Espresso nerd. Tech Debt Geneologist. Lord of the Boardgames.
Mars.
Joined June 2009
- Tweets48.8K
- Following7.5K
- Followers1.9K
- Likes283K
Pinned Tweet
Reminder that I'm looking for a new role.
I'm an experienced infrastructure engineer. I've worked with Kubernetes, Terraform, Postgres, AWS, with some Azure and GCP as well.
I've also done a lot of valuable work as a backend engineer, having worked primarily in Haskell and Rust, though I've also gotten my hands dirty with Python, some Go, C++, and a bit of TypeScript.
I've also had the privilege of being a public speaker, and have also lead training seminars for peers on how to use different tools, sharp edges to avoid, and getting them to a functional mental model of how things work quickly, so they can start to ask meaningful questions and debug problems on their own.
I take ownership quickly, care deeply about reliability, correctness, and delivering quality service to customers. I say this up-front because this comes with a number of downsides, including:
* I dislike shoddy work, buggy code, leaky abstractions, or flaky services. "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" is fine and well, but tech debt brings an aggressive drag coefficient to your business, and that fact gets swept under the rug far too often.
* I don't optimize for shipping a ton of code quickly. I tend to be on the lower end of lines of code/sprint, and I'm not terribly keen on changing that. I write code to be maintainable, have clear invariants, be easy to refactor as business needs change, be easy to debug, and to quietly work while you're focus is elsewhere.
I'm also a quick study, and have a long history of getting spun up quickly on the new parts of a stack I encounter at the various roles I've filled over the years.
If this sounds like a good fit, please do drop me a line. I'd love to talk about how I can make your life better.
thewizardtower.github.io/McC…
Merlin retweeted
FACT: In the last 20 years, Israel has had 10 elections (incl. the one today). The Palestinian Authority has not had a single one during that time.
Hello all you democratic warriors, where are you?
Merlin retweeted
Democrats continue to threaten Republicans because they know that no matter what happens, nobody will do anything about it.
Except other Democrats, who listen to these calls to violence, and act.
I played the demo they released for the next fest.
Parts felt absolutely brilliant. The work of dedicated, skilled craftsmen. The care and attention to detail was immediately obvious.
Other parts felt... less polished. Part of that was that I was playing with a steam controller, and the controller UI felt very alpha -- present, worked most of the time, but sometimes just broke. In fairness, they were very up-front about this, at least after an update. It's difficult for me to play with keyboard+mouse, so I put up with it.
I was trying to decide if I wanted to buy it, it was right on the edge between yes and no (well, at least until my contract ended, which made my decision for me).
However, this announcement deeply convinces me that the team behind this was exactly as serious as those first impressions lead me to believe. So I'll be picking this up as soon as both 1) it is available, and 2) I'm gainfully employed again.
I'm sorry things worked out this way, but I'm very impressed with your decision. Not a given in today's market. Good luck in your efforts.
An Update on Early Access:
ALT The Cygnus Cross team has made the difficult decision to delay the Emberville release to January 7, 2027. This decision wasn’t made lightly. After a fantastic Steam Next Fest, we realized we simply needed more time to include all the changes and improvements that we think will make the game the best it can be. Thank you for playing our Steam Next Fest demo, and for all the wonderful comments, suggestions, and feedback. Look forward to our Early Access release in January!
Merlin retweeted
The most hilarious part of the whole Brazillian elections thing is that while the "winner" immediately starts persecuting his political rivals and censoring social media, leftists are pumping their chests about having defeated fascism XDDD
Let me break down the Flavio Bolsonaro situation and why he is in the United States just hours after the election…
First, they imprisoned his father. They sentenced Jair Bolsonaro to 27 years and placed him under house arrest after he challenged the 2022 results and was accused of plotting to overturn the election.
In this recent election, Bolsonaro was ahead. Lula and his thugs, including his former corruption lawyer, who now sits on Brazil’s Supreme Court, requested a two-hour extension that miraculously produced enough votes for Lula to win. That extension added only about 35,000 votes, roughly 0.03 percent of the total, which is nowhere near enough to explain Lula’s final margin of roughly 4.4 million votes.
Bolsonaro immediately challenged the election because anyone who is not a communist and has a brain could see that the election was stolen from him if they actually paid attention to what was happening. President Trump called the outcome a rigged election and said it looked very bad.
Hours later, they accused him of trying to overturn the election, EXACTLY as they did to his father, and accused him of inciting “violence” in the streets. Then they prohibited him from leaving the country, even though he had committed no crime, and canceled his passport to make sure he could not leave.
Fortunately, Bolsonaro had been working with the United States. They extracted him in an undisclosed operation before the authorities could throw him in prison just like his father.
