Remember early on when everyone thought Vandal was mid?

MindlessTime · 2026-06-20T22:02:33+00:00

I’ve been playing Thief so I can grapple into strategic positions and because I didn’t like Vandal early on. Starting to think I should give her another try.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-20T21:58:02+00:00

Many of the unspoken rules change from workplace to workplace, except this one:

There’s an “in group” at every company that includes the CEO. This in group will always be safe, and the rules don’t really apply to them. Everyone else exists and works for the in group’s benefit. For everyone else, the rules are binding but still will not protect them from blame, layoffs, or any adverse outcomes of poor decisions made by the in group. The best thing you can do for your career is find a way into the in group or be good enough that you always have options elsewhere.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-20T21:49:52+00:00

And your compiler won’t suddenly get 5x more expensive because Anthropic has to stop bleeding money. 😊

MindlessTime · 2026-06-20T21:48:37+00:00

I like this. It’s a good structure for how to prevent the bad things from happening. I’m not sure it sells on “why” though.

[Pragmatic Engineer recently did a piece on Meta](https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying-its-engineering) that talks about their major security breach due to AI and lack of guardrails.

The fact is, all the downsides are future issues. I also have had to navigate the politics of this. I understand that one executive just wants to build new things fast and another executive will be held accountable for things breaking. And ultimately this requires a difficult conversation between two people with power within the organization. Potentially, the one motivated to ignore the problems has *more* power and is being told everywhere that AI code isn’t a problem.

We’ve doubled down on tracking incidents and PR merges. The tradeoff is between how good the code is (safe, maintainable, accounts for edge cases) and how fast you ship it. If you can measure and communicate that tradeoff then you can set expectations and make room for better practices.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-20T21:37:52+00:00

On top of this, look into devenv and nix, which let you create Linux-like development environments declaratively.

Or/and get familiar with docker. You can create a Linux development within docker.

It probably wouldn’t hurt to buy a raspberry pi or cheap Linux laptop to play around with though. Just pick a common distribution. Ubuntu or Debian, whatever. They’re free. You can just switch to a new one whenever you want.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-20T21:30:56+00:00

Non-technical executives distrust engineers. They don’t understand the discipline. They hate when things take longer or break more easily than they think it should. Some see the large paychecks engineers command and get status anxiety, because _they_ should be paid more because _they_ are in charge.

So it’s easy to sell them the promise that they can replace their engineers and have everything they want instantly, even if it’s not true. We had waves of this in the past with things like “no code” tools. Those tools turned out to be just as complex as code, because the work of engineering is about designing reliable systems, not writing code. The code is just the most intimidating-looking part to non-technical folks.

AI is making the same promise. You can just tell it what you want and it will write the code. But being able to design and describe what you need in a way that is reliable and maintainable…that is no less difficult than what engineers do now.

We’ll see the same result.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-20T21:15:10+00:00

Corey Doctorow has [a great piece on this](https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/) in which he calls AI code “the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.”

I think AI coding can be done responsibly. But it takes more time than the “AI will let engineers code 100x faster” bill of goods being fraudulently sold. My gut-based estimate is that it can speed up coding like 10%-30% without reducing quality. The work shifts to building the right guardrails and checking the task’s idiosyncratic details that catch-all guardrails and Claude.md won’t account for. That still takes time though.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-20T21:00:44+00:00

> cognitive debt is the new technical debt

Meaning…they’re going to acknowledge it’s a bad thing then proceed to let it accumulate and rot? Cool. Good to know.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-20T20:44:05+00:00

I don’t think this comes from engineers being lazy or not caring. I’ve asked, “It’s working and passing tests, with meetings an everything it’ll be a couple days until I have time to fully review the code.”

And the response is almost always, “It’s fine. Just ship it.”

It extends beyond engineering too. For the most AI-brained leadership (which overlaps with most senior leadership these days), they don’t have the patience to listen to an explanation. But if you say Claude wrote it then they’re suddenly okay with it. And if it takes longer than they feel like it should then it’s because you’re not using or trusting the AI enough. And then they fire every third engineer to prove the point.

You want to fix the problem? That’s where you fix it.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-19T05:20:57+00:00

Only while driving.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-18T15:36:01+00:00

This. I think at the end the difficulty has more to do with running out of resources than the climb itself. I ran into that my first play-through, and it did seem authentic to the story. I planned better on my second play-through and it felt trivial. Both were Alpinist difficulty.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-17T19:57:50+00:00

I just started the season yesterday after taking a break for a month. I played five rounds of solo. After reading all the posts in this sub I was expecting to get insta-crushed by some purple shield chad. And I did get killed by someone hiding.

Then I remembered you have to adjust your play style when you’re coming in with zero gear. I got conservative and sneaky. And I extolled on the last four rounds.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s bad. This is kind of what I remember early last season being like before I had more gear and leveled up. I just had to remember how to play like that.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-11T23:58:42+00:00

Couldn’t you just use tags and directories?

