Baldur Bjarnason

Translation: Europe must do what the US does: unchecked unlimited growth at all costs. Who cares if easily half of US "innovators" are deeply unprofitable companies losing billions a year while producing unmitigated disasters in their externalities? Numbers must go brrr. All that is wrapped in vague words and feelings. Instead, I recommend "Facing reality, whether it's about Apple or the EU, is a core requirement for good management": https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-eu-and-tech…

Fantastic paper, possibly THE most important paper on software engineering. Unfortunately the language is quite dry and academic. This piece commenting on the paper is a nicer read https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/

I follow the following blogs for front-end. * https://adactio.com * https://piccalil.li/blog/ * https://stephaniewalter.design/ * https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/ This post has some good pointers: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/what-do-i-need-to-read-to-be-a-cs… I'm not sure what other advice to give. A lot of this was collected over time in response to frustrations I felt around the direction front-end has been moving in (css-in-js, atomic css etc.) and looking for people writing criticisms of it.

This stuff is gold. A real pro Another great post I found on his site after reading the OP: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/what-do-i-need-to-read-to-be-a-cs…

Podcasts: * http://show.terrifyingrobotdog.com - new and near-future tech and its impact * http://www.unfinished.bz - web design, business, funny stuff * http://devchat.tv/js-jabber - JavaScript * https://boagworld.com/show - web development and business * http://www.relay.fm/rocket - general tech * http://spong.com/podcasts/tsf/ - videogame development Sites and blogs: * http://culture.vg/ - videogame criticism * http://acko.net/ - advanced JS * http://scripting.com/ - web, news, * https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/ web, writing Here are some of my favourites that I haven't seen mentioned (so maybe lesser known).

From "Your use of AI is directly harming the environment I live in" at https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/your-use-of-ai-harms-the-environm… by the Icelandic citizen Baldur Bjarnason: "Iceland doesn’t have that much excess power generation. Already our power companies have to occasionally limit power delivery to heavy users. Increasing power generation that much requires tough choices: we’d have to ruin the environment some way. We just don’t have that many locations left for hydroelectric or geothermal power plants. Most locations that remain are popular tourist sites – destroying them would be bad for the economy – important ecosystems, or would require improvements to the grid that nobody seems to be willing to pay for. Even if we shut down some of the aluminium smelters, reusing that power elsewhere would be problematic. The Kárahnjúkar power plant is in the middle of nowhere and was purpose-built to serve the aluminium industry. When it generates excess power – which happens – that power is usually wasted because the grid can’t shift it from the region where most of the smelting takes place to the regions that have most of the population. However, data centres in Iceland are both located near populated areas and are almost exclusively used for “AI” or crypto. You can’t buy regular hosting in these centres for love or money. If you buy hosting in Iceland, odds are that the rack is in a building in Reykjavík somewhere, not in a data centre And those data centres…

All-time great read about Apple/EU conflicts: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-eu-and-tech… From the conclusion: > Normally when the EU regulates a given sector, it does so with ample lead time and works with industry to make sure that they understand their obligations. > Apple instead thought that the regulatory contact from the EU during the lead time to the DMA was an opportunity for it to lecture the EU on its right to exist. Then its executives made up some fiction in their own minds as to what the regulation meant, announced their changes, only to discover later that they were full of bullshit. > This was entirely Apple’s own fault. For months, we’ve been hearing leaks about Apple’s talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were. Talks like those are to help companies implement incoming regulations, with some leeway for interpretation on the EU’s side to accommodate business interests. > Remember what I wrote about electrical plugs? The EU is pro-business – often criticised for being essentially a pro-business entity – and not in favour of regulation for regulation’s sake. > If Apple had faced reality and tried to understand the facts as they are, they would have used the talks to clarify all of these issues and more well in advance of the DMA taking effect. > But they didn’t because they have caught the tech industry management disease of demanding…

Oh for Christ's sake, someone pry Baldur off his cross again. > Blocking network assets is a setback for format adoption People are standing here telling him that _allowing_ network assets _is a setback for format adoption_ and he's just going to keep pounding this stupid, obnoxious drum of his until he runs everyone off. > almost all of the problems described would be solved by getting OS vendors (Google, MS, Apple) to invest more money in EPUB That's back-asswards. Google, MS, and Apple don't give a shit about EPUB, they never will, and it's arguable that we're better served with them not buying a seat at that table considering how poorly their "help" has helped web standards, as much of the rest of his dismissive thread helpfully notes. If he wants money for EPUB standards he should shake the cup at IDPF members who rely on it, and particularly Amazon, to whom he quite vocally abdicated the publishing space 12 years ago.[1] Barking at operating system companies is nonsense at best and how we wind up with another, even more avoidable situation where the space is held hostage by them at worst. At least Amazon can chuck some goodwill money at EPUB development while continuing to kick its ass up and down the market with MOBI. (Aside from all this, his dismissals of the "clunky" reading system complaint, citing how EPUB has "too many divergences", only further proves to me how tunneled the vision is of the people involved. To hell with forking or improving EPUB, then,…

