Daniel Moch

A couple years back I was introduced to some of the folks at Galois, and they convinced me that formal methods can lower the cost of software development. Now I’m reading this post from Marc Brooker where he adds a bit of nuance that I think is helpful. I’ll summarize it this way: formal methods can lower the total cost to develop and maintain system-level software, where the requirements are stable and well-understood. If you’re designing a user-facing system and need to interatively respond to customer feedback—in other words, if your requirements are shifting and poorly understood—Agile remains the best choice.

I couldn’t read about the advantages of Homa in datacenters without imagining one populated with servers communicating over 9p. What would the performance of Plan9 look like if 9p were implemented on top of Homa?

The image of zombies felt inescapable as I got up to speed on Hawk Tuah girl Haliey Welch, a story and character so packed with minor happenings that it could be its own cinematic universe.

Why zombies? Look it what Welch has done since her debut. There are podcasts, public appearances, and now an infamous meme coin. The last of these is clearly tied to her value as a meme, but the others were enabled by her pop culture currency as well. Her ability to do these things at all is a recycling of her first moment, like that ouroborus, eating its own tail, recycling itself. Or, if you like, it is an act of cannibalism, just like what zombies are known for.

Until about six months ago I had drawn a hard line on social media. I am not proud of this since I prefer to take a thoughtful approach to things. Thoughfulness and absolutes make poor neighbors, and so with the new year it seems like a good time to reflect, in writing, on how I am using and plan to use this site in the next season of life.

Past

To review where I am coming from, apart from the occasional foray into the Fediverse I have not had an active social media presence since maybe 2017. LinkedIn is arguably an exception since I have largely maintained an account there, but even this one was mostly dormant.

Keypub seems like the kind of thing that could be really useful, and yet I find myself mildly pessimistic about its prospects. The biggest get would obviously be a forge provider like GitHub or GitLab, but I don’t see them adopting this anytime soon.

That said, it could perhaps be a nice signal for anyone looking to build a reputation-based service for vetting open source contributors and/or maintainers. I haven’t fully thought through how that might work, but having a second source linking SSH public keys to email addresses seems like it could be valuable.