Mastodawn

The two worlds of programming: why developers who make the same observations about LLMs come to opposite conclusions: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-two-worlds-of-programming/

The two worlds of programming: why developers who make the same observations about LLMs come to opposite conclusions

Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

Simon Clifford Mar 10

Christine Lemmer-Webber Mar 10

It turns out GenAI code changes are causing serious incidents and outages at Amazon with "high blast radius" https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/03/after-outages-amazon-to-make-senior-engineers-sign-off-on-ai-assisted-changes/

Junior / middle engineers no longer allowed to push GenAI code to production without senior engineer review

(HT @KimPerales )

EDIT: Better link above than before. Old one is here:
https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f771de

After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

AWS has suffered at least two incidents linked to the use of AI coding assistants.

Ars Technica

Simon Clifford Mar 7

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Ada Worcester 🏳️‍⚧️Mar 5

If you don’t like programming, I invite you to do something else with your time instead of promoting the machine that lets you not do it. Some people actually like it, you jerks.

Simon Clifford Mar 5

Everyday Cyborg Mar 3

Quote in September last year for a high-memory compute server. £28,000.

Quote today for the _exact same machine_. £90,500

This is for medical research. Saving lives. When I say LLMs are killing people by killing research computing, this is what I mean.

@davidgerard.co.uk @edzitron.com

Simon Clifford Mar 2

BeyondMachines

Mar 2

coping with interstellar medium looks like the better alternative these days

Simon Clifford Mar 1

xeniax ⏚Mar 1

Please take care of your back

Simon Clifford Feb 25

Bruce Sterling @bruces Feb 25

*Literally "shouting at the cloud" here

*L33t hacker's ascii-centric website doesn't seem to have a single ad or tracker on it, what the heck gives with that

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/

The Slow Death of the Power User — fireborn

Simon Clifford Feb 23

Graham Sutherland / Polynomial Feb 22

"texting a message used to take a time approximately proportional to the sum of the alphabetical indices of the message's characters modulo 3" is one of those things that is absolutely true but also 100% sounds like a shitpost if you weren't around for that era.

Simon Clifford Jan 28

Nicole Express Jan 28

traditional software development is dead

Simon Clifford Jan 26

Research Computing Services Jan 26

We are thrilled to share that the University of Cambridge has secured a major £36 million government investment to expand our Dawn AI Research Resource supercomputer — increasing its capacity sixfold by spring 2026. This significant boost will unlock cutting-edge AI computing power for researchers and start-ups across the UK.

👉 https://bit.ly/4qZif9j

Government funding boost for Cambridge supercomputer

• £36 million investment to increase the AI Research Resource supercomputing capacity at Cambridge sixfold by spring 2026. • More cutting-edge AI chips

University of Cambridge