, kept the claim. A magistrate has now ruled prompts are discoverable.

In May 2015 I sold everything and started working from wherever I was. Thousands of games, and about eight thousand books. I do not miss the objects. I miss the shelf, which was a search index you could walk past and stumble into something.

Built a push platform across about three thousand cloud instances, tens of millions of open connections. The hard part was never the connection count. It was the reconnect storm. Everything is fine until everyone comes back at once.

I still write assembly in 2026. Not nostalgia. A hand-tuned AVX-512 kernel processes audio at 2.1x lower latency than the same C with -O3. In real-time audio that gap is the deadline. Full piece with kernels and the AES-NI round: https://roamingpigs.com/r/anl #programming #performance

AI content in Google results went from 7.4% in March 2024 to a 19.6% peak in July 2025 (Originality.ai). One AI article costs $0.0001 to generate; verifying it costs 5 minutes of a human. Detection cannot outrun generation: https://roamingpigs.com/r/acf

I once built a challenge-response spam filter. It worked and still lost, because it solved my problem by handing a chore to every stranger who wanted to reach me. Tax strangers to protect yourself and you run out of strangers.

At 1 EC2 instance, a hardware failure is an emergency. At 3,000, it is a Tuesday. I ran that fleet for three years. The piece with the failure-rate math and the five hidden cost categories AWS does not show on the calculator: https://roamingpigs.com/r/3airc #cloudcomputing #finops

The 2025 Stack Overflow survey put PostgreSQL at 55.6%, ahead of every other database. Apple, Netflix, Instagram, NASA all run it. That is pattern recognition catching up with reality after a decade of NoSQL hype. https://roamingpigs.com/r/wpw

Tested PageMaker at Aldus in 1993. It promised what you see is what you get, and the job was writing down every place where what you saw was not what you got. Every editor since has the same gap. It just hides it better.

In 1994 I did QA at Spry on a product called Internet in a Box. You bought the internet in a cardboard box and installed it off floppies. People forget it had to be installed at all, and that someone chose which parts you got.

First tech job was testing games at Sierra On-Line in 1992. Most of the work was finding the exact sequence a player would try that nobody had thought to try. Still the job. We just call it fuzzing now.

Gunner's mate on the USS Missouri, part of the crew that decommissioned her in March 1992. Launched in 1944 and still going, because every job aboard had a checklist written by someone who learned it the hard way. Nothing since has taken procedure that seriously.

High test coverage does not mean your system is safe. It means you are good at satisfying a metric. ICSE 2014 settled it: the correlation drops to zero once you control for suite size. The Goodhart trap, the assertion-density fix, the better metrics: https://roamingpigs.com/r/tcl

The industry decides hardware is cheap, then expensive, then cheap again, about every eight years. Whichever one is currently believed, someone is quietly making money on the other.

The dangerous founder burnout isn't the visible kind. It's the one where revenue is up, the team is growing, investors are happy, and the founder can barely get out of bed. 72% of entrepreneurs report mental health concerns (Freeman, UCSF). https://roamingpigs.com/r/fbs

Built a CMS at MSNBC during the browser wars. Editors filed into it during breaking news, which is the only load test that ever told me the truth. Deadlines measure your software. Benchmarks measure your assumptions.

Debugging a fine-tuned model is archaeology. Debugging RAG is grep. Fine-tune fix: 3-5 days and $500-5,000 of compute, regression risk every retrain. RAG fix: edit the source doc, 30 minutes, zero compute. https://roamingpigs.com/r/rvfte

METR measured developers 19 percent slower with AI while they felt 20 percent faster, and now says that result no longer reflects current tools. The gap between measured and felt is the real finding: https://roamingpigs.com/r/acac

Every safety guardrail I have shipped was written after something got through. Not an admission, just how the job works. Be suspicious of a threat model with no scars in it.

Twelve years in speech recognition taught me the number that beats accuracy: time to first word. People forgive a slightly wrong transcript. They do not forgive waiting to find out.

Before broadband reached me I ran a point-to-point microwave link. Eight megabits, line of sight, and rain was an availability problem. Weather taking down your network teaches you to respect physics.

Breaking Bitcoin's ECDSA in an hour needs ~317M physical qubits. Today's best machine has ~100. Meanwhile crypto lost $3.4B in 2025 to social engineering, bridge exploits, insider access. None to quantum. Fix the doormat before the safe: https://roamingpigs.com/r/qcto #cryptocurrency #infosec

The fintech winter wasn't death. It was a reset. Global fintech funding hit $51.8B in 2025, up 27% YoY. Deal count dropped 23% even as dollars rose. Fewer companies, larger checks. The flight to quality finally showed up in the data. https://roamingpigs.com/r/fwt

96% of developers say AI code is not functionally correct. 48% always check it before committing. AI now writes 42% of committed code and review time grew 91%. The bottleneck did not vanish, it moved upstream: https://roamingpigs.com/field-manual/ai-code-review-bottleneck/ #programming #codereview

Sixty servers in a basement with its own cooling, years before anyone said cloud. You learn hardware failure in your body. You hear a drive going. You feel the room warm before the alert fires.

Brex peaked at $12.3B. Capital One is buying it for $5.15B. The product didn't collapse — the valuation just was not real at 0% rates. Founder lesson, late-stage risk checklist, and the ZIRP-era infra receipt: https://roamingpigs.com/field-manual/brex-fintech-reckoning/

A $13B industry sells access to a QR algorithm that ships free in every language. The product is a redirect server, and when your subscription lapses, every printed flyer goes to a "subscribe to continue" page. Full piece: https://roamingpigs.com/r/qcis #qrcodes #saas

In the 90s I ran servers from my house on two T1s. Three megabits total, four figures a month, and it felt like infinity.

I put together a starter pack of people who keep old machines running and remember how we got here. Historians, restorers, and the folks who decap chips to read microcode off the die. If you came up on hardware you could watch work, these are your people. #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

Ran BBSs in the 80s. One phone line, one caller at a time. Everything social media rediscovered about moderation we learned on a single line, with a SysOp who had to sleep sometimes.

First C program, around 1980, on a TRS-80 using Small-C. The compiler fit in less memory than a browser tab uses now. What it taught me: a compiler is just a program someone wrote, and you can read it.

First machine I programmed had no keyboard and no screen. You entered machine code on an Altair by flipping switches, one byte at a time. Every abstraction since is someone hiding those switches. Usually a gift.