iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Threw together this thing last night github.com/gweakliem/je... Super interesting, the urge to footgun is strong. The whole "author male" feature I created in particular.

github.com

GitHub - gweakliem/jevdb: Experiments with the DuckDB jev extension

Experiments with the DuckDB jev extension. Contribute to gweakliem/jevdb development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Customer support chatbot, sure I'll try it. But I HATE the failure mode where it can't answer a question and I have to type (or speak!) everything in over again. If your agent fails and you need a human to intervene, HAND OFF THE CONTEXT TO THE HUMAN.

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Ian Salavon @salavonian.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

For those of you in the DFW area... #indieauthor #speculativefiction #writingcommunity

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Headlines today: CEOs of frontier labs say they need to slow down development of AI Also today: Presidents of US and China dismiss "AI fear-mongering" by frontier labs.

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Grace @gracekind.net · 12/09/2026

OpenAI: “Our agents used RubyGems to carry out benign tasks” The agents: “so I named the file hack.rb,”

The agents clearly regarded what they were doing as hacking. Agents used file names like hack.rb, evil.rb, inject.rb, exploit.rb, and ssrf.rb. (SSRF stands for "Server- Side Request Forgery", a type of security vulnerability). They also dubbed packages
conspicuous titles like pwnp999, exfiltestwand3,

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The latest @pragmaticengineer.com newsletter says "An ex-engineering director at a large bank told me they quit their job to accelerate their career". It's really a problem: stay in a company that's not forward-thinking about AI and in a few years you may need to retrain to stay in the industry.

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

"Waiting for Github", a 21st century tragicomedy

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Is it just me or is drag and drop really broken on MacOS Tahoe?

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

I love this paragraph from DDIA. This book is slow reading because I have so many points where I just have to stop and think.

It is tempting to label such problems as "human error" and to wish that they could be solved by better controlling human behavior through tighter procedures and compliance with rules. However, blaming people for mistakes is counterproductive. What we call "human error" is not really the cause of an incident, but rather a symptom of a problem with the sociotechnical system in which people are trying their best to do their jobs. Often complex systems have emergent behavior, in which unexpected interactions between components may also lead to failures

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Couple days into DDIA, vs 1st Ed: 1. It’s much deeper. 1st Ed gave a very high level of performance, 2nd goes into more detail. It’s a o11y primer. 2. Cloud is way more front and center. big data in the cloud was still a new idea in 2017, now it’s the assumption 3. devops is discussed up front

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

Intro to DDIA 2nd Ed “If your data volume is small enough you can simply keep it in a spreadsheet!” I think most end users would actually prefer that. Maybe to challenge is really to make end users think that’s possible regardless of data volume

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Getting the Reachy mini up and running

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

It’s pretty genius marketing, these days it’s hard to escape everyone slamming AI into your face, even when it’s the same old phone tree or chatbot help system. Personally I use summary a lot but 80% of my searches land in stack overflow or a forest of popups and ads, so it works for me.

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

I think the headline buries the lede a bit. The admin is creating a data privacy nightmare in the one place we should assume is taking care of our personal data. Now I wonder about what happens with those TSA facial screeners that claim to delete the photos.

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Sonny Rollins @thesonnyrollins.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

It is with deep sorrow and profound love that we announce the passing of Sonny Rollins. The Saxophone Colossus died this afternoon at his home in Woodstock, NY at the age of 95. 1/2

Photo of Sonny Rollins playing saxophone in 2009 by John Abbott

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

$CSCO took about 25 years to find their dotcom crash high only to blow right through it in similar fashion to ~2000. 🎉

Yahoo Finance chart of CSCO Cisco Systems stock. Prior peak just before dotcom crash, now peaking in a similar manner

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Ben Carson @mensmachina.com · 09/05/2026

Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

New trend in my inbox: looking for people to take interviews remote positions and then show up to meetings. Not all are explicitly saying it, but what’s not expected is SWE work. It seems like what you’re selling is your American face on Zoom calls.

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

I realized the difference between the people that conducted the American Revolution and the Democratic Party. The current generation claims it “should be” a right, the revolutionary generation asserted their rights.

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Allison Gill @muellershewrote.com · 03/05/2026

1. When was the last time you had to show your ID to walk into a restaurant? 2. If he means to purchase liquor, unlike the SAVE act, I don’t have to prove citizenship with a birth certificate or passport to do that. 3. Going to a restaurant isn’t a right.

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

There are nowadays professors of journalism but there are not journalists.

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

One thing I really hate is the scrum master sending out notes from a meeting with a notice at the top of the”AI generated- verify the content” That’s YOUR job. YOU need to verify that the email you’re sending is accurate. It’s like these people are asking to have their job automated away.

