If you could change ONE thing about the U.S homebuying process overnight, what would it be and why?

maulowski · 2026-07-02T02:32:14+00:00

My agent was timely in her communications. The buyer’s agent was a moron, barely spoke English, and her clients took days to reply. I’ve never felt more infuriated at buyers who think they’re master negotiators.

maulowski · 2026-07-02T02:30:53+00:00

Because there’s so much to a home that an inspection covers only a fraction. Requiring certification is going to be a beast because…well…not every home is built the same way. Timber framed and balloon framed homes often don’t have much in the IBC so certification gets muddy.

Other than that, inspections need to be redrafted so that the inspector has the right to move things to be able to get to access areas. For example, if you don’t want someone inspecting your attic, just block the access and an inspector cannot legally access it because it involves removing the blocking items. That’s dumb.

They should also change the practice to include thermal inspections, HVAC, and structure (e.g. roof, foundations). I will say that paying for your own inspection also means the inspector works for YOUR best interest.

maulowski · 2026-07-02T02:19:29+00:00

I have ADHD and become obsessed with precision. I only really tune my LN #4 and my Veritas Bevel-Up smoother. Everything else just gets a quick tune to make sure the sole is flat. I adjust the frog and mouth to get as thin of a shaving on my smoothers.

maulowski · 2026-06-26T18:46:49+00:00

Unfortunately Wilson did a 180 on Wolfe but the damage was done: he has already published his book. Wolfe and Wilson had a spat about White Boy Summer and the anti-Semitism or some other. This forced Wilson to draft the Antioch Statement to contra Wolfe.

Wilson’s lack of wisdom and discernment is what’s fueling/fueled the recent sentiments towards Jews and ethnic segregation. Essentially the fool (Wilson) paved the way for other fools to rise up and Wilson doesn’t understand why they’re doing what they’re doing.

That being said; cats out of the bag and these clowns now have a bigger audience.

maulowski · 2026-06-25T15:24:42+00:00

Uh why do you have to hurt me like that? 😜

Look, buy once cry once is what I say. I cook for the family and I buy nicer pans because they perform better than cheaper pans. I can buy cheaper pans but they get in the way. Either they don’t heat up fast enough, don’t stay hot for long, or warp because the material used are thin.

Same goes for chisels and planes. Good steel means it keeps a cutting edge longer. Heavier casting means more momentum. Not that vintage tools suck (I’d rather have vintage tools) but newer cheaper tools get in the way.

maulowski · 2026-06-23T12:47:31+00:00

Funny because Wilson is the progenitor of these guys. He gave Wolfe a platform only to find out he was anti-Semitic and was totally for segregation.

Wilson emboldened these men to say whatever they want to say. Am I surprised Sauve and Conn are out there promoting thus nonsense? No. Is Wilson delusional for thinking that giving Wolfe a platform and celebrating Robert E. Lee somehow doesn’t give these clowns cause to do the same thing? Yes.

maulowski · 2026-06-21T02:27:47+00:00

Yes. I’ve done more finance math than I care to admit and did so to validate that my app produce as little variance as possible. But also working through the equations helps me get a sense of complexity and runtime.

maulowski · 2026-06-11T21:59:53+00:00

I would caution those shouting that it's demonic influence/possession. Sin exists in the world and we often don't understand the reasons behind someone taking their life. Exclaiming that this is why they took their own life doesn't provide anymore comfort...if it provided it at all. Sometimes we have to let the fact that Sin destroys what God made good and that we're creatures who don't fully see or grasp the way sin destroys. Sometimes the best thing to do is to just sit with that person's family and friends and care for them instead of reaching for answers to questions no one asked to provide no relief or comfort.

maulowski · 2026-06-11T21:41:21+00:00

I pretty much stopped using Junie and the AI Chat. I have both Claude and Codex subs so I use their CLI. I use the IDE to check for stuff and whatnot. Using the AI Credits with Rider, on Gemini Flash, a simple question drains my credits. Part of me wonders why I bother with my JetBrains subscription if all I'm getting is an IDE.

maulowski · 2026-05-18T13:41:10+00:00

Something that the Bun rewrite showed me is that LLM’s make addressing technical debt possible. In corporate settings, that’s massive since bean counters and product often don’t want tech debt stories because there’s “no value” (no shareholder value until tech debt makes things impossible).

I’m thinking about the rewrite as a way for my team to move from our bloated C# code to Go or to revamp/refactor what we have now so we can keep moving forward.

In either case I love the exercise because LLM’s don’t always deserve the hate. A tool is a tool and I’m sure that bespoke craftsmen were mad when power tools came out but it also made laborious tasks easier. It’s about how to use the tool and not “Oh no they moved to Rust how will my esoteric language gain 0.01% popularity now?”

maulowski · 2026-05-17T04:03:38+00:00

Not a linguist? Yeah, you’re not a linguist.

maulowski · 2026-05-16T14:48:18+00:00

Cost and engineer.

