Posts tagged: techhttps://waylonwalker.com/tags/tech/atom.xml2026-06-16T08:16:58ZAll posts with the tag "tech"Waylon Walkermarkata-goPrompt Seagullshttps://waylonwalker.com/prompt-seagulls/2026-06-16T08:16:58Z2026-06-16T08:16:58ZI was listening to @syntaxfm this morning and @wesbos said at 328s "The prompt seagulls are driving me nutty". 100% hard agree Wes. Now I didnt just come off...<p>I was listening to @syntaxfm this morning and @wesbos said at
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A2MCNKC_hQ&t=328s" style="--favicon-url: url('/assets/markata/link-avatars/www.youtube.com.png');" data-favicon="/assets/markata/link-avatars/www.youtube.com.png" class="has-avatar has-avatar-before">328s</a> “The prompt seagulls
are driving me nutty”. 100% hard agree Wes. Now I didnt just come off of a
conference where they dropped fable 5. I’ve not logged into twitter in months,
but I see it around work.</p>
<div class="admonition warning">
<p class="admonition-title">prompt-seagulls</p>
<p>“Prompt, PR-ompt, promt, PROMT”</p>
</div>
<h2 id="a-hrefrule-1-classwikilink-data-titlethere-is-no-such-thing-as-magic-data-descriptionmagic-exists-to-describe-things-that-are-beyond-our-current-understanding-when-you-describe-your-solution-to-a-problem-as-magic-you-are-admitting-that-you-data-date2026-06-14there-is-no-such-thing-as-magica"><a class="wikilink" data-date="2026-06-14" data-description="Magic exists to describe things that are beyond our current understanding. When you describe your solution to a problem as magic, you are admitting that you..." data-title="There is no such thing as magic" href="/rule-1/" data-preview="Magic exists to describe things that are beyond our current understanding. When you describe your solution to a problem as magic, you are admitting that you...">There is no such thing as magic</a> <a href="#a-hrefrule-1-classwikilink-data-titlethere-is-no-such-thing-as-magic-data-descriptionmagic-exists-to-describe-things-that-are-beyond-our-current-understanding-when-you-describe-your-solution-to-a-problem-as-magic-you-are-admitting-that-you-data-date2026-06-14there-is-no-such-thing-as-magica" class="heading-anchor">#</a></h2>
<p>Asking for the prompt as a first question here, is a clear sign you are looking
for magic. What are the magical incantations I must pass to all master clanker
to get it to do the things that I want. Wrong, there is no magic prompt to
get impressive results, its people that know and understand their craft that
get amazing results. They have taste. They have design in mind, They see
what the end product should be. They are guiding the model to do what they
want and are not surprised when they get it.</p>
<div class="admonition warning">
<p class="admonition-title">prompt-seagulls</p>
<p>“Prompt, PR-ompt, promt, PROMT”</p>
</div>
<h2 id="process">process <a href="#process" class="heading-anchor">#</a></h2>
<p>No one is one shotting their work and kicking up their feet for the other 39
3/4 hours of the work week. Theres process and methodology to it. Develop the
right skill files, the right AGENTS.md, instructions, all of the other things.
This puts the ball in your court telling the models how you want these things
done without deep prompting.</p>
<div class="admonition warning">
<p class="admonition-title">prompt-seagulls</p>
<p>“Prompt, PR-ompt, promt, PROMT”</p>
</div>
<h2 id="taste">taste <a href="#taste" class="heading-anchor">#</a></h2>
<p>If you want to build products that humans use and enjoy you must bring some
level of domain expertise. You should know a bit about your product, your
customer, and how the underlying tech you are working with works. You should
understand the basics of how websites are built and laid out or how a cli
operates. If you don’t you will inevitably build out something that does the
job, but is not intuitive, does not look good, or feel good, and no one can
figure out how to use it, cause no one, especially these days, no one is
reading the docs.</p>
<div class="admonition warning">
<p class="admonition-title">prompt-seagulls</p>
<p>“Prompt, PR-ompt, promt, PROMT”</p>
</div>
<h2 id="testing">testing <a href="#testing" class="heading-anchor">#</a></h2>
<p>Actually try to use your product, can you? Can you hit errors? You probably
should be able to one way or another if you are accepting input from a user
they are bound to be able to input something you cannot just automatically
recover from. In these cases does it make sense, can you easily see what you
were supposed to do, or why it was wrong? Does it work on various resolutions?
