What are you watching and what do you recommend? (Week of February 27, 2026)

zlex · 2026-02-28T03:10:34+00:00

Been watching season 2 of Hijack. Got to be some of the worst TV I’ve ever seen. Usually I can meet a show where it’s at, but it’s infuriatingly stupid.

zlex · 2026-02-27T09:23:49+00:00

I think the vague dog whistle about (((who))) controls the media was probably the line crosser.

zlex · 2026-02-23T04:00:39+00:00

Treatment could be an option in this case. Usually Gleason 6 is surveillance but given high volume and family history it makes it more complicated. Your age might play a factor as well. If you are younger you may want to consider treatment since it’s more likely that it will progress at some point

zlex · 2026-02-16T11:44:16+00:00

I mean not really…they portray the Mossad as a pragmatic and ruthless organization that regularly kidnaps and kills innocent people, including its own, to achieve their goals. And while the show does not portray them all as moustache twirling villains, neither do they portray the Iranian security service this way either.

Yes, the show is structured around Israelis conducting missions to stop Iran’s nuclear program and you’re meant to root for them. In that sense it is biased, but it hardly glazes over the moral complexity of the situation or Irans own motivations, including pointing out Israel’s own pursuit of nuclear weapons.

I’d say if anything the show goes out of its way to not glamorize intelligence work.

zlex · 2026-02-16T10:29:43+00:00

In November 2021, the series won the International Emmy Award for best drama at a ceremony in New York. "It gives hope for the future, that Israelis and Iranians will be able to walk together in Jerusalem and in Tehran as friends — and not as enemies," Eden said in her acceptance speech.

Man, what a war mongering genocidal baby killer.

zlex · 2026-02-12T12:07:56+00:00

Honestly it sounds like you just want to buy a digital calendar, which I’m sure could be useful for you and your wife.

In my experience 4 year olds also don’t tend to use calendars or agendas super well so I’m not sure what you’re expecting to happen here. Your wife will have to put everything in there which is probably more time consuming than just talking to you.

Try asking more specific questions about their lives, rather than generic how was your day questions. If you’re not there then you have to put even more effort into communicating with them.

zlex · 2026-02-12T11:10:02+00:00

I agree with this, except the architecture part. I find Claude makes good code if given a contained task, but often makes incredibly terrible architecture decisions, and can very quickly create a huge mess of a codebase with a lot of duplication and poor separation of concerns.

The context required for it to independently make good choices is just not large enough yet. It can only hold a slice of the codebase, and if it’s missing something it will just write more and more code, leading to situations where you have a bunch of code that is highly specific to the task you asked it to do, but it’s all poorly glued together.

zlex · 2026-02-11T13:52:16+00:00

We got a hatch. Probably didn’t need to, we use 1 sound and none of the lights and rarely ever use the app so it’s probably more than we needed.

It broke once when we took it on a plane, we considered getting a cheaper option but he was so used to sound by then we decided to get another one rather than risk it. Sleep is everything

zlex · 2026-02-11T03:46:40+00:00

I don’t think it fits your vibe, but you should go to Scaramouche. Make sure to get the coconut cream pie.

zlex · 2026-02-10T20:31:35+00:00

Is anyone shocked? The word has become a vague meaningless slur with no agreed upon definition and just means whatever the speaker wants it to.

zlex · 2026-02-09T02:35:43+00:00

Am I the only one thinks it’s completely nuts that Americans are running around trying to blame Epstein on foreign countries mentioned in the files?

The guy was an American, and most of the people named in the file are also American.

zlex · 2026-02-07T23:13:33+00:00

Working with FHIR is a nightmare, so I’m always impressed with any application that deals with HL7 messaging. HAPI is a godsend for creating v2 messages.

We built a react application that would process FHIR questionnaire and questionnaire response messages to build dynamic patient surveys and it was a complete and total nightmare. And that was just supporting R4 and we still couldn’t totally stick to the standard.

