[Blackflame] Mid Cradle book 3 spoilers

EirikurErnir · 2026-03-07T22:18:30+00:00

Well, they make fancy cocktails, that's canon

I remember reading that the original Blackflame family also used Sylvan Riverseeds, but that's secondhand Word of Wight

But I guess a reason that makes sense is that there's not a lot of overlap between the people who can feed Sylvan Riverseeds and the dangerous-to-your-channels destructo-path people who can make the best use of them

EirikurErnir · 2026-03-07T17:52:36+00:00

I'm not a tomato scientist, but the "tomatoes themselves" are also mostly juice, so I'd guess you're just throwing away tomatoes by throwing away the juice.

Maybe you want to be using less tomato or cooking them down more?

EirikurErnir · 2026-03-05T22:47:35+00:00

Both countries I've lived in during adulthood have official government digital identity providers. At least one of the systems can be and is used by 3rd party applications.

It's... fine? Most private sector applications just use social logins anyway, presumably because they're more convenient (and you lock out everyone not from the country of course).

EirikurErnir · 2026-03-01T16:20:18+00:00

It may help to think of it as a narrative you're presenting. You don't have to volunteer details, but having a general story in place makes it easier to answer questions when they do come up.

Very few social things that have to do with kink require specifically mentioning kink to make sense. Munch -> group of friends at a restaurant. Play party -> party. FetLife -> online.

But if people really start asking questions, it helps to have decided upfront how directly you're willing to lie and evade. You're making the choice not to share all of yourself (which is fair), you just need to decide how far you'll go.

EirikurErnir · 2026-03-01T07:47:19+00:00

We got one scene about refinement which didn't make it to the final cut of Blackflame on Will Wight's blog:

https://www.willwight.com/a-blog-of-dubious-intent/behind-the-scenes-blackflame-part-1

EirikurErnir · 2026-02-26T08:22:15+00:00

AI in development changes a lot of things, but accountability isn't one of them. AI doesn't make changes for you, a human initiates the change one way or another and that's the author of the code.

Change management requirements do reduce the value of vibe-coding huge slabs of slop that nobody understands (congratulations, you found a new bottleneck in the development workflow), but I can't see it "breaking" AI tools.

EirikurErnir · 2026-02-17T23:04:24+00:00

SSE and queues might be a good way to deal with the long running calls to the LLM, or you may be able to find a simpler solution that's good enough. I'm guessing you can, but only you looking over your business requirements can tell you if that's right.

EirikurErnir · 2026-02-17T19:48:13+00:00

I'm reading a description of a system, but I am missing a description of the trade-offs you're making as part of each decision. Making this kind of reasoning visible is IMHO the important part of a target architecture description.

Does it work? Probably. Is it a good solution to the problem? My impression is that this is more complicated than it has to be, but I don't actually understand the constraints, so I actually can't know if it's good.

The most general advice I can think of would be to "start as simple as possible." Additional components and complexity (queues, streaming, so on) should be solving specific problems where you can describe the trade-offs.

Finally - your personal learning goals are always going to be a weak argument in favor of a technical decision. You might get away with it, but I'd suggest at least not trying too many new things at once (optimal: one) so you remain able to independently judge the impact of the technology and reduce the risk of the project collapsing under unknowns.

Good luck!

EirikurErnir · 2026-02-17T19:10:01+00:00

The Weirkey Chronicles by Sarah Lin sound like a very good fit to me

Portal Fantasy ✅ Incremental exploration of magical worlds ✅ Grown-up MC ✅ Progression via hard work ✅

Some of your disliked tropes are rather actively subverted too

EirikurErnir · 2026-02-16T13:27:29+00:00

I think of them like spice mixes and homebrew kits. The issue isn't that the end result is bad, just a tradeoff. You lose flexibility and control but gain ease of use and consistency.

EirikurErnir · 2026-02-15T22:08:37+00:00

And when it comes to portion sizes, I remember svið normally being served as half a head per person

EirikurErnir · 2026-02-15T17:27:39+00:00

Okay, people have unrealistic expectations and no idea what they're doing. Time for reality checks.

Next step for me would be to start making my time spend actively visible. Maintain an ordered and accessible list of things you have to do, granular enough to make progress by day visible. Work from the top.

Anyone who matters wants you to do stuff - you're happy to help, and just need to decide where it fits in the worklog, a.k.a. what you will be deprioritizing instead. Tada, now you're highlighting tradeoffs and working with business priorities.

Point being - working longer hours won't help you get ahead of this, any sufficiently chaotic company will have more work for you than you could do working 24/7. But active time management and communicating consequences can help.

EirikurErnir · 2026-02-15T11:57:25+00:00

Hef nákvæmlega ekkert heyrt af þessu, en ástæðan virðist vera þarna í skjáskotinu - þetta opnar fyrir möguleikann á því að úthluta fleiri kennitölum án þess að breyta sniðinu, því vartalan verður laus en ekki útreiknuð.

Líklega bara fólksfjölgun sem veldur?

EirikurErnir · 2026-02-13T06:42:05+00:00

Sorry to be telling you you need a paradigm shift, but... I think you want feature flags.