This goes for about everything these days, web or terminal. Can you read the
output on a full screen easily? What about a half screen? If you’re a Philz
coffee mac fanboi with slinging a top of the line 8k display, does it even work
on what a mere mortal might be trying to use?</p>
<div class="admonition warning">
<p class="admonition-title">prompt-seagulls</p>
<p>“Prompt, PR-ompt, promt, PROMT”</p>
</div>
<h2 id="good-starting-point">Good starting point <a href="#good-starting-point" class="heading-anchor">#</a></h2>
<p>Ai repeats patterns it finds, its very good at repeating patterns it finds
nearby. If your existing codebase is not consistent, and riddled with
pitfalls, it will be replicated and be digging larger holes for you to dig up
later.</p>
<div class="admonition warning">
<p class="admonition-title">prompt-seagulls</p>
<p>“Prompt, PR-ompt, promt, PROMT”</p>
</div>
<h2 id="old-school-checks">Old School Checks <a href="#old-school-checks" class="heading-anchor">#</a></h2>
<p>Automated checks are a hard requirement for me these days, lint, type check,
secret scan, cve scanning. All of these things help drive consistency and
helps reliability.</p>
<div class="admonition warning">
<p class="admonition-title">prompt-seagulls</p>
<p>“Prompt, PR-ompt, promt, PROMT”</p>
</div>
<h2 id="actually-read-some-of-the-code">Actually Read Some of the code <a href="#actually-read-some-of-the-code" class="heading-anchor">#</a></h2>
<p>Now for the most controversial, un-vibe coder thing… Actually try to read the
code. You might notice some things. Somethings like regression testing, and
supporting old versions, old formats, duplicating schemas. AI is really good
at waking up from a cold state, assuming everything it sees is in production
with real users and writing a lot of code. It will do things like supporting
the version that it made 5 minutes ago and never shipped for eternity. Have
your clankers review too, that’s also fine, not a substitute for you taking a
look. Even if you are not finding the tiny bugs here, you will understand more
about how your project works, the direction its going, and be able to catch
directionally wrong shifts.</p>
Waylon Walkerhello@waylonwalker.comhttps://waylonwalker.comten year computerhttps://waylonwalker.com/thought-947/2026-03-17T09:32:50Z2026-03-17T09:32:50Z!https://alexwlchan.net/2026/ten-year-computer/<div class="embed-card embed-card-external">
<a class="embed-card-link has-avatar has-avatar-before" href="https://alexwlchan.net/2026/ten-year-computer/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="--favicon-url: url('/assets/markata/link-avatars/alexwlchan.net.png');" data-favicon="/assets/markata/link-avatars/alexwlchan.net.png">
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<div class="embed-card-title">Dreaming of a ten-year computer – alexwlchan</div>
<div class="embed-card-meta">alexwlchan.net</div>
</div>
</a>
</div>
<p>Great gusto here from someone looking to fill landfills less. Get more use from what they paid for. Dodge some tough times in the hardware industry. I’m going to argue that the 10 year computer is not one bit crazy right now. No idea what the future entails, if local llms get good enough to really get so useful they feel required this could easily change. One issue I had with the post as they are looking to get a machine for the next 10 years is they were so focused on themself that they missed the point. They were so focused on buying something that would work for them for 10 years that they bought something brand new rather than thinking about the bigger issue of how do we get hardware to last 10+ years. Some factor of this involves giving our devices a second life. Two things went wrong here. First it appears they they have a perfectly good imac with a broken screen. I know nothing about apple/imac, assuming that the screen is toast and unrepairable, I know you can ssh into a mac this feels like good potential for server hardware. Next they purchased a brand new mac mini. Hardware has been good for a long time, there is no need to buy new right now, especially now. I haven’t bought a new machine in years and most of my hardware is second hand cobbled together stuff, and has no issues. I’ve got one machine thats 16 years old, 2 machines at 9 years, one at 8 years. To get here they need to be repairable, designed to last, and probably no run windows as they will release something that renders them too slow or require new hardware for security that wont work.</p>