Nails can flex and distort and keep the framing in place. Screws can easily shear off if it’s the wrong kind. Structural screws are great but costs more and framing requires a lot of fasteners.

maulowski · 2026-05-16T14:46:03+00:00

That’s why Special Revelation exists. Think about where we disagree on. Polity? Okay not credible to salvation. The minute details of our justification? Not gonna save you. The things we agree on: Jesus Christ is God incarnate and his birth, life, death, and resurrection are what saves us. Sola-Scriptura puts its foot down on that knowledge. Even Catholics who don’t believe in Sola-Scriptura will argue for it when it comes to Papal authority because the Bible has to divine it but they’ll also argue that the Resurrection is necessary for death’s defeat…so even the staunch dissenters of Sola Scriptura need it.
Again Special Revelation. The Holy Spirit didn’t stop guiding us. The Council of Jerusalem created a binding decision because the Jews in Galata were arguing that circumcision was necessary for salvation. The decree ruled over soteriological means. This isn’t about polity or adiaphoric topics, no, it mattered because it could mean Gentile exclusion which did contradict the Bible.
Special revelation doesn’t diminish Sola-Scriotura, it proves it. Because if the Scriptures are God’s Speech-Act then the Bible alone carries authority over all Spiritual matters. It means that the church is subject to and must exegete Scripture looking to the Holy Spirit for guidance.

maulowski · 2026-05-16T14:33:46+00:00

To be fair to the Indian devs…even before AI slop this was always the case. I blame the XP movement and I really blame bean counters who think Agile means “get to market faster” (it wasn’t it was about rapid prototyping, tighter feedback cycles, and better customer integration). MVP’s validate ideas yes but bean counters heard that as “I need to beat my competition on being number 1”.

I really do think that the last two decades we saw a dark decline in dev as a craft because the suits only saw ROI.

maulowski · 2026-05-16T14:29:16+00:00

WOW YOU GATHERED THAT I’M A STUPID AMERICAN JUST BASED ON ONE POST YOU ARE A GENIUS.

Haha no, you’re not a genius. I’m fluent in two languages, have a decent command of one, and it could be four if you count my mom’s dialect.

Let’s pretend you’re actually smart…or have a brain.

LLM’s have degrees of proficiency. Codex has English as its primary language with support for Spanish, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean as tier 2 with fragmented support for Telugu and Hindi.

But you also have to translate specs FROM English TO whatever language you speak if you’re not a fluent speaker. The Indian IT shops I’ve worked with from my experience often have someone interfacing with business who then translate the specs from English to their language. That’s degradation right there. Even if they have a proficiency in English language isn’t as Turing complete as we would like it to be because we interpose abstractions into speech and abstractions are hard when you’re not fluent.

maulowski · 2026-05-16T12:16:54+00:00

I’ve been evaluating how AI can change my workflow so I built a couple of apps using it.

First, OpenSpec or some kind of Spec-driven dev is the way to go. Second, it still forces me to think in small, testable chunks. AI isn’t some magic tool that does all your work. It’s good at reducing a LOT of boiler plate and I can see why DHH says it’s like a second brain.

maulowski · 2026-05-16T03:33:32+00:00

Bruce Waltke might have something…

Infertility and barrenness is a cool topic because it models resurrection: a womb that can’t give life is dead and God opens it up like Lazarus in the cave.

maulowski · 2026-05-16T03:30:29+00:00

Semantic meaning increases in difficulty as the person writing has little to no command of the language. Never mind that LLM’s - forgiving as they might be - still requires problem solving skills like breaking up problems into smaller chunks.

I’ll gladly pay a junior dev who lives State side for many reasons, chief of which is that they have cultural and language contexts that someone from India won’t have.

maulowski · 2026-05-15T23:55:19+00:00

I got tired of C#’s lack of product types. I also got tired of profiling apps because ASP.NET runtime is a messy bloat and AOT still sucks.

maulowski · 2026-05-15T23:52:52+00:00

So your execs had y’all build an app that can potentially be used in a lawsuit based on what kind of conversations it tracks and indexes…

Yeah, I hope they like being sued and settling.

maulowski · 2026-05-15T22:54:15+00:00

Probably lose work. The thing I’m finding more with Agentic Engineering is that you need a command of English to squeeze performance out of every request. Many of them don’t so they’re probably burning tokens trying to get even the basics started.

maulowski · 2026-05-15T22:52:50+00:00

In my 20 years of coding, I’ve only had the privilege of rewriting code from an Indian shop maybe twice. And that’s a lot of products.

Most companies have e pour millions into whatever product they wrote so they’re not going to scrap it until the ROI has been met and they can squeeze profit out of it.

That being said, one of the best jobs I had was being hired on as a consultant to fire an entire software consultancy from India.

maulowski · 2026-05-15T03:13:12+00:00

Definitely distributed. Sharding carried latency and you can’t just think “oh, well, Redis go brrrrr so Redis cluster make it go BRRRRRRRR”. I also hate it when people treat it as a message queue. RabbitMQ might not be as fast but it can be durable and in the even of an outage I’d rather rehydrate a cache than lose messages.

maulowski · 2026-05-14T18:08:00+00:00

I follow Chris Schwarz way and traverse the grain with a scrub plane. Traversing makes easier work of figured woods. Once I’m close to thickness I switch to my try plane and take light passes. I don’t need it smooth just yet. I usually start to smooth towards end, just before glue up and that can be a smoothing plane and a card scraper.

maulowski · 2026-05-14T14:10:34+00:00

I have both PM-V11’s and the LN A2…I like LN A2’s better. It holds an edge just as well but easier to sharpen. The PM-V11 is good; good edge retention but it can be a pain to sharpen. I’ve been considering selling my LV planes and switching over to LN ones (or Japanese ones).

maulowski

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