iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Not to any fine degree. I think family lore maintains either Ireland or Austria based on places named Naas and having Irish/Germanic ancestry. But iirc my ancestors have been in the US for generations and were a nice mix of various types of European and some indigenous American, all lost to time

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Funny enough, there's a town in Ireland called Naas, except it's pronounced "Nace" like it rhymes with face or pace. That was a surprise. I don't have any family connection to the place, but I did visit there briefly once for the novelty of the name when I was visiting Dublin years ago

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

I feel you. It sounds like your last name and mine are pronounced very similarly if not the same, except for the extra N on the start of mine. It's been a lifelong (born and lived in the US) annoyance having a last name that defies common English pronunciation and spelling norms

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

This relates to why a college instructor I know would stop reading submissions if they went beyond the word count limit. The true challenge wasn't showing what you know; rather, it was showing you could carefully select from the near-infinite knowledge space and concisely to respond to the prompt

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

...And the "gay panic defense" is absolute garbage, and it's often a made-up, after-the-fact legal fiction for folks who committed violent crimes in the full knowledge they were committing violent crimes against someone who was gay

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

I didn't see someone mention this yet in the comments, but it sounds to me like he's trying to set up what's called a "gay panic defense". The tl;dr is "I had a temporary mental episode b/c of a gay person's alleged behavior. Ergo, not responsible for my actions." (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_and...)

en.wikipedia.org

Gay and trans panic defense - Wikipedia

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

This, incidentally, is exactly how a former college instructor I know answered students who complained about the instructor's strict refusal to grade on a curve. The instructor had to drive over a bridge to get to work every day, and the instructor wanted to make sure the civil engineers knew math

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Lu wilson @todepond.com · 16/02/2026

free open source software needs fewer engineers and more designers and product people

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

No joke, though, I am excited to get this deployment together. It's an OpenStack cloud, and I could not have put this together without the excellent work the OpenStack community put into making it even possible to expose different storage backends through a single, transparent-to-the user service

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

I am the proud architect of a private cloud going into production with not 1 but *3* different storage backends on EOL hardware cobbled together to meet the cloud's storage demands until we can get the real production storage backend in place that was delayed due to shenanigans.

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

I wonder how much of this trend was driven by tech execs optimizing for getting funded/bought out or something like that instead of actually solving a problem or running a business. Your target customer in that case would be the VC/hedge fund folks and not whoever actually uses your service I think

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Micah @rincewind.run · 17/02/2026

have you ever read one of my Discworld QOTDs and thought, hey, I should really get around to reading those books? good news! the full series is back on Humble Bundle - it’s Kobo but it’s pretty easily to transfer those to your preferred e-reader you won’t regret it

humblebundle.com

Humble Book Bundle: Best of Humble Bundle: Terry Pratchett's Discworld by HarperCollins Encore 2026

Experience Sir Terry Practchett’s beloved Discworld series! Get 35+ books covering all corners of this comic fantasy universe and help support Room to Read!

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Reposted by Jadon Naas

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

Union workers solved the trolley problem, you're welcome

IWW IU 520 (Railroad Workers) PRESENTS:

TROLLEY PROBLEM SOLUTION

"Slip the switch" by flipping it while the trolley's front wheels have passed through, but before the back wheels do. This will cause a controlled derailment bringing the trolley to a safe halt.

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Reposted by Jadon Naas

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 28/01/2026

olive oil is a legitimate interest

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

After exposure to Samin Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat book (wherein she talks about the quality of olive oil), I take a much greater interest in olive oil than I did before. None of that "comes from 12 different countries and swirled together in a big jug" business anymore

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Emma the Sewer Socialist @mayorseidel.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

The thing I have come around to is that educated people, and aspirationally this means everyone, should be *literate* in the full range of fields, from technical through humanities. We can’t all know everything, but all fields should be legible to us. We should know how they build and use knowledge.

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

At this point I'd be delighted if I *didn't* have to use an interface to do something (inb4: chatbots are still an interface, and I'd argue an even worse interface crudely bolted over not-very-good interfaces)

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

They wouldn't even have to do the work of building their own marching band program if they partnered with Drum Corps International. I would watch more football if they had the Cavaliers, the Blue Devils, or whoever else is popular these days in marching band perform during the game

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

... it's a sign that the information is not easily accessible enough. I feel like part of the promise of the "cashier-less" grocery stores was that you didn't have to talk to/engage with a surly cashier. But what if the cashier wasn't surly? Wouldn't that be cheaper to accomplish than all of this?

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

I think a lot of the hypothetical use case for AI (LLM, especially) type tooling is papering over poor customer experiences, poorly designed user experiences, and poorly made things in general. Using an agent to pull info off a site because the site is too difficult to do that task isn't winning...

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

...Like imagine if you could feel like you wrote a book by simply reshuffling notes, links, and redoing your organization system again for the 100th time to produce a book-shaped result without having to really put pen to paper. (Sure, there might be editing, but that's different than writing)

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

I wonder if part of the allure for LLMs, esp. for coding, is that it taps into the procrastinator's work-about-work need, but you get to feel like it's work because you get something work-shaped at the end without actually doing the real work...

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Gonna give systemd timers a try instead of cron for a job to copy data from old OpenSearch indices into an archive index. systemd timers look like a neat thing. I wish they would have used a better variable name than %i for the unit name in templates, but that's my preference for more verbose names

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

You might ask why would someone need to dump hundreds of old tmux sessions. The short answer is there might be hidden tribal knowledge of a complex, inadequately documented system buried in those sessions belonging to former team members.