Meanwhile, while ALL of this is unfolding, Lula’s little tranny lover, Erika Hilton, who is a “Congresswoman,” is publicly calling for the Brazilian government to seize Bolsonaro’s and his wife’s assets and freeze ALL their bank accounts.
DOES THAT SOUND NORMAL TO YOU? A man challenges an election, and suddenly the Brazilian government is coming after him for doing exactly that.
THIS IS COMMUNISM.
So while you see Democrats across our country congratulating Lula on his victory, including Alex Soros, the biggest demon of them all, understand exactly what you are looking at. These are the people cheering on a government that is targeting its political opposition. They are the enemy, and they will attempt the SAME thing against a Republican here in America, just as they did to Trump.
This is EXACTLY why it is essential to vote RED and make absolutely sure our country NEVER becomes what Brazil has become.
ONCE YOU GO COMMUNIST, YOU CAN NEVER GET OUT OF IT.
:Laughs in @OfficialOpeth:
I think @PalmerLuckey's argument for this is air tight and rock solid.
It'll be painfully expensive at first, but it's a tremendous step in actually reshoring chip manufacturing.
The machines that follow this trend will be cheaper and better.
Merlin retweeted
I'm not Israeli, but if I lived on a tiny strip of land surrounded by genocidal Muslims, yet managed to win all the wars, become one of the richest countries per capita in the world, and a hub of technology, science, and innovation, I'd be pretty damn proud.
Merlin retweeted
signs you've become the senior dev:
you're the only one who understands the deploy script
you're the only one who remembers why it's cursed
you wrote the deploy script
you're now too afraid to touch the deploy script
you added a comment instead, saying 'do not touch'
Memory safety is no longer optional.
Our industry has been skating on thin ice, relying on security via obscurity, hoping that a dedicated cracker wouldn't make a given piece of software or infrastructure their pet project.
LLMs make that trivial. If Linus' law of 'given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow' is true, then LLMs are acting like an infinite amount of eyes, available on demand.
You can spend 200x+ on your security budget, or 1.2x on development. Choose wisely.
Announcing 3 Critical vulns for hundreds of millions of IoT, Firewalls, OT, and Military devices including: Palo Alto Networks, Comcast, D-Link, HP, Canon, Honeywell, GE, Oracle, Siemens, Rockwell, Digi, Lockheed Martin, Boeing...
The vulns are with GoAhead Web Server which is a backend library used by these devices. There's a patch available from GoAhead but that doesn't mean there's a patch available for the devices yet -- that's up to the manufacturer.
- TLS traffic over DHE ciphers have a 1-byte secret, "04", meaning anyone can decrypt connections to these devices and steal login credentials and session tokens if the client negotiated with DHE ciphers like the latest TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256, which is extremely likely.
- LibreSSL mTLS has been completely bypassed, meaning anyone can connect over mTLS. If you have one of these devices listening on the internet and are expecting mTLS to protect it from attackers, take it offline or patch asap.
- OpenSSL Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) are not enforced, meaning if a user device is stolen or compromised, and you revoke that mTLS cert, nothing actually happens. There are a lot of other attacks this can be used for.
These are critical because these types of devices run our world. Water systems, electricity, military, firewalls, critical infrastructure.
foxio.io/blog/choose-your-ba…
Gates may use Windows, but Microsoft makes most of its money (at least, its Azure money) by running Linux boxes.
Victory is sweet.
Merlin retweeted
Chomsky was wrong.
Researchers found your brain doesn’t store language the way every textbook since 1957 claims.
For decades, the undisputed rule of linguistics, led by Noam Chomsky, was that human language is hierarchical.
We were told our brains process language using complex "grammar trees." That we secretly build deep, abstract, mathematical rules in our heads before we speak.
This new paper proves that is completely wrong.
Researchers at Cornell University analyzed how people actually process and produce language in real time.
They found sequences. Linear chunks.
When we speak, we aren't calculating deep syntactic rules. We are just predicting the next most logical sequence of words based on the context of the words right before it.
We string linear chunks together.
If this sounds familiar, it should.
This is exactly how Large Language Models like ChatGPT work.
For years, critics have dismissed AI as "just a next-token predictor." They said it isn't truly intelligent because it doesn't understand deep grammatical hierarchies like humans do.
But this paper suggests humans don't use those hierarchies either.
We are just predicting the next chunk.
Language isn't a rigid tree of mathematical rules. It's a linear stream of contextual predictions.
We thought we were building AI to mimic the complexity of the human brain.
It turns out, the human brain was just running a simpler algorithm all along.
Merlin retweeted
Today we lost Walter Koenig.
Some thoughts about a fine actor and an exceptional human being...
Merlin retweeted
People love to claim Rust rewrites are just vanity projects.
Then you put FlashRaw next to LibRaw.
FlashRaw finishes the entire batch in 0.79s.
LibRaw is still grinding at 5.5s.
12.6x faster. It is not even close.
