Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 15/09/2026I can’t understand why this is so surprising. A model’s base training set is human generated and we have literally spent millennia trying to figure out how to teach humans not to do bad things and only partially succeeding, with constant spectacular failures. Why would models be easier? 202
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 26/08/2026Man, I just feel so hard for the poor bastards who had to deal with those PRs. It's going to be a new rite of passage for software engineers. 030
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 15/08/2026I feel like if I explained Hungarian notation to a new grad it would basically sound like we used to use leeches and bloodletting to cure diseases. 000
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 13/08/2026Often so much of an exec's job is cleaning up messes that they themselves created through ignoring the overwhelmingly likely consequences of their own actions. 020
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 12/08/2026This is exactly what I was concerned about when I read about this. If I have Claude proofread my original work and I accept enough of its suggestions (even though they may be no more than your Word-grade grammar suggestions you'd have gotten pre-AI), now suddenly my work is "generated by AI." 320
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 10/08/2026Man, where the f**k did "load bearing" come from? Someone had to say it a lot for it to show up in the weights the way it has. Can we track down that person and make them pay? 120
Reposted by Paul VickScott Hanselman 🌮 @scott.hanselman.com · 07/08/2026Couple weeks ago I had my buddy @ericlippert.com on the podcast to talk about his book Fantastic Adventures in Data Structures and Algorithms, and now the book is out! Manning Publications Co. hubs.la/Q03Q9Q9y0 It's on sale right now in early accesshubs.laFabulous Adventures in Data Structures and Algorithms - Eric LippertAuthor Eric Lippert introduces fabulous solutions using uncommon algorithms and data structures. There’s a lot more to algorithms than the useful-but-boring recipes you recite for every interview. Th... 26814
Reposted by Paul VickHelen Kennedy @helenkennedy.com · 04/08/2026Read it here if you haven't yet. Today is the very best day of all days to read it for the first time. short-stories.co/@raybradbury...short-stories.coThere Will Come Soft Rains by Ray BradburyThe voice-clock sang, breakfast was ejected, but no doors slammed. The garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. The house sat alone in a city of rubble and… 27985461
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 04/08/2026I am old enough to remember when compilers' assembly output could NOT be blindly trusted, ESPECIALLY when run with optimizations on. When I started, the product I worked on had "debug" (no opt) and "retail" (with opt) builds, and one of the first things you learned to ask was which build... 110
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 02/08/2026What if I go, “I’m not saying that I _want_ someone to hack this bank and transfer a million dollars into my account, and I’m not saying that someone _should_… but, boy, it would be really _nice_ if someone did.” Is that ok? Maybe with a “<wink> <wink>” at the end? 021
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 01/08/2026I've lived under the direct flight path of the Blue Angels in one way or another for about 25 years now (first Cap Hill, now Seward Park) and I have to say, the bloom is definitely off the rose. 000
Reposted by Paul VickReverend Chapman @wadatahmydamie.bsky.social · 27/07/2026One nice thing about the Cybertruck is that there’s never a question about who gets it in the divorce 2862123
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 22/07/2026Fond memories of college. Don’t think I ever made it into the “best of” compilations. 010
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 20/07/2026Beyond the massive problem of being found as a needle in a very large haystack, there's the second-order problem of having to support the app if it actually starts being used. Getting something that works is relatively easy. Getting something that's polished and solid and bulletproof is a huge PITA.nytimes.comA.I. ‘Vibecoded’ Apps Are Flooding Apple’s App StoreMobile apps are easy to make with artificial intelligence. That doesn’t mean people are excited to use them. 110
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 20/07/2026There is a half-remembered quote I put in my high-school yearbook (!!!) because I liked it so much: "To be a god of something, you have to be able to DO it." If you claim expertise in something solely because you ask the AI, you are just a false god. It's a very real problem. 020
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 19/07/2026It’s also quite notable that given all the “fall of Western society” BS related to Lupita Nyong'o as Helen, not a bit of hand wringing about her as Clytemnestra. Hm. Why wouldn’t those boys care as much about that? (And I thought Nyong’o did an even more amazing job as her. She slayed. Literally.) 011
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 19/07/2026Saw it today and it was really good. Even had me at one point worrying that those Greek warriors weren’t going to get the gates of Troy open in time… 110
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 17/07/2026"I mean, I'm walking along there and I come to the corner and there's this 'DON'T WALK' sign flashing. How dare they? It's a free country. How does someone in the government have the temerity to tell me I can't walk into traffic if I want to? I can do whatever I want." 000
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 08/07/2026Steve Jobs killed the Xbox. I think all of the woes trace back to the disastrous launch of the Xbox One. And most of those bad decisions were driven by MSFTs obsession with defeating the iPhone. All the “three screens and a cloud” BS they were feeding themselves. 000
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 02/07/2026Something the flood of Microsoft retirement notices on LinkedIn has reinforced is just how *long* the tech boom has been. Yes, ups and downs. But Microsoft had 12k employees when I started there and it felt big. Now it has 228k. There is a *lot* of just... inertia in the industry. 020
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 28/06/2026In fairness, execs have made this mistake for longer than AI has existed. The previous iteration was "Mistakenly, we thought that by just hiring a lot of smart people and giving them the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product." Also usually ended in tears. 010
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 27/06/2026Yes, it’s like: Me, prototyping with AI: Yeah! F**k yeah! Me, trying to ship AI code: Well, this sucks. 150
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 20/06/2026Mostly they were accurate but one said that I was a former Microsoft executive. I wish? 010
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 16/06/2026In the words of the inimitable Gordon Gekko, "A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place." 000
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 04/06/2026This doesn't surprise me at all. I'm constantly wrestling with the fact that Claude is confused by the Java setup on my machine and will waste untold number of tokens figuring out over and over how to run a test. I noticed and tried to fix it but there's no reason I had to do that. 010