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

One neat small tech thing I have recently learned about is that you can capture all of the scrollback buffer from a tmux pane to a file to review later using the "capture-pane" command. I've had the pleasure recently of slowly and painstakingingly dumping a couple hundred old tmux sessions to file

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

At this stage of things, I feel like LLMs (and more broadly generative AI in its current form) are very much like a missing stair (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing...). Some think LLMs are genius wonders, but then LLMs facilitate real-world, significant harm on people with less power in social groups

en.wikipedia.org

Missing stair - Wikipedia

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

And there's a chance there's not even servers holding the GPUs that you could buy on the cheap and repurpose since most of the GPUs that were bought are sitting in warehouses somewhere, assuming the servers didn't exist just to provide basic functionality wrapping the GPUs

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henry ✷ @strange.website · 01/01/2026

you’re right! it feels mostly awful to Go Online™, these days. the internet in a sad state, for reason after reason after reason. but there is a way to fix it; to trade the voidful howling for a quiet & joyful song. here’s how to win the war for the soul of the internet, and build the Web We Want.

henry.codes

A Website To End All Websites | Henry From Online

How to win the war for the soul of the internet, and build the Web We Want.

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Reposted by Jadon Naas

Neugin @lostcitymagic.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

A message for you all to carry through the year

Image is a popular astronaut meme. An astronaut is looking at the earth from space saying wait, I am worthy of love? An astronaut is behind him holding up flowers and saying always have been

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

I got another bag of Harney and Sons Scottish Morn tea, and I must say that tea is terrific. It is a very nice, solid black tea, especially if you like drinking strong black tea. I also recommend Harney and Sons Milk Oolong tea. That tea is some of the best Oolong tea I have ever had.

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Call me senseless, but what if we just removed the need to always have a stapler at hand? What kind of life needs to have all of these random bits of bric-a-brac immediately at hand? This kind of idea makes me wonder if the people pushing these products have some cartoonish notion of others' lives

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Based on my own experience, I think building a team that can do the work with only a light touch on guidance is an excellent goal to work towards. I'm a big believer in letting professionals/competent folks do what they need to do, but keeping close by in case they need support of some kind

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Of course, there were other times when I helped guide architectural decisions and made sure individual work harmonized, you could say, with the rest of the team's work. I was really fortunate to work with great engineers who mostly needed me to support them and stay out of their way

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

I am wrapping up a fractional tech lead role for a small software engineering team, and I felt like sometimes my main role was to be an accountability sink for the engineers on the team. That is, they knew what needing doing, but they needed me to say "yes, let's do that".

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

I could understand moving from a monolithic repo if you were afraid of the blast radius of introducing a bad change, but that still feels like something you could solve through better post-deployment testing and monitoring. Not sure if moving between monolith <-> microservices would actually help

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

I'm curious if this indicates a problem in inadequate testing or change management. One of the orgs seemed to have good automated testing and controls around changes. Another org did not have good automated testing and controls.

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

I've seen an org decide to go from a monolithic codebase to multiple repos/units, and I've seen an org decide to go from multiple repos/units to a monolith/monorepo. The main factors in these cases were how difficult was making changes and avoiding regressions.

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

I wonder if we shouldn't look at code in determining whether to use a monolithic or divided architecture and rather we should look at the experiences (maybe structures, like in Conway's law terms) of the teams and organizations managing the code...

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

I'm not up-to-date on the state of the art, but JSON Web Key Sets are still one of my favorite machine-to-machine authentication methods when I need to auth communication between services I develop. Mostly because it's stateless, and I don't have to worry about revoking/running a DB/managing state

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

I wonder if demystifying technology work would help foster healthier relationships around technology. Sure, it is magic, but it's not magic in the Gandalf/Merlin/wizard sense. Oftentimes in my experience, it's just pushing buttons until the computer-shaped thing does what you need it do

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

I let audit logging for a software feature get cut in the name of trimming scope for an MVP, but I'm inclined to believe that if you think audit logging would be a useful thing to have at any point it's probably worthwhile to include in the current MVP. I can't say why, but cutting seems incorrect

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

Software cultures are absolutely deprived of compassionate moments where we get to be human together and experience being on the same side together. I really believe that humanness changes people's lives and I'm not giving up on its power. I have seen it measurably work, again and again.

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

Right! I think this kind of thing often happens when teams focus on shipping the feature without asking if the feature is anything anyone actually wants or helps the person at the other end of the computer actually do whatever it is they want to do (assuming that's something the team cares about)

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

The power of defaults is one of the reasons why the pit of success (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archiv...) is one of my favorite metaphors for how we should make successfully using or doing whatever the user needs the easiest path. It should be more difficult to run into trouble, not easier

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

I think this kind of shit talk is especially appropriate given that the Gospels go to some length to criticize the people who loudly, visibly, and aggressively proclaim how faithful they are in public places instead of living the virtues they claim to hold so dearly

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

I think one true sign of software engineering skill is when you can solve a problem without any new code. Even better is when you can solve a problem through only talking to people and building better relationships and mutual understanding

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Jadon Naas @djadonn.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

I think one lesson folks should take away from using LLMs to make code is that the code wasn't really the important part to begin. Sure, you usually need code, but code is mostly the expression of someone's domain knowledge applied to fixing a particular problem at hand

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