April fools day has messed with my ability to identify satire at this time of year. Let's look at the evidence:

Posting date: 2025-04-02T01:57:13 1743559033 <-- too late

LoC: 35,000 <-- That's a _lot_

Front page: "Elon Musk Dirty Pants", "Heroin Hashbrowns", "AI Slop Stew", "Sweet Tooth Delight Made with Human Teeth" <-- WTF?

This is a joke, right?

He's Finnish, not Swedish.

Both Finnish and Swedish are official languages in Finland. Linus' parents are from the region of Finland that primarily speaks Swedish, so Linus grew up speaking Swedish at home.

Part of the beauty of the (current) WWW is that last W: the web. By design, everything is (or at least "can/should be") interlinked and scripting/computation is a layer on top of that. (See Fielding's thesis.[1]) Inverting to opaque WASM blobs as the information layer seems like throwing all that out.

Sure, WASM could still simulate interlinking -- because it's so general -- but that generality also imposes an implementation bar. Who's going to write an HTML renderer in WASM just so they can get links to work how they used to? If someone comes up with some simpler WASM-linking solution, how long will it be before there are 15 competing simpler solutions which are all mutually incompatible?

[1]: https://ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/fielding_dis...

Bumblebee headband?

Prince Harry’s real name is Henry.

I wouldn’t want to end up in Chorleywood, near the north western end of the Metropolitan line, late at night. It’s a nice little village, but I suspect it would be pretty dead.

While I definitely sup from the RMS Kool-Aid, I can’t help but notice that it sounds a lot like small-government libertarianism (s/government/corporations). You’re the product, and all that, but maybe that angle dilutes the point he’s making. Why should software be any different to basically everything else; unless you’re one of those crackpots who bury gold bullion because you don’t trust the man?

Looks like there's an errata, already :)

https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/01/a-sheepish-apolog...

Some good advice at the end of that:

1) Don't state something as fact when you haven't researched it fully.

2) Remember that when you do state something because you believe it's fact, it could be based on incomplete information.

3) If you're not 100% sure about something, best introduce at least some element of doubt.

4) Don't trust everything you read just because somebody you trust presented it as fact.

I think this was overly self-critical - what would researching fully even mean? They can have however many sheep they want hidden within one-mile distance from Trafalgar square, no-one would expect the author to scour every possible ___location ensuring that there is no sheep hidden lol just to make a funny post 100% sure to be true

Guy knows his audience though. All of his posts are incredibly prone to bikeshedding. If our main journalists knew that their output was going to be subject to much detail-oriented scrutiny, we'd have the best-run country in the world.

Much of his bikeshedding is obviously self-deprecating humor to me. It’s simultaneously both genuine and ironic.

I think that people sometimes don’t (can’t?) quite ‘get’ that wry-but-also-sincere style that much of British humor exhibits.

It also says "But they might have been goats.".

> But you can't go in and have a look, they don't take walk-ins, only pre-booked groups and very occasional public events, the last of which was cancelled.

This has a very Douglas Adam’s feel.

Cunningham's Law in action which states that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.

Vauxhall and Spitalfields are much closer to Trafalgar Square.

My anecdata shows people who have no/limited experience in software engineering are suddenly able to produce “software”. That is, code of limited engineering value. It technically works, but is a ultimately an unmaintainable, intractable Heath Robinson monstrosity.

Coding LLMs will likely improve, but what will happen first: a good-at-engineering LLM; or a negative feedback cycle of training data being polluted with a deluge of crap?

I’m not too worried at the moment.

LLMs will have the same effect that outsourcing had on tech jobs i.e. some effect but not meaningful for people that truly know what they’re doing and can demand the money for quality to distinguish themselves from random text generator (AI) slop.

Something similar happened when Rails showed up. Lots of people were able to build somewhat complex websites than ever before.

But there are still specialized people being paid for doing websites today.

My god, sudden flashback of our CTO doing Rails code after hours and showing us how easily and quickly he was building stuff. We called that period of time the "Ruby Derailment"

I can imagine a world, not far from today, where business experts can create working programs similar in complexity to what they do with Excel today, but in domains outside of "just spreadsheets". Excel is the most used no-code/low-code environment by far and I think we could easily see that same level of complexity [mostly low] be accessible to a lot more people.

I don’t quite buy the Excel analogy, because the business experts do understand the Excel formulas that they write, and thus can maintain them and reason about them. The same wouldn’t be the case with programs written by LLMs.

> is a ultimately an unmaintainable

Does it need to be maintainable, if we can re-generate apps on the go with some sort of automated testing mechanism? I'm still on the fence with the LLM-generated apps debacle, but since I started forcing Cursor on myself, i'm writing significantly less code (75% less?) on my day-to-day job.

> if we can re-generate apps on the go with some sort of automated testing mechanism?

Ahh so once we solve the oracle problem and programming will become obsolete…