Notices by Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)

IDK who needs to hear this, but you shouldn't buy promises of utopian futures with abundance and UBI from dudes who spend a considerable fraction of their time figuring out how not to pay their taxes.

Tired: this meeting should have been an email
Wired: this app should have been a web page

https://danq.me/2026/07/09/your-app-could-have-been-a-webpage/

Pro tip for regulators looking to do good by their citizens (a troublingly small subset):

The memorypocalypse (deflationary RAM pricing across multiple years) should put usable hardware lifetimes at the very center of the agenda; the best approaches are legislated bootloader unlocks from date of sale, firmware code-in-escrow (OSS'd + patent unencumbered for firms that fail to deliver security updates less than 6 years out), and legalising browser choice to extend app compat and enable alt OSes.

Had missed @brucelawson's excellent "Apple at 50" post; nodded the whole way:

https://brucelawson.co.uk/2026/apple-at-50-my-top-five-apple-moments/

If you dump in a lot of food or chemicals to achieve short-term results, you *might* be able to juice things in the short run for your fish, but you also buy the consequences of a dynamically unstable system under stress.

So when managers assume that they'll "increase productivity" by adding a machine that generates more code, without taking into account the intertemporal effects of *owning* more code (of lowest-common-denominator quality), they're replicating the KLOC fallacy on steroids.

This leads to an appreciation of the toxicity of short-term incentives.

There's a reason I think very, *very* poorly of managers that lean on date-driven delivery: they are consistently externalising costs in ways that they *can and should* appreciate. That takes the form of high-interest unstructured loans against future product and team capacity.

But far too many engineering leaders assume *ceteris paribus* ("all else equal") will hold.

That's not how the fishtank works.

A conversation with a coworker re-triggered an intrusive thought that I find myself returning to regularly while working in a firm in the grips of AI influences:

Teams and engineering processes are like fish in tanks. There's a careful balance of the nitrogen cycle that keeps delicate organics alive; above a certain pH, it's just not plausible to believe things will keep working. But to understand effects, we have to take into account causes and add the effect of time.

The Grok/Musk AI undressing scandal teaches us that Apple and Google's shameful app stores stand for nothing but profit, invalidating one of the 5 arguments they make to retain monopoly power to tax all software. But the other four arguments are bullshit, too. The iceberg of deception is larger than the tip of content moderation:

https://infrequently.org/2026/01/naked-power/

Regulators can take many lessons from the Grok/Twitter undressing scandal, but one of the most important is that Apple and Google are gaslighting when they claim store monopolies are necessary to protect us. Nothing could be further from the truth:

https://infrequently.org/2026/01/naked-power/

The Onion has become the Spirit Halloween of news:l, and it's glorious:

https://theonion.com/washington-post-publishes-editorial-defending-fbi-raid-on-its-reporter/

The true irony of fascists censoring Plato is that Plato was a fascist (see Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies"):

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/14/donald-trump-plato-gender-education

Happy NY from NZ!

How broken is today's frontend culture?

@fugueish points out that the median *mobile* page is now larger than a copy of DOOM (2.6 MiB vs. 2.48 MiB), the P75 page is larger than 2 DOOMs, and the P90 mobile page is 4.5x the size of DOOM:

https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight

@tedmielczarek learned a lot here, but mostly that I'm not interested in this snack.

Lovely NY friends: if someone comes to your door with a petition to recall Schumer and Jeffries, say *yes*:

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/11/10/congress/jeffries-backs-schumer-amid-fierce-democratic-backlash-to-shutdown-deal-00644705

ICYMI, servers got *good*, which means that if your data is smaller than ~8TB (yes, TB), it's not "big data", it's "thing you can grep in memory in near real time"

It's gratifying to see the ripples of work from a decade ago continue to improve things as good-spirited folks integrate those APIs into their thinking:

https://htmx.org/essays/the-fetchening/

@whitequark Them's fighting words.

@whitequark What did I just read.

If you haven't already, figure out where your local No Kings event is next weekend and make a plan. Inflatable frog costume totally optional:

https://www.nokings.org/