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 30/05/2026Everyone complains about AI sycophancy, but I'm wondering who are these people whose friends and families are out here telling them that their ideas suck and they're wrong and they shouldn't do such-and-such? In my experience, most bad ideas go unchallenged because we all know we're not... 100
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 29/05/2026+1,000,000. If there is any constant that has held true over my career, it is that executives: a) never know when to stop, and b) always go way too far. Just as some companies doubled in size (looking at you, Meta) during the pandemic, this is so going to come back to bite them all in the a**. 020
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 29/05/2026The thing is, there's a whole crowd of frogs standing on the bank of the river and every time this f**king scorpion stings one of them, they fish the scorpion out of the river. Then he climbs right on the back of the next frog, who says "This time it's going to be different." 000
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 29/05/2026"One day you will come to a fork in the road and you’re going to have to make a decision [...] If you go that way you can be somebody. [...] Or you can go that way and you can do something [...] In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do?"goodreads.comA quote by John BoydTiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. He raised his hand a... 000
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 26/05/2026My anecdotal impression from talking to folks is that companies are definitely on the hire and looking for people but are also being incredibly conservative and bouncing folks for minor imperfections. Maybe because layoffs make them paranoid about needing perfection, maybe "many fish in the sea"? 010
Reposted by Paul VickCarl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 24/05/2026Suzanne Vega releases “Luka” 39 years ago this weekend. She said she once received a fan letter about it: “Dear Suzanne, Luka is the most compelling piece of music I’ve heard in a long time. There are no words 2 tell U all the things I feel when I hear it. I thank God 4 U, Prince” 252110051985
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 24/05/2026This has always been a problem, AI has just made it 100x worse. Once you’re more than 2 or so levels away from the actual work, you lose all understanding of what that work entails and are prone to make decisions totally at odds with reality. 1152
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 23/05/2026In an unrelated vein, been doing some writing lately and discovering that I just cannot seem to remember the first "c" in "syntactic." I just keep writing "syntatic." And keep getting corrected. 000
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 23/05/2026This fits with a hypothesis that I formed early on in the ChatGPT era, namely that we would reach a point where model trainers would start paying highly knowledgeable folks to just write things to be consumed only by the model. Now it seems it's not just writing, it's more basic work as well.businessinsider.com'I got drafted': Inside Meta's push to move 7,000 staff into its AI task forceMeta reassigned thousands of employees to a new AI task force during this week's layoffs. Some are anxious and confused about what comes next. 000
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 20/05/2026Shocking and sad. I don’t think I ever interacted directly with Soma but he ran DevDiv during some of my best years there. (I think my last memory of him was a ship party for some version of Visual Studio during an austerity period at MS where they staged the party, I kid not, on… 210
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 18/05/2026The first time around it was: let's hold on and we'll restore things once the four years is over. This time I don't know there's going to be anything left on the other end of this. 000
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 18/05/2026I fail to understand how there is anyone with a glancing knowledge of this man who would actually trust him in any way, shape or form. Just as with his former boss in the federal government, I would not do anything for this man unless he paid up front and in full. And even then I would not be sure. 000
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 18/05/2026On the one hand, good that this is being exposed. On the other hand, I would say I never trusted a charity marketed in the same manner as JG Wenthworth and your local “sue for damages” lawyers. 010
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 17/05/2026We've reached the point where "I've created my own agent harness" is like when folks used to say "I've created my own programming language." Good for you! But so has everybody else in the world. 000
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 14/05/2026I now have anxiety that sometimes I sound like an LLM. I was just reviewing a message I'm about to send, and I'm like, "That sounds *exactly* like the way Claude would put it." I'm pretty sure I don't have Stockholm Syndrome, maybe the models just digested too much of my online writing? 200
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 06/05/2026This reminds me of a story told to me by an old timer when I was a wee Microsoftie. Apparently there was a huge discussion around how Windows should indicate what button on a dialog had the focus (since mice were not as common and many folks used keyboards). One dev vociferously argued…devblogs.microsoft.comA dispute over the TAB key highlights a mismatch between Microsoft and IBM organizational structures - The Old New ThingI want to speak to your manager. 110
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 03/05/2026AI is a force multiplier, but I find these kinds of "experiments" to be annoying in two interrelated ways: 1. It has always, always, always been the case that "five really smart [cutting edge] people" can code rings around the average team of 40 or 50 people. OK, without AI... 260
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 02/05/2026When I was a student in New Haven, the tow trucks would circle the block on the main drag starting at 3:50pm, waiting for parking to be illegal at 4pm on the dot. As soon as the clock struck, they’d swoop in and start towing, no quarter given. 000
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 30/04/2026Southern son William Faulkner said it best: “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” 0134
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 29/04/2026An exhausting aspect of agentic coding is the constant "problem -> request -> fix -> test" loop that's running. When I'm writing the code myself, I can often think through things and eliminate classes of problems at once, but the agent doesn't poke its head up and think, "I'm seeing a lot of... 220
Paul Vick @panopticoncentral.net · 28/04/2026An excellent time to tell a story I've probably told on here before (if so, sorry about that)... As a newbie on the VB team, I had to fix a bug in the math routines in OLE Automation. They were in assembly and I had some questions. I asked who I should talk to. "Oh, you need to talk to Tim... 100