Mastodawn

I made two Terra Cotta ollas to sink into one of my raised garden bed. You fill these with water and the water slowly seeps through the porous clay into the dirt. The roots of the plants are attracted to this slow water seepage and surround the pots. I'm testing these near my tomato plants and hoping for the best. (photos attached)

Dave Bergen May 28

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Nonilex May 27

Dr. Homer Venters, fmr chief medical officer of NYC jails who previously consulted with #ICE on preventing detainee deaths, called the rise in suicides terrifying.

It “reflects failures in how the system’s being operated, & particularly failures in how the first stages of coming into #detention are happening so that people aren’t being assessed adequately, &then if that…screening picks up red flags, they’re not acted on in a way that reduces the risk of them having preventable death.”

Dave Bergen May 28

This life is a blanket fort
Always teetering about to fall over

Many times it does collapse and bury us
We can be dismayed or find the joy in putting it back together

We are only here for a short time
Best we can do is find some good friends and some snacks to share

Dave Bergen May 16

I have figured out what people really want:

Everything all at once right now for free.

All of the credit and none of the blame.

Dave Bergen May 16

Mitchell Hashimoto May 15

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).

It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.

The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.

Dave Bergen May 10

Caroline Kinlund May 9

My 7-year old, cleaning the playroom with me: Do we have a hot glue gun?
Me: Yes… why?
Him: if we glue every object to another object then it’s half as many things to clean up

#ConversationsWithMyKids

Dave Bergen May 10