With hindsight, considering the cards we were dealt, there's not much I would have done differently. If I had known better before, I would have ensured stronger buy-in because after a while our internal stakeholders were often pushing back on the effort, and that led to concessions where throw away code in the legacy systems was built even for weak business outcomes. Overall I share your concerns. Having the right reasons to rewrite is key. I believe this blog[1] about software as theory building does a great job at describing the challenge with software gardening, and the times where a rewrite is the solution are few. Even then, it's critical to handle the rewrite in ways that can work - in our case, we chose to progressively eat the legacy software without making major changes when we could avoid them. The legacy software we had was mostly the results of one man heroics and traded off performance and availability for correctness and security. It also was designed to be maintained by a small group. Solid choices if you are early Kraken - but as many successful startups, we were victim of our success and we needed it all. When it became clear that we had to rewrite the stack (the 2017 3-days shutdown happened just before that realization), those in charge at the time decided to experiment with Rust. It was a crazy bet in early 2018, it was still Rust 2015, no NLL, no async, far rougher ecosystem. The fact that it became successful enough to warrant pursuing a…

The thing about churn (of developers/contributors) rings so true to me from my career, and I think is really under-appreciated. In "the industry", or just among "people who make things in teams" (including open source). > Constant churn in a software development team, both among the programmers and designers, is absolutely devastating. It is the death knell for a software project. Makes deadlines meaningless. It turns software into a disposable, single-use product like a paper towel. Anything that increases team member churn threatens the very viability of the project and the software it’s creating. From an essay that is worth reading in full, "Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies": https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/ I think it's exactly right about the importance of "mental models" and "theory building", and if we could keep that in mind we could build better more maintainable software. ("More maintainable" over the long-term I think is almost synonymous with "has easy to grasp mental models that are sufficient to guide your work with the system")

Might be a very very uncharitable reference to this, for example: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/the-oss-bubble-and-the-blogging-b…

He's not denying that there is demand, he just has a different view on what's happening: When developers say that LLMs make them more productive, you need to keep in mind that this is what they’re automating: dysfunction, tampering as a design strategy, superstition-driven coding, and software whose quality genuinely doesn’t matter, all in an environment where rigour is completely absent. They are right. LLMs make work that doesn’t matter easier – it’s all monopolies, subscriptions, VCs, and lock-in anyway – in an industry that doesn’t care, where the only thing that’s measured is some bullshit productivity measure that’s completely disconnected from outcomes. ... One group thinks this will make the world ten times richer. The other thinks it’ll be a catastrophe. (from an earlier post, https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-two-worlds-of-programming/)

You should read Baldur Bjarnasson's recent essay, "Trusting your own judgment on AI is a huge risk". https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/trusting-your-own-judgement-on-ai… Excerpt: "Don’t self-experiment with psychological hazards! I can’t stress this enough! "There are many classes of problems that simply cannot be effectively investigated through self-experimentation and doing so exposes you to inflicting Cialdini-style persuasion and manipulation on yourself."

Similar argument to https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/trusting-your-own-judgement-on-ai… but I like this one better because at least it doesn’t try to pull the rhetorical trick of slipping from “we can’t know whether LLMs are helping because we haven’t studied the question systematically” to “actually we do know, and they’re shit”.

you're spot on. Building software is first and foremost making a team of person understand a problem. The fact that part of it is solved by writing code is almost a byproduct of that understanding, and certainly does not come before. on this topic I suggest everybody who works in our industry to read Peter Naur's "Programming as Theory Building"[1] and a nice corollary from Baldur Bjarnson: "Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies"[2] [1]: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf [2]: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/

This piece is rather puzzling. The author is essentially claiming that no one can trust their own judgement on AI (or anything?), and that the lack of scientific research means we should be in a "wait and see" pattern. ...and yet, the author literally just published a book called "The Intelligence Illusion: Why generative models are bad for business": https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/intelligence-illusion-2nd-ed-laun… It seems they might have missed "motivated reasoning" in their study of human cognitive faults.

This article does a good job talking about this: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-eu-and-tech…

yep. From Baldur Bjarnason: > For months, we’ve been hearing leaks about Apple’s talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-eu-and-tech… The EU cannot allow a large business to mess around like this.

Elsewhere in the thread, someone linked this blog post, I think it describes the position of the EU well. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-eu-and-tech… The conclusion they come to is: the EU will protect the single market even if it makes things harder for their own businesses, the single market is a totally existential issue for the EU, it is the reason it exists.

