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Vibes, Code, Consequences

A selection from my weblog and elsewhere since last time…

Original content

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam.

Wastebook

  • “Some daring and remarkable hairstyles in this.”

  • stylometric

  • “You’re not wrong, Coté. That sentence is the digital equivalent of trying to tie a fishing knot with cold fingers – it’s technically possible, but why make it so hard?” Gemini, says. It goes on to diagnose he problem with the text I shared with it: “The core problem is a combination of syntactic density and low reader-agency. The sentences are built in a way that forces the reader to hold too many abstract concepts in their working memory before getting to the central action.” I love that last bit! “Don’t make me think.”

  • “Clocked In, Checked Out.” #chilllofi.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, Power Mac G4 edition.

Relevant to your interests

  • Offstage Advocacy - DaShaun became a great devrel by developing a new way to work with our community. I’ve seen it pay off in all ways, big time. Here is his key differentiation for devrel. // “There’s more to developer advocacy than just conferences and content. The real thing that companies want, is they want to see it move the needle. They want to see us driving adoption, or driving sales, or driving perceptions, or sentiment. We’ve got to move the needle.”

  • Why Migrating from VMware Isn’t as Simple as Changing Hypervisors - Refactoring is easy. Day two is where all the work is. How to think about infrastructure software as strategic instead of just tools. Plus, evaluating if your should migrate from massive stack to another.

  • It pays to speak fluent LinkedIn - if you can crack the bro code - “It involves posing a provocative question, sharing a vulnerability that you have learnt from (ideally losing your job, pet or parent), using an emoji at the start of each paragraph, and the paragraphs being absurdly short.”

  • How to use NotebookLM with a practical job search example - This is a good overview. Other than the podcast generator…I still don’t get it enough to want to use it. Maybe I don’t realize how much I need flash cards and infographics? It feels like my kids would find a lot of use for school. A professor in a box? Maybe it would be good for D&D adventure planning? Like load up the entire Rime of the Frostmaiden and just have it prep the shit out of it for you?

  • Your, My, My - Fighting Proper Noun Feature Names - In a UI, label things what they are, not your unique, product centric (often brand/marketing) name for it.

  • Internet Handle - “Internet handle” is a good name for your personal domain name.

  • Stop Hacklore! - A whole bunch of security advice for individuals, more plain-spoken than jargon.

  • The Creative Website Manual™ - Instructive thoughts on web design.

  • What the hell is going on right now? - It’s day two for vibe coding.

  • DOGE no longer has ‘centralized leadership’ under White House tech team, personnel head says - This is the story of most large IT transformation/modernization efforts. Once the executives that started it leaves, it stops. Then a new one comes in that does almost the opposite. Put all your apps in the cloud, bring all your apps on-premises. Tide goes out, tide comes in. That pattern of course fuels staff “modernization fatigue” where they just ignore all the slides in Q1 and get on with their lives.

  • Beyond JSON: Converting Spring AI Tool Response Formats to TOON, XML, CSV, YAML, … - As always, if you use Spring, you get the latest and greatest…so long as you’ve architected your socialtechnocal system so you can upgrade.

  • Walmart (WMT) Q3 2026 earnings - “Walmart has gained more high-income customers as even affluent households sought relief from pricier grocery bills due to high inflation in recent years. That cohort also has responded to store remodels and faster deliveries.”

  • Why populism became popular - tl;dr: “Nobody likes a smartarse”; populists loathe them.”

  • Gartner Survey Shows Finance AI Adoption Remains Steady in 2025 - “Three use cases stood out as they have been adopted by more than a third of respondents that had implemented AI in their function. Knowledge management - helping organizations organize, retrieve, and leverage information for better decision-making – is the most common AI use case (49%) in finance organizations, followed by accounts payable process automation (37%), and error and anomaly detection (34%)”

  • Gartner Forecasts IT Spending in Europe to Grow 11% in 2026 - The Europeans are not digging the American public cloud of late.

  • Europe’s IT spend to surge 11% amid cloud sovereignty fever

  • Digital Sovereignty in Europe According to Google Cloud

  • Life Isn’t Chess. It’s Poker. - “We conflate the quality of our decisions with the quality of their outcomes so automatically that we rarely notice we’re doing it. “A good decision that leads to a bad outcome gets reclassified in our memory as a bad decision. A terrible decision that happens to work out becomes evidence of our brilliant judgment.” We are constantly running our own internal kangaroo court, retroactively convicting or acquitting our past selves based solely on how things turned out.”