Waylon Walkerhello@waylonwalker.comhttps://waylonwalker.comA pretty good email scamhttps://waylonwalker.com/thought-874/2025-12-01T18:22:02Z2025-12-01T18:22:02Z!https://cassidoo.co/post/email-settings-scam/<div class="embed-card embed-card-external">
<a class="embed-card-link" href="https://cassidoo.co/post/email-settings-scam/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">
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<img class="glightbox" src="https://cassidoo.co/og-image/email-settings-scam.png" alt="A pretty good email scam — How I helped family recover from a clever email scam that hid behind sneaky account settings" loading="lazy"/ data-glightbox="description: A pretty good email scam — How I helped family recover from a clever email scam that hid behind sneaky account settings">
</div>
<div class="embed-card-content">
<div class="embed-card-title">A pretty good email scam</div>
<div class="embed-card-description">How I helped family recover from a clever email scam that hid behind sneaky account settings</div>
<div class="embed-card-meta">cassidoo.co</div>
</div>
</a>
</div>
<p>scams suck. This is a good story, sorry to hear that it happened to a real person. If you or anyone in your family has a compromised email, add these to your checklist to fix.</p>
<ul>
<li>automatic forwards</li>
<li>2-factor email</li>
</ul>
Waylon Walkerhello@waylonwalker.comhttps://waylonwalker.comYouTube has earned its crownhttps://waylonwalker.com/thought-788/2025-08-07T14:22:58Z2025-08-07T14:22:58Z!https://world.hey.com/dhh/youtube-has-earned-its-crown-48f12ccc<div class="embed-card embed-card-external">
<a class="embed-card-link" href="https://world.hey.com/dhh/youtube-has-earned-its-crown-48f12ccc" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">
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<img class="glightbox" src="https://world.hey.com/dhh/avatar-fb368b1ee9b185dc2a09b03eabdb61678dd55244" alt="YouTube has earned its crown — I often give Google a lot of shit for shutting down services whenever they're bored, hire a new executive, or face a three-day weekend. The company seems institutionally incapable of standing behind the majority of the products they launch for longer than a KPI cycle. But when the company does decide that something is pivotal to the bu..." loading="lazy"/ data-glightbox="description: YouTube has earned its crown — I often give Google a lot of shit for shutting down services whenever they're bored, hire a new executive, or face a three-day weekend. The company seems institutionally incapable of standing behind the majority of the products they launch for longer than a KPI cycle. But when the company does decide that something is pivotal to the bu...">
</div>
<div class="embed-card-content">
<div class="embed-card-title">YouTube has earned its crown</div>
<div class="embed-card-description">I often give Google a lot of shit for shutting down services whenever they're bored, hire a new executive, or face a three-day weekend. The company seems institutionally incapable of standing behin...</div>
<div class="embed-card-meta">world.hey.com</div>
</div>
</a>
</div>
<p>I wonder how much of <a href="https://killedbygoogle.com/" style="--favicon-url: url('/assets/markata/link-avatars/killedbygoogle.com.png');" data-favicon="/assets/markata/link-avatars/killedbygoogle.com.png" class="has-avatar has-avatar-before">killed-by-google</a> is due to is <a href="https://thoughts.waylonwalker.com/post/787" style="--favicon-url: url('/assets/markata/link-avatars/thoughts.waylonwalker.com.ico');" data-favicon="/assets/markata/link-avatars/thoughts.waylonwalker.com.ico" class="has-avatar has-avatar-before">20 percent time</a>. Allowing engineers to follow a passion project turns into a real product that doesn’t have full backing and support of the company.</p>
<p>similar to DHH as much as I am hurt by reader and all of their privacy BS that comes from ad based revenue I appreciate YouTube and them supporting all of the creators on it. Giving a platform for small creators the ability to sustain themselves and reach a larch audience without big coorporate rules.</p>