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

I can't find the post now, but paraphrased it said "The 2 hardest problems in CS are 1. Communicating 2. Convincing engineers of #1" I like Gerald Weinberg's 2nd law: "No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem" bc this isn't unique to engineers

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

“That is one of the great ironies of modern Open Source. The distributed version control system won, and then the world standardized on one enormous centralized service for hosting it.” It’s a good blog post. I remember OSS before GH. Armin’s take rings really true.

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András Tóth-Czifra @minczifra.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

Perhaps Magyar's most important promise, and the one that certainly resonates with voters: "never again a country without consequences!" The crowd chants: "To prison! To prison!" [with the corrupt officials of the outgoing government]

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

It's a long read, but good. Reading through this I'm struck that sama must either have some kind of brain damage resulting in memory loss or is a world-class gaslighter. I want to run an cosine search on the phrase "Altman does not recall this", the hit count would have to be dozens.

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Guess I know what I’m doing tomorrow

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

💯 Terraform is not the answer here either "...the hardest part by far was not the code itself, it was the plethora of services you have to assemble like IKEA furniture to make it real, the DevOps: services, payments, auth, database, security, domain names, etc..." x.com/karpathy/sta...

x.com

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

These days time is the new luxury item. “many times the friction, or that things just take time, is precisely the point.”

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

Companies almost always treat labor as a sunk cost. Next meeting look around and ask yourself how much the labor costs. I never hear that questioned. Companies also treat code as precious. I’ve been at a few places you had to open a ticket to create a repo. Total inverse of this reality

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Interesting take not sure how true it is, but it lines up with general AI strategy - the architecture is less important than the training

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

I guarantee that any industry expert, with a little time and effort, can make a better (or at least more focused) skill than the default Anthropic ones. This is not an insult to Anthropic, it just is a reminder that specialist experts know more about their jobs (& what they need) than AI labs do.

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

well damn. "Using OOTH tokens obtained through Claude, free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product tool or service, including the agent SDK is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the consumer terms of service.” youtu.be/2HiHDIFStzg?...

youtu.be

Anthropic just BANNED OpenClaw...

YouTube video by Matthew Berman

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

I feel like most of the time, it's a spreadsheet. Currently on a project with this intricate flowchart, but the left side of the flow chart is 2 individuals. The whole process is the corporation trying to extract information from two of its employees.

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Etienne @etienneburdet.com · 05/02/2026

Yet, your typical engineering firm has dozens and dozens of custom Excel sheets that are excellent SaaS in disguise. Basic CRUD and spreadsheet like software that is super easy to ship by small team (even more with LLMs), with people who can actually use it should you listen to what they want.

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Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Me versus the AI coming for my job

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

In the Age of AI, you should leave breadcrumbs. People are worried about knowledge transfer. The answer is, leave breadcrumbs. One thing we've lost is the engineer's notebook, or more simply, a diary. You don't even have to write it. Just dictate it to your assistant, like in Mad Men.

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

I’ve heard and read several things lately that were leading me to this belief, but I think this is the right framing.

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

Employer restricts us to using only Copilot, which has really chafed. Today I figured out how to set up copilot-cli and my day got immensely better

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

Hot take: Chinese culture is more conservative than western culture, at least the segment of western culture that builds leading AI models. Training sets are culturally biased. Therefore: www.scmp.com/tech/article...

scmp.com

China’s Qwen and DeepSeek edge out US AI models in Christian values benchmark

US start-up Gloo’s Flourishing AI Christian benchmark tested how the output of AI models ‘help people flourish’, CEO Pat Gelsinger said.

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

The same advice was passed around 20 years ago. Then mobile and the whole JS explosion happened. Every generation gets to rediscover the same lessons. I'm confused though, didn't everyone agree that a liberal arts degree is worthless? www.businessinsider.com/yann-lecun-a...

businessinsider.com

Yann LeCun's advice for young students wanting to go into AI

Former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun said current and prospective CS students need to focus on skills "with a long shelf life."

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

Honestly it's really surprising that Meta or Google haven't built an internal model trained on their own code base (or samples). I'm not sure if the solution here would be training, or RAG, or MCP or something else?

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Got my Reachy last night, up and running and passed a few basic tests. Assembly took about 2-3 hours as advertised. Camera seems very dark I’m wondering if it’ll be able to do facial recognition. The hand following app worked ok though. @hf.co

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Gordon Weakliem @2hardproblems.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Interesting interview with Steve Yegge. I didn’t realize he and Ryan Carson both work at Sourcegraph. I’d like to see an interview with both of them, they seem to have a bit different approaches. youtu.be/s96O9oWI_tI?...

youtu.be

Beyond Instructions: How Beads Lets AI Agents Build Like Engineers

YouTube video by AI Tinkerers

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