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Rules don’t always work on AI agents
A recent Mastodon post from @solomonneas highlights an annoying issue: an AI agent pushed to the main branch 12x, despite clear instructions not to. […] My agent pushed to main 12 times despite explicit instructions. Fix: git pre-push hooks on 39 repos. Agent can’t push code to main because git rejects it. No willpower needed.…
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The Misleading Platform Term
In the past couple of years, lot’s of companies are providing platforms to their employees. Be it for Data Analytics, Compute, Self-Service-something. – Which is all great. I’ve even been involved in one myself. The problem just is: What exactly is a “platform”? At some point, I was frustrated enough to say “Whenever a manager…
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How an Identy Check is distributing your Biometric Data
I just came across “I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here’s What I Actually Handed Over.” and thought it might be worth sharing It’s a story of someone just wanting the “verified checkmark” on LinkedIn. Quite legit, right? Just that – afterwards – he started to check which companies his biometric data are now shared with.…
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Nolto.Social is gone, but is has shown the Demand!
Nolto.social started as a small experiment as a free alternative to LinkedIn. The author wanted to explore ActivityPub and see what could be built. There was no funding, no team, no roadmap. Just an idea and some time. Within a few weeks, almost a thousand people signed up. Companies created pages. Articles were posted. Events…
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AI Won’t Turn Everyone Into Developers- Because Most People Don’t Want to Be Developers
The AI hype claims that LLMs will make everyone a coder. I say: that’s pretty much BS. Most people don’t want to build software. They want their problems solved, preferably without lifting a finger. Joan Westenberg nails this so well in her recent article: The “everyone will code” myth ignores decades of proof. We’ve had…
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Find me on Nolto!
AAhh – Nolto has gone Nolto was never meant to grow. [… ] It was one person building something interesting to see what would happen. At this point I have decided to shut it down. Ahh too bad. But I respect the decision of this guy! He made quite a thing but also admits that…
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StaffEng is back!
I just saw that the StaffEng Podcast is coming back! We’re rebooting the Staff Engineer podcast with a specific focus: practitioners using AI to deliver valuable outcomes with specific examples If you don’t know StaffEng, its About Staff Engineering, “Leadership beyond the management track”. At most technology companies, you’ll reach Senior Software Engineer, the career level,…
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Firefox vs Vivaldi – A Matter of Engines, Not Just Geography
The world is complicated. I like the #DID campaign – regaining your digital independence step by step. Like changing from X to Mastodon or from Chrome to another browser. For me, the next logical step was reconsidering my browser choice. Firefox was the first choice, but then I wondered: why not Vivaldi? A Norwegian developed…
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How to migrate Gmail to another Provider without Breaking the Mail History
This is a practical how-to on moving email from Gmail to another provider. The main challenge is Gmail’s label system: one email can have multiple labels and all mails also appear in “All Mail”. Most other providers use folders instead, where an email can only exist in one place. If you migrate without taking this…
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How a User Helped Fixing 4 Bugs with AI (and No Expertise)
I see a lot of AI skepticism in the dev community — and some of it is fair (okay, maybe “a lot”). Vague bug reports, monster commits, untested code … We’ve proably read it all, and maybe even seen it all. Even Mitchell Hashimoto whose post appeared yesterday in my timeline writes “Slop drives me…