Waylon Walkerhello@waylonwalker.comhttps://waylonwalker.com20 Percent Time – Ted Merzhttps://waylonwalker.com/thought-787/2025-08-07T14:19:33Z2025-08-07T14:19:33Z!https://ted-merz.com/2022/09/14/20-percent-time/?utm_source=chatgpt.com<figure>
<a href="/static/https://ted-merz.com/2022/09/14/20-percent-time/?utm_source=chatgpt.com" class="glightbox-link" aria-label="https://ted-merz.com/2022/09/14/20-percent-time/?utm_source=chatgpt.com"><img class="glightbox" src="/static/https://ted-merz.com/2022/09/14/20-percent-time/?utm_source=chatgpt.com" alt="https://ted-merz.com/2022/09/14/20-percent-time/?utm_source=chatgpt.com"/ data-glightbox="description: https://ted-merz.com/2022/09/14/20-percent-time/?utm_source=chatgpt.com"></a>
</figure>
<p>Googles 20 percent time is fascinating to me. It seems like a great way for engineers to fill up their tank with new skills, passion projects, and the need to scratch an itch. To me these days it feels like something that would incentivize good talent to join.</p>
<p>I can remember back earlier in my career December and January were slow months for big companies. Riddled with vacation and annual planning cycle. I would use this time to create tools and libraries that would help me move quicker throughout the year.</p>
<p>I clearly remember having a conversation with a colleague several salary grades ahead of me come mid February asking what I was up to. I was furiously pecking away at some of these projects while he let me know that he had been waiting for this years plan for months and had no tasks from the boss.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That said, I don’t think any major tech company is going to adopt 20% time these days. It’s too chaotic, too hard to manage and impossible to measure.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This line from Ted feels exactly why 20 percent time generally blows up and likely turns into another <a href="https://killedbygoogle.com/" style="--favicon-url: url('/assets/markata/link-avatars/killedbygoogle.com.png');" data-favicon="/assets/markata/link-avatars/killedbygoogle.com.png" class="has-avatar has-avatar-before">killed-by-google</a> product that has a small user base and is furious about it being killed. With enough of these at least one <strong>cough</strong> <em>reader</em> <strong>cough</strong> has affected us all.</p>
Waylon Walkerhello@waylonwalker.comhttps://waylonwalker.comNew Phone Day Apr 2 2025https://waylonwalker.com/new-phone-day-apr-2-2025/2025-04-02T08:57:47Z2025-04-02T08:57:47Z!!! info backdated<div class="admonition info">
<p class="admonition-title">backdated</p>
<p>This represents the first sign in to this new pixel 6.</p>
</div>
<p>This will be my 3rd pixel 6 since 2021, One shattered screen and one blown
battery. My first one was brand new, the first new phone i’ve had in years.
That phone only proved to me that new flagship models make no difference to me,
I had been running pixel 3 refurbished for many years before.</p>
<h2 id="no-social-media-on-this-device">No social media on this device <a href="#no-social-media-on-this-device" class="heading-anchor">#</a></h2>
<p>Social media sucks become a bunch of people yelling “fake news” at each other
and propping up their political candidate as the savior of everything. Elon
bought twitter and fractured it. The communities are no longer here, and I
have to dig through so much political posts to see post on tech and engineering
its not worth it anymore.</p>
<p><strong>update</strong> from a year later and It’s been great, I check socials like once a
week hoping to find better things, but it all seems like the same BS. The
Crypto bros have moved on to AI so hard that I just cant stand watching most of
them yap about something that they have no understanding of and how much AI
does such a better job at, how you are fomo by not following the new shiny
thing that no one will talk about next week.</p>
<h2 id="few-apps">Few Apps <a href="#few-apps" class="heading-anchor">#</a></h2>
<p>My wife gets on me all the time for running it so lean. It’s getting harder
and harder to just have the few apps you want and use a browser for the rest.
