Links, Jan 23rd, 2026

§The problem is culture

An incredibly great essay about “honor culture” versus “engineering culture” in software on a fulcrum of coding agents, for which I had a hard time finding a single great quote, but this one captures the trust of the piece:

A popular aphorism in my Bluesky bubble is “Everything is gender”, and this is unfortunately quite applicable in this situation. Given the way in which the technical equivalent of “women’s work” is essentially shoved under the rug or stigmatised as being unmasculine, tools that are made primarily by men and for men completely fail to take women’s work into account. Then, by a subtle sleight of hand, the work that is valued and seen as “technical” becomes the work that can be done most effectively by coding agents, and thus, in the tech culture, becomes valuable de facto.

§An adversarial coding test

I have been contacted by people wanting to “partner” with me on interviewing candidates, “just pull down this code and check it out!” And every single one I’ve looked into has been an attempt to execute code on my computer.

This is one person’s tale on being about the receiving end of one of these hacking attempts, particularly involving VSCode’s “trust” model.

Anyway, as the piece concludes, be careful out there.

§Backseat Software

This is a piece about how currently-popular software development methodologies encourage a NOTICE ME mentality:

What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks:

“How are you enjoying your drive so far?”

It ends with some really great recommendations about how to avoid these traps:

  1. Make interruptions opt-in, and make opt-out permanent

  2. Separate product health telemetry from growth telemetry

  3. Use analytics as a flashlight, not a steering wheel

  4. Optimize for trust, not just return visits

  5. Ship a real “quiet mode”

These are hard, because incentives in companies tend to be stacked against them. There’s no technical reason things are this way; but there’s plenty of business reasons they are.

Conversely, our car has stranded us somewhere for an hour, making us late to an appointment, because apparently that’s a thing cars can do now.

§Feds Create Drone No Fly Zone That Would Stop People Filming Ice

(free membership with 404 Media required)

The order is particularly notable because it does not apply just to static locations like DHS offices, but also to “vessels and ground vehicle convoys and their associated escorts.” The notice classifies areas within 3,000 feet horizontally and up to 1,000 feet of altitude as no fly zones and as “national defense airspace,” meaning the skies up to a half mile from ICE vehicles in Minneapolis, for example, could fall under this new jurisdiction.

I’ve long had an interest in aerial landscape photography and finally got my first drone for the purpose over the recent holidays. This has involved learning a lot about airspace, how it’s governed and administered, how to be a responsible user of it, and so on. Through this, I’ve also become aware of some conspiracy-level theories about how the DJI ban is supposedly a first step to prevent US citizens from using them in a manner similar to the Ukraine – a category error that puts one into tinfoil hat territory.

Anyway, one of the core principles of drone operation is that you need to check at the time of flight to make sure the airspace you want to use is still open; failure to do so can get you into really hot water – a TFR (temporary flight restriction) can go into place for reasons such as visiting heads of state, or near sports arenas during events at them, but now it seems that is being extended in a manner meant to prevent people from documenting what the government is doing in their neighborhoods. One doesn’t have to weaponize drones to make them dangerous to people in power.

There don’t seem to be any TFRs in place in Minneapolis as of this writing.

§Crypto grifters are recruiting open-source AI developers

I did not know about developer-centered memecoins, but am not surprised by it at all. It’s pump-and-dump as-a-service.

Incidentally, this is why AI open-source software engineers make such great targets. The fact that they’re open-source software engineers means that (a) a few hundred thousand dollars is enough to dazzle them, and (b) their fans are technically-engaged enough to be able to figure out how to buy cryptocurrency.

§‘AI’ is a dick move, redux

I’ve linked to Baldur many times before but not for the last year; I agreed too much with the thrust of this piece. LLM Chatbots and Diffusion-based image generators have harmful side effects on the order of radium, leaded gasoline, and asbestos, and hand-waving all of those away because you personally find them useful, well, that tells me everything I need to know about whether I can trust you.

Somebody who is capable of looking past “ICE is using LLMs as accountability sinks for waving extremists through their recruitment processes”, generated abuse, or how chatbot-mediated alienation seems to be pushing vulnerable people into psychosis-like symptoms, won’t be persuaded by a meaningful study. Their goal is to maintain their personal benefit, as they see it, and all they are doing is attempting to negotiate with you what the level of abuse is that you find acceptable.