what I hadn't realised was, things will get worse, not better: I'm now seeing systems that are complex beyond human reasoning, because humans *aren't reasoning about them*. >1kloc bash scripts embedded within >2kloc YAML files, that are not independently developed or tested, stuff like that

One consequence I thought would follow from vibecoding was, systems are not going to get simpler: when two bureaucratic processes interact, and those processes are aided by automation, there's less incentive to cut through the bureaucracy and simplify the underlying processes

The stupidest thing was discovering that `os.path.exists` can accept integers, and treats them as file descriptors, meaning `os.path.exists(0)` is true, and anything that coerces to 0 is also true for example the Boolean value false

Yesterday was quite unusual for me, I spent a whole day on one thing, writing python. It was also mostly quite pleasant.

I’ve reached half a day fighting $REDACTED_INTERNAL_CICD and can stomach no more. On to something else

@cstross @Gnuxie someone tell redhat (or IBM) that hah

ER has appeared on Netflix. Very happy

@labr @bodger hey I tuned in a little earlier and enjoyed what I heard, thanks!

@b0rk @Anarcat the sidebar specifically? (neo)vim does, but it takes some coercing to put it there. I would not recommend (neo)vim as default man pager (or editor) for beginners (despite using it myself)

@davidgerard that post is a *goldmine*

New blog post: Lanzarote
https://jmtd.net/log/lanzarote/
A stream-of-conciousness blog post to get back into the habit, discussing our holiday to Lanzarote, Autistic Burnout, the UK special needs education system, Pandoc parsers, the AI control problem and the issue of copyright and LLMs. #software #debian

New blog post: FOSDEM 2026 talk recording available
https://jmtd.net/log/fosdem/2026/video/
The video recording and slides for my FOSDEM 2026 talk (Java Memory Management in Containers) are available. I hope to write a proper postmortem blog post soon. #containers #java

@rivets I thought I did too ;) At some point I want to look at making blog posts first-class Fediverse objects

https://jmtd.net/log/lanzarote A stream-of-conciousness blog post to get back into the habit, discussing our holiday to Lanzarote, Autistic Burnout, the UK special needs education system, Pandoc parsers, the AI control problem and the issue of copyright and LLMs.

Hmm my blog-to-fedi thing isn’t working it seems

@textfiles thank you for your service 🫡

My primary reason for working on a moinmoin reader for pandoc has gone away (change of strategy for migrating Debian’s wiki) but I’ve kept working on it anyway.

@Anarcat @b0rk I could get behind a split like that, if our default man viewing tools could handle cross references and such better. Obviously non-default ones do, but the default is important imho because it’s what beginners will experience

@textfiles hi, random Q, I think you have a one-page site with a fanfare ending “internet!!!!” But I can’t remember what it is. Can you tell me please?