Each store, each vehicle, each doctor are needing their app more and more
today. What do I know, probably next to nothing about their apps, but it just
feels so wrong to install an app that could have been a website. I’ve seen the
shady shit facebook does through their apps that turns out to be protected by
drm law created a decade before anyone ever saw a smart phone.</p>
Waylon Walkerhello@waylonwalker.comhttps://waylonwalker.com⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Changelog Master Feedhttps://waylonwalker.com/thought-253/2024-04-20T01:47:19Z2024-04-20T01:47:19Z!https://changelog.com/master<div class="embed-card embed-card-external">
<a class="embed-card-link" href="https://changelog.com/master" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">
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<img class="glightbox" src="https://cdn.changelog.com/static/images/share/twitter-master-8e71f3d7acf22cec2efb6c4633ba01e8.png" alt="Changelog Master Feed — Your one-stop shop for all Changelog podcasts." loading="lazy"/ data-glightbox="description: Changelog Master Feed — Your one-stop shop for all Changelog podcasts.">
</div>
<div class="embed-card-content">
<div class="embed-card-title">Changelog Master Feed</div>
<div class="embed-card-description">Your one-stop shop for all Changelog podcasts.</div>
<div class="embed-card-meta">Changelog · changelog.com</div>
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<p>Jerod (It’s ya boi) and Adam are my favorite tech news nerds, and have the sickest podcasts in tech. Yes plural podcasts they run seven podcasts maybe more. If you want it short and sweet they got the best 15 minutes of tech news each week this is it. My favorite is Ship it, sad to see Gerhard go, but Justin and Autumn are crushing it. Every episode is highly polished and surrounded by the sickest beats in podcasting.</p>
<p>Subscribe to one pod if you want, but I recommend collecting them all with the master feed.</p>
<p>⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐</p>
Waylon Walkerhello@waylonwalker.comhttps://waylonwalker.comRug pull, not cool! (Changelog & Friends #40)https://waylonwalker.com/thought-250/2024-04-20T01:36:03Z2024-04-20T01:36:03Z!https://changelog.com/friends/40<div class="embed-card embed-card-external">
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<img class="glightbox" src="https://snap.fly.dev/friends/40/img" alt="Rug pull, not cool! (Changelog & Friends #40) — If Changelog News had an extended edition, this might be it! Jerod & Adam discuss Hashicorp's Cease and Desist letter, Redis getting forked, Boston Dymanics' scary cool new robot, Justin Searls' extensive use of the Apple Vision Pro, Thorston Ball moving from Vim to Zed, Firefox becoming hard to use, Beeper joining Aut..." loading="lazy"/ data-glightbox="description: Rug pull, not cool! (Changelog & Friends #40) — If Changelog News had an extended edition, this might be it! Jerod & Adam discuss Hashicorp's Cease and Desist letter, Redis getting forked, Boston Dymanics' scary cool new robot, Justin Searls' extensive use of the Apple Vision Pro, Thorston Ball moving from Vim to Zed, Firefox becoming hard to use, Beeper joining Aut...">
</div>
<div class="embed-card-content">
<div class="embed-card-title">Rug pull, not cool! (Changelog & Friends #40)</div>
<div class="embed-card-description">If Changelog News had an extended edition, this might be it! Jerod & Adam discuss Hashicorp's Cease and Desist letter, Redis getting forked, Boston Dymanics' scary cool new robot, Justin Searls' ex...</div>
<div class="embed-card-meta">Changelog · changelog.com</div>
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</a>