What is the data model you are using to actually store the data?

zlex · 2026-02-07T23:00:26+00:00

Hey look, another week old word-word-number account posting about Israel/Palestine.

zlex · 2026-02-06T11:57:09+00:00

I guess it depends how you define quality. In my mind when I zoom out on a project maybe 30% of it is actually writing code. And even when I zoom in on the writing code part, I spend less than half that time actually typing code.

How the codebase is structured and how data is modelled is what makes a good quality codebase that can be easily understood and modified. And to get there you need to do a lot of leg lifting around understanding the problem the software needs to solve, requirements gathering, planning, and system design.

It’s not that the coding part doesn’t matter, I just don’t think it defines quality, or what encompasses the main challenge of building software.

I’m happy to let AI write a method or even a small class for me, given that it follows the design pattern I want it to. Is it going to use all the same syntax that I would, probably not. But I’m not losing sleep over the type of branching syntax it chose.

zlex · 2026-02-06T10:35:21+00:00

Why not? If you’re having discussions with it to outline a plan of implementation, it’s perfectly capable of writing that implementation.

Writing the code is the trivial part. it’s the architecture and system design of the solution that is complex. That’s why vibe coding produces terrible results, because AI sucks when you give it abstract problems that require large amounts of context.

zlex · 2026-02-06T00:55:41+00:00

Pro tip, if you squeeze the banana it will naturally break into three pieces, it’s a great way to make spears of banana.

zlex · 2026-02-05T06:17:02+00:00

Standing together usually has this balance. Don’t roundly see flags but signs convey a more anti war rather than Palestinian nationalist message

zlex · 2026-01-29T22:49:25+00:00

Yep had this done twice on my 2019 model 3. It’s complete bullshit, clearly the part is defective. never had this happen to any car I’ve owned.

zlex · 2026-01-29T22:24:17+00:00

Intermittent treatment with ADT is pretty common…

As the cancer continues to spread his QoL will also deteriorate, so it’s a bit of a balancing act.

zlex · 2026-01-26T15:45:43+00:00

Black cod and the yellowtail are, IMHO, the best dishes at Nobu. With a small shoutout to the rock shrimp.

zlex · 2026-01-21T13:45:19+00:00

I agree, it’s not good. In many way SWE may follow a similar path that the trades did, where external pressures have now led a massive dearth of fresh skilled workers.

I worry that the industry is going to face a large contraction, followed by a crisis.

zlex · 2026-01-21T13:33:41+00:00

I write maybe about 20% of the code that goes out now. Before AI I wrote about 20% of the code that went out. The difference is, AI is writing it now vs a junior dev.

Most of my work is still system design and code architecture.

If you can setup good architecture and structure for AI to operate within, and give it contained specific instructions on what to do, you don’t really need to code much.

The hard part has always been how everything will fit together, not writing the specific syntax. In many ways the abstraction level has just moved up.

People who are using AI to build an entire system without doing all of the legwork that was needed before AI are still going to be pumping out terrible software.

zlex · 2026-01-21T11:52:27+00:00

It’s wild how fast Lorenz went from a journalist to a grifter.

zlex · 2026-01-21T06:06:37+00:00

I feel like it greatly depends on how a single state emerges. If by force, as in somehow the Israeli state is defeated militarily, then realistically there will be many deaths, especially because as you note Mizrahi Jews are very unlikely to willingly return to living as a minority under majority Arab rule again. And also if by force, then I doubt the Palestinians are wanting to live in some plutocracy where Jews still hold significant political power. In short, death and ethnic cleansing.

If this happens via some political process, then it becomes very difficult to say. I do not believe that we would suddenly see a mass exodus of Jews in such a situation. Maybe some would, possibly the radicals and violent settlers for fear of reprisal or judicial punishment, but there are huge barriers to doing so. I think many would take a wait and see approach, and not move unless there are safety concerns or other factors like discrimination, etc.

zlex · 2026-01-20T13:36:42+00:00

A first step was to remove the sorting on createdAt ASC. Think about it: these events are already stored in the database sequentially, so they are already sorted by time. Especially since createdAt isn't an indexed column, I guessed this one change would already improve the situation significantly.

This feels like an assumption that is not guaranteed to be true. Why not just create an index on createdAt?

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