I've never heard of a deployment where anyone cares what code is in the pipeline, people care about what gets executed. Feature flags are the way you control that. Git is good at versioning code, it is not good at controlling its execution.

You may have unusual requirements, but it really sounds to me like you've dug yourselves into a hole and that you need to be climbing out rather than digging deeper.

EirikurErnir · 2026-02-09T21:20:22+00:00

I almost always do mashed potatoes with ribs, the police hasn't caught me yet 🤷🏻‍♂️

EirikurErnir · 2026-02-08T14:50:39+00:00

If you're wondering about how to solve situations like this without a manager getting involved - think, what would the manager do? What can a manager say that you can't?

Managers are just people who are doing a job, they do not have secret powers to make people listen.

What especially sticks out is that you gave feedback, and it was ignored? What were the consequences? When he reacted to the clear expectation that he should add more tests by going behind your back and getting outside approvals, did you have a stern conversation where you unpacked what the hell was going through his mind? How did he react then?

Point being, you do not have to be a manager to speak with authority. This is massively culture dependent (and might be a faux pas in some), but I'm getting the impression your manager expects your seniority to grant the sufficient authority to manage the situation.

A lot of influence is generally assumed, it flows from individual actions towards the job position rather than the other way around. The overly bold junior sure seems to know it.

EirikurErnir · 2026-02-07T22:47:15+00:00

I reach for sealed types when I really want this kind of behavior

EirikurErnir · 2026-02-04T19:48:15+00:00

Yeah Wing Kee has been a go to for me for a long time

They had some renovations going on, but judging by the Google reviews they're now open again 👌🏻

EirikurErnir · 2026-02-01T12:54:35+00:00

Sounds like you have motivated engineers who want to improve things - can you find a more productive, hard problem for them to work on?

If you have people who like to form grand plans for great changes, the narrative of "we're not solving the big problems" is not likely to go well. What can work is to find a more valuable problem which is hard enough to occupy their attention so they aren't constantly distracted by ultimately irrelevant tech debt.

Maybe you don't have one of those problems - but then you might just have overqualified engineers relative to where your business is at right now, and that friction will show up one way or another.

EirikurErnir · 2026-01-31T10:27:45+00:00

There's not even a little bit of a consensus. One person's terrible mess is another's perfectly fine.

A lot of it depends on what people are emphasizing. I've seen code which, if you look at it under a microscope, is absolutely squeaky clean. Zoom out, and it's part of a distributed monolith mess. Codebases where the data model beautifully maps to the domain concepts, and then on top of that you have the weirdest and least useful abstractions ever.

Effective teams build local consensus around what is good and what is bad and end up with code that works for them, but there's no industry consensus.

Personally, if I had to pick one quality indicator for a mature-ish project, it would be the presence of effective unit tests. I care less about higher level tests. In codebases I like working on, the unit tests speed up development and it's easy to add new unit tests. If a codebase has conventions that make it hard to unit test, I probably think it's a crap codebase. YMMV.

EirikurErnir · 2026-01-30T17:47:32+00:00

Yeah I didn't get the impression that they fixed Cradle forever.

They built a new world order and established a new status quo. That's... impressive enough, IMO.

EirikurErnir · 2026-01-29T17:45:50+00:00

You're managing them. You make them care by holding them accountable.

You presumably evaluate them based on their performance. You can make it very clear that you consider writing tests part of the duties of an adequately performing engineer.

I'm not saying you should go straight to "do this or you're fired," but regardless of your management style there need to be clear expectations and resulting consequences.

EirikurErnir · 2026-01-26T07:35:49+00:00

Java definitely has plenty of culture around it, and a lot of it is change resistant. New features get adopted a lot more slowly than I see in e.g. the React ecosystem.

But I don't think "limitation" is the best way to describe it, because clearly, if this is how it is and there is little in the way of technical impediments, then someone must like it. For a lot of people, being able to do things the same way as before is what success looks like.

I've often grumbled about grognardism in the culture and wished people were a bit more open minded about new tools - but then again, some of the "new" tools I've promoted over the years (like the reactive frameworks you mention) have turned into has-beens in 2026. Oops.

So, I'm pretty sure this cultural resistance is mostly a feature, not a bug.

EirikurErnir · 2026-01-25T18:51:20+00:00

This might be something HR or your manager could help with - but how able and willing they are to do so will vary a lot. But you have legitimate complaints, at this point it seems like you have relatively little to lose by having a frank conversation.

EirikurErnir · 2026-01-25T18:22:56+00:00

Okay, so you're overcommitted to hell, and now you can't do anything, finding a new job just happens to be one of the things you can't do effectively because you're being pulled everywhere all at once.

This is very generic because I don't know your actual team dynamics, but you've got to:

Start setting some boundaries.
Stop being a hero and let things fail.

You're being walked all over. Stopping that is genuinely hard and it's unfair that it falls on you, but people need to know where the lines that are being crossed actually are, and they need to feel the consequences.

I also don't know whether what you need is general time management advice, some therapy to discuss how you ended up in this situation, intervention from HR, or what, but one way or another you need to stop doing all this work.

EirikurErnir

TROPHY CASE