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<p>Five star episode with Jarod and Adam shootin the crap.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://opentofu.org/blog/our-response-to-hashicorps-cease-and-desist/" style="--favicon-url: url('/assets/markata/link-avatars/opentofu.org.png');" data-favicon="/assets/markata/link-avatars/opentofu.org.png" class="has-avatar has-avatar-before">The massive Cease and Desist</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sucks that the guest had to back out, what a wild world 2024 is. Filled with license and pricing changes.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/from-vim-to-zed" style="--favicon-url: url('/assets/markata/link-avatars/registerspill.thorstenball.com.png');" data-favicon="/assets/markata/link-avatars/registerspill.thorstenball.com.png" class="has-avatar has-avatar-before">From Vim to Zed</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Interesting to hear the journey into zed, way to go Thorston diving all the way into working at zed.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/boston-dynamics-debuts-humanoid-robot-destined-for-commercialization" style="--favicon-url: url('/assets/markata/link-avatars/arstechnica.com.png');" data-favicon="/assets/markata/link-avatars/arstechnica.com.png" class="has-avatar has-avatar-before">Boston Dynamics’ new Atlas</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I later saw this through a YT short, and man does it hold up to the creepy level that they described.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://markdowndown.vercel.app/" style="--favicon-url: url('/assets/markata/link-avatars/markdowndown.vercel.app.ico');" data-favicon="/assets/markata/link-avatars/markdowndown.vercel.app.ico" class="has-avatar has-avatar-before">MarkdownDown</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a legit cool service, that converts <a href="/html/" class="glossary-term" title="HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the standard markup language used to create and design documents on the World Wide Web. It structures web content by...">html</a> into markdown</p>
Waylon Walkerhello@waylonwalker.comhttps://waylonwalker.comDevin's Upwork "side hustle" exposed (Changelog News #90)https://waylonwalker.com/thought-247/2024-04-18T01:18:04Z2024-04-18T01:18:04Z!https://changelog.com/news/90<div class="embed-card embed-card-external">
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<img class="glightbox" src="https://snap.fly.dev/news/90/img" alt="Devin's Upwork "side hustle" exposed (Changelog News #90) — YouTuber "Internet of Bugs" breaks down why AI "software engineer" Devin is no Upwork hero, Redka is Anton Zhiyanov's attempt to reimplement Redis with SQLite, OpenTofu issues its response to Hashicorp's Cease and Desist letter, Brian LeRoux introduces Enhance WASM & PumpkinOS is not your average PalmOS emulator." loading="lazy"/ data-glightbox="description: Devin's Upwork "side hustle" exposed (Changelog News #90) — YouTuber "Internet of Bugs" breaks down why AI "software engineer" Devin is no Upwork hero, Redka is Anton Zhiyanov's attempt to reimplement Redis with SQLite, OpenTofu issues its response to Hashicorp's Cease and Desist letter, Brian LeRoux introduces Enhance WASM & PumpkinOS is not your average PalmOS emulator.">
</div>
<div class="embed-card-content">
<div class="embed-card-title">Devin's Upwork "side hustle" exposed (Changelog News #90)</div>
<div class="embed-card-description">YouTuber "Internet of Bugs" breaks down why AI "software engineer" Devin is no Upwork hero, Redka is Anton Zhiyanov's attempt to reimplement Redis with SQLite, OpenTofu issues its response to Hashi...</div>
<div class="embed-card-meta">Changelog · changelog.com</div>
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<p>Damn 2024 is such a shit show, now Devin seems to be out as a complete scam. It’s really teaching us to have skepticism for what you find on the internet. Turns out that when broken down frame by frame much of the description in the video was a straight up lie. Personally it seemed quite plausible that it was percentage points better than the competition, but I was not holding my breath for it to be a hands off engineer.</p>
Waylon Walkerhello@waylonwalker.comhttps://waylonwalker.com