It is a bit tangential, but this article [0] by Baldur Bjarnason sheds a light on the EU's perspective in crafting regulations such as the DMA, and how that seems to be largely misunderstood by the big US tech companies. [0] https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-eu-and-tech…

This article and related discussion might be relevant. It addresses more or less exactly this sentiment: > This is the reason why I get a bit frustrated whenever I see somebody in tech dismisses the EU as just trying to protect European companies from competition with their glorious and wonderful US companies. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-eu-and-tech… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39602417

The Facing Reality article [1] explains what "single market" means in the context of app stores: "App Stores let private companies subdivide and control the single market to their own financial gain. When much of the digital economy is taking place on phones, tablets, and various other devices that are largely limited to App Stores, this is effectively ceding the single market to a fragmented market that’s entirely under corporate control. This is against the core operating theory behind the EU." [1] https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-eu-and-tech…

Sorry what? I'm saying Deno suffers due to Node backward compatibility. A write up about it: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/disillusioned-with-deno/

It looks like Naur’s paper is as topical as ever (https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/).

I see plenty of links to recent papers (last two years). > This entire article is rife with trivial to find errors that totally invalidate it's claims. Could you share some? Maybe they’re trivial for you but handwaving it doesn’t help others identify what is correct or not. For your claim to be true either the multiple papers cited would have to contain glaring flaws or the author would have to be wildly misinterpreting them. That doesn’t seem trivial to assess. > It feels like narrative was written first, then someone went looking to try to find newsbites that sound like they support it. From the author’s other writings, the opposite seems to be true: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/thank-you-for-your-patience/ https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/why-i-wrote-the-intelligence-illu…

> I’ve never before experienced such a disparity between how much potential I see in a technology and how little I trust those who are making it. quote taken from launch blogpost: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/why-i-wrote-the-intelligence-illu…

What were the arguments in favour of SPAs in the first place? I'm finding it interesting that most of the top HN submissions (by popularity) matching "single page app" are critical, not positive. First 15 follow, all but 5 are negative: - You probably don't need a single-page app (https://journal.plausible.io/you-probably-dont-need-a-single-page-app) 816 points | 6 years ago | 499 comments - A single-page app is almost always worse than a multi-page app (https://www.gregnavis.com/articles/the-architecture-no-one-needs.html) 289 points | 6 years ago | 145 comments - The myth that you can’t build interactive web apps except as single page app (https://htmx.org/essays/you-cant/) 262 points | 4 months ago | 143 comments - Building a single-page app with Htmx (https://jakelazaroff.com/words/building-a-single-page-app-with-htmx/) 252 points | 5 months ago | 143 comments - AWS Lambda as a back end for a single-page app (http://lg.io/2015/05/16/the-future-is-now-and-its-using-aws-lambda.htm… 229 points | 10 years ago | 73 comments - Create your own dysfunctional single-page app (https://tinnedfruit.com/articles/create-your-own-dysfunctional-single-… 208 points | 6 years ago | 138 comments - The Single-Page-App Morality Play (https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/single-page-app-morality-play/) 207 points | 3 years ago | 131 comments - Todos: a Backbone.js example Single-Page-App (with…

Haha I was checking the comments precisely to see if this was the case. This happens nearly everywhere a language that isn't Java, Python, Ruby, Go, PHP, or JavaScript is used. IMO it has more to do with tech labor arbitrage[1] than anything technical. Even if a system is punching above its weight, over time, the Weird Language Choice spooks people enough that they get the rewrite bug. Bleacher Report is a funny example: it used to be a darling example of Elixir, where a migration from Ruby -> Elixir claimed a move from "150 Ruby servers to 5 (probably overprovisioned) Elixir servers."[2] But then management and politics got scared, moved it all to more conventional tech, and the whole system suffered (see this legendary post[3]). Fred Hebert describes a similar thing happening with a migration from Erlang deployments to Go/Docker/immutable, where you lose some pretty valuable capabilities by migrating to more conventional tech.[4] I don't see this changing anytime soon -- we came of age when it was viable to attract investment with the promise of tech innovation. These days, those are liabilities because managers misunderstood the "Use Boring Technology" post the way consultants bartardized "Agile" (taking decent advice and misunderstanding it into something wholly different and horrifying). The result is you've got companies with customers in the 1000s using k8s, calling it "simple" and "Boring," whereas that same company would be called amateur if they did things like…

I've witnessed how abandoning first principles undermines the evolution of a system. If our mental model of a system is not formalized into first principles (i.e. a high-level specification), then successive generations of engineers will have to re-learn those principles through trial-and-error. They'll introduce mutations and dependencies between the mutations-- and when they leave, the next generation of maintainers will repeat the process. Generations of mutations eventually create a brittle, calcified creature of a system which people fear to touch with a ten foot poll. I imagine people who were taught SICP would be more respectful, if not inclined, towards a formal articulation of a system's principles. This philosophy is described in depth in the original 1985 article https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf and in more accessible language in https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/. You can also observe engineers opposing/misunderstanding the need for specification in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42114874