Tag Archives: RMF

🥩 Red Meat Friday: The Apple TV Price Increase

Jason Snell has a few words to say about Dan Rayburns’s post on LinkedIn concerning the price increase for Apple TV and why it spells the end of the device. I, too, have a couple of things to say. First, … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Apple And The Cost Of Ram

The technical press is wetting their pants—or pretending to—about Apple1 raising prices on many of their products due to the AI industry fed rise in RAM prices. It’s outrageous, they claim. Apple should just eat the cost of those increases … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Vibe Coding vs. System Engineering

Yusuf Aytas has a great post that explores the difference between a vibe coder and a software engineer. He plays it straight and says, basically, that vibe coding may be fine for a proof of concept or for a one-off … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Score One For The Luddites

As many of you know, I have a special contempt for what I call “the new Luddites”: those who find (nonsensical) fault—usually for performative reasons—with technology. The most common current sign of the new Ludditism today is giving up smart … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Microsoft Backdoor?

Our younger colleagues can be forgiven for viewing Microsoft as a benign company. Those of us who have been around for a while remember the old days and we haven’t forgotten or forgiven. Despite their efforts to appear a friendly … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Goodhart’s Law At Amazon

You would think that by now every organization on earth would have heard of Goodhart’s law. The law can be briefly stated as, “When a measure is used as a target, it ceases to be a measure.” We see the … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Writing Telephone Numbers

I don’t know why this is a Red Meat Friday item but, apparently, it