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It was pitch black. I was eaten by a grue. (he/him)

aka https://wiki.dbbs.co https://dobbse.net https://dobbs.github.io https://linkedin.com/in/dobbse (used to tweet at https://twitter.com/dobbse)

Four responses to overload, by Woods and Hollnagel, summarized by @dobbs: https://burnout.wiki.do/view/four-responses-to-overload
four responses to overload

Thinking "human in the loop" as you deploy AI everywhere? Hope you're testing the humans and the AIs together. As you read this article, think about your business-critical systems. The authors are focused on safety-critical systems, but the whole software industry is hastily combining humans and AIs without this kind of sophisticated testing. We could do irreparable harm to businesses everywhere. There's pragmatic advice here if you choose to understand it. https://ai-frontiers.org/articles/how-ai-can-degrade-human-performance-in-high-stakes-settings
How AI Can Degrade Human Performance in High-Stakes Settings | AI Frontiers

Dane A. Morey, Jul 15, 2025 — Across disciplines, bad AI predictions have a surprising tendency to make human experts perform worse.

AI Frontiers
The AI Ops and AI SRE stuff feels like fighting the last decade's dumpster fire of industry-wide SaaS entanglement with the the next decade's gasoline of LLMs.
It was so much fun witnessing @erikareads working through all the details of making an easier-to-share web page for the Ten Machine Requirements! This paper is important and timely, and Erika just made it more accessible. This work matters!
I recently read the paper "Towards Joint Activity Design Heuristics: Essentials for Human-Machine Teaming" which I loved so much I wanted to make it easier to share. To that end, I've excerpted the Ten Heuristics from the paper here: https://human-machine.team/ with anchors for each heuristic.
Ten Machine Requirements To Satisfy Essentials Of Joint Activity

@marick @adrianco Two books come to mind that show some of this. One is 99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz which teaches a notion of shameless green and refactors to a better model. The other is Domain Driven Design, Section III which tells stories of models that reveal limitations and are improved with insight.

We are designing a new research project in the Developer Success Lab, and we're seeking to understand software engineers' experiences with *incidents* ! Good, bad, ugly, all of it!

Have a big story or strong POV on this? We're bringing together a small community group for a one time zoom session, to share stories and help us learn. You'll directly influence what the lab studies on this.

You can let us know if you're interested here (more details below):

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeuQiE0Ww1oElsWNk6a9KyEmIgqfwHdpnV5_dN9CP4qornJhg/viewform?usp=sharing

Incidents community-group

We would love to register your interest to be part of a small (4-5 person), one-time, group conversation about incidents in the context of software engineering and software engineering orgs. This conversation will help inform a new research project we are embarking on at the Developer Success Lab. The goal will largely be to develop ideas about this broad topic and help us find less visible areas of work involving incidents to bring into the light for the broader research and engineering community. You can find out more about our work here: https://dsl.pubpub.org/original-research We will contact you at the email you provide below. Thank you very much for taking the time to be here, and for your interest in contributing to this work.

Google Docs
@jenniferplusplus Thanks for this. I feel seen.

I read The Unaccountability Machine a while ago and liked how it introduced accountability sinks and “large corporations as AIs”, but felt it had some oddities in its analysis.

I’ve kept seeing people discuss it, and decided to turn my gripes (and likes) into a blog post: https://ferd.ca/notes/davies-on-the-unaccountability-machine.html

Davies on The Unaccountability Machine

@dtauvdiodr I don't know "tiled windows" and also don't know your window sizing needs... but I have been happy using the free version of https://rectangleapp.com/ to get keyboard control to move windows around in MacOS. My own window placement needs tend to be just putting one thing on the left half and another thing on the right half.
Rectangle

Move and resize windows in macOS using keyboard shortcuts or snap areas. The official page for Rectangle.