  • What Technical Debt Means To IT Professionals - “Forrester data provides clear guidance on where organizations should focus. Knowledge and process debt, selected by 37% of respondents, demands immediate attention through process improvement, reengineering, and organizational change management. Unsupported vendor software and redundant IT systems, each selected by 30–32% of respondents, require proactive migration planning before crisis points emerge. System inflexibility, identified by 35%, calls for architectural investments that preserve future options. And yes, code quality, selected by 27%, deserves attention as part of the portfolio but not as the sole focus.”

  • Reducing the 7 R’s of modernization down to 3 - new take on tech debt, from Charles Betz.

  • A second helping of weight-loss drugs is coming - I’m no epidemiologist, but all of this seems like the biggest positive health impact since vaccines. In the America, all my life The System and The Culture have been telling us we’re overweight and that is causes problems. No doubt, a lot of healthcare spend is in response to that.

  • Time to Migrate - He goes hard and detailed in the Masto recco.

  • AI Is Everywhere, but Progress Is Slow - Were solidly in the “you’re doing it wrong” era of AI hustling

  • OpenAI: The New York Times is forcing us to turn over 20 million ChatGPT conversations - That’d be an unexpected source for a data leak.

  • The Economic Impact of Brexit - “These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%.”

  • AI leads to a platform engineering revival at KubeCon NA 2025 - Your AI stack needs to have DevX, thus, a platform. ‘“I think it’s a sign of maturity that even when you mix in cloud native development with the current AI hype, organizations are actually realizing that developers are still the internal customers who need platforms as products. You can’t just say ‘get on with it’ and hand them a box of tools,” said Daniel Bryant, head of marketing, Syntasso Ltd.’ // And a list of interesting startups and small companies in Kuberntes-land.

  • Only three kinds of AI products actually work - “For my money, the current multi-billion-dollar question is can AI agents be useful for tasks other than coding?” // Good thinking about productizing AI: what seems to work and not work.

Two lovely battle maps

I’ve been playing Flight to the Undermountain. Here are two nice battlemaps from it.

These are likely made with Inkarnate. What makes them lovely is that they are very minimalist. The Inkarnate stock, too, does a good job of adding in texture to the ground. The trees in the first have some good variation.

Logoff

Each time I write a small utility, either a command line one or for an MCP server, I need to store state and config in the file system. I’ve come up with many ways of doing it. You know, like, you want to store a default LLM prompt in a file. You want to store a D&D play log in a file, or a bunch of markdown files for D&D monsters. There’s more simple things: where do you put the log file?

There’s actually standard for how you do all of this, XDG. It's think it’s from X-Windows land, but if you take a look at ~/.local and ~/.config, you’ll see that several applications use this scheme. I wanted a simple, tiny library that I could use in my Java projects to do it, so I implemented one with my pals Claude and ChatGPT. I haven’t used it yet, but it is tested. The next step in the xdgj project is to make sure it works with Spring, dragging in all the property handling and magic that comes from a Spring project.

Implementing it reminded me of one of the ways coding can be fun. This is a seemingly boring thing it’s doing, and seems so simple. The spec is wonderfully small. But it’s written in a way that requires a very close reading to catch all of the implications and how you implement it. This is especially true for section 4, which is a bit of a mess if you’re not used to this kind of spec writing. What’s going on in that section is that the spec writers are trying very hard to not take a position on how the spec is used and interpreted. And, thus, they don’t need to take on those responsibilities, nor think about them. It keeps things small and, as such spec writers would say, “minimal.” They might even say “elegant.”

Speaking of, the actual code for this “library” is tiny. It took a long time to get it that tiny! You start working on each method and type of functionality, writing the test cases as you go. You think of edge cases to test and re-code for. You go back and read the spec and realize you’ve missed something. Worse, you realize you’ve read something into the spec that wasn’t even there!1 Then you take a break, and realize that you can replace a lot of the code with just one chunk of code. You rewrite the tests, etc.

It’s fun!

Hopefully, I’ll never have to worry about util files management again.

1

In this case, the concept of an “application name” doesn’t exist in the spec and is not mentioned. It’s something every application that XDG uses, but it never shows up there. It’s implied, but not part of the spec. Put another way, the XDG spec will tell you where user data is stored - or logs - but it will not tell you how to arrange files there, what format they are in, or anything. It just tells you the “base directory relative to which user-specific data files should be written.” Does that mean you dump user files right there, or create a sub-directory for the application so you don’t overwrite other applications’ files? The spec seemingly does not care, nor does it speak of it.

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