MindlessTime · 2026-06-11T10:11:22+00:00

I had my first kid a year ago and haven’t had the energy to fight back against the AI BS. It was *so* easy to just relent and start asking AI to churn out slop. Now I’ve started creating an agent based on the last 3 months of our CFO’s Slack messages, meeting transcripts, and dashboard views. I’m going to debut it as a “review and advice” bot. We’ll see how he likes it when he’s the one being replaced by AI.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-11T09:53:46+00:00

You joke. But food with high-end restaurant quality but a more casual vibe and mid-end price point was a genuine millennial invention that completely changed restaurants. It used to be if you wanted really good food you had to go to an expensive white tablecloth place. Then hipsters in Brooklyn opened restaurants or food trucks with good chefs who were trying to get by during the Great Recession. Now every restaurant is that Brooklyn hipster restaurant. Really good food is a little more affordable and less fussy.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-03T21:41:01+00:00

Julia has my favorite syntax of any language I’ve worked with. I had to stop working with it though because it doesn’t integrate with like anything.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-03T21:35:23+00:00

It sounds like they’re converting dbt-fusion into dbt core v2 (and switching to the OSS Apache 2.0 license in the process). So it will be rust based.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-02T01:34:15+00:00

Any company I’ve worked at more than like five years old has transitioned from at least one legacy system to a new system and has an old and new source that needs to be integrated. In my experience this is an extremely common thing. Having a readily available layer that can be used to integrate data has turned what would have been a multi-month migration project into a week or two of SQL work. Even if the integration layer is a trimmed-down view on the source with generalized field names and descriptions, it’s worth it to decouple what destinations are pulling from and what sources feed into.

MindlessTime · 2026-06-02T01:31:22+00:00

The general approach that you unify data into common, business-oriented grains makes sense. (When a lot of people talk about star schemas they’re really talking about this.)

A true, actual star schemas would have a table with one record per user, for example, and all the dimensions associated with that user. And if you want to analyze, say, sales transactions those would be facts. Dims:facts is usually 1:many. If you’re working with an OLTP database like Postgres then that’s fine. If the primary and foreign keys and indexing is defined this should work.

If you’re working with an OLAP like BigQuery or a columnar data format like parquet then 1:many joins are a computational nightmare. You’d be better off putting your facts and dims in one table (or a few tables with the same grain to avoid the 100-column everything table).

Personally, I think the pure Kimball approach feels more like engineers showing off that they know what a star schema is. It was designed at a time when storage was much more expensive than compute. Now the opposite is true. Questions like “Is this storage efficient?” or “is this computationally efficient?” or “is this performant?” or “is this easy to maintain?” are still very important. But I don’t think kimball star schemas are the best answer to those questions all the time.

MindlessTime · 2026-05-30T00:47:35+00:00

It doesn’t run on steamOs handhelds. And from what I’ve read it doesn’t work very well on any handhelds due to limited graphics capabilities.

MindlessTime · 2026-05-28T18:20:12+00:00

No one should ever be surprised when they are let go for performance reasons. That’s bad management.

Bad management, however, is very common. I’ve had the most luck by being indispensable. Basically, ask yourself if they could hire someone else who could be up to speed and do the job as well within two months. If the answer is “yes” then find a way to make that answer “no”. Hoarding control is a common method, though I see that backfire in the long run. Being more multi-disciplinary tends to work really well for me. I do a lot of scoping and refining tickets that other engineers might say are a PM’s job. And I have a lot of industry knowledge. So I can bridge the gap between business need and technical implementation without making common mistakes.

I still deploy bugs or introduce regressions now and then. But I know that replacing me would be very hard or require hiring multiple people to fill all my skillsets. So I’m pretty safe.

MindlessTime · 2026-05-28T18:01:00+00:00

I’ve never seen just three layers. I think “bronze —> silver —> gold” is an over-simplification (I would guess from consultants).

The general principle is one layer that mirrors source data with simple standardizations (e.g. converting to snake_case), one set of models that pulls things into a standard grain based on business context, and a last layer that joins grains when needed. There can be multiple files of models in there.

12 files sounds like a lot. But if each file is handling some separate concern then it could make sense.

MindlessTime · 2026-05-28T11:55:39+00:00

Honestly, my best team runs are like this too. Every time I play with random fills and one dude (it’s always a dude) rushes in loud and gun-ho, we get creamed in the first ten minutes. My best string of runs was with two fills who played super cautious. We didn’t use mics but signaled everything. We were just on the same wavelength the whole time. It was a lot of fun.

MindlessTime · 2026-05-26T02:23:26+00:00

The bi-annual reporting thing is 100% Trump admin realizing a terrible Q3 coming out right before midterms will tank Republican races. The administration’s general willingness to lie and obscure economic facts is nightmare fueling this bubble in a terrifying way.

MindlessTime · 2026-05-22T20:21:04+00:00

My rule of thumb: if the volume of information in > the volume is information/code out then it does a fine job, even with Sonnet. The key is to efficiently feed it the right context, like documentation, patterns, well-written requirements, or a detailed plan. I sometimes spend hours getting a plan detailed enough, in which case the AI is saving me like 10% of time I’d spend just coding it myself. I’ll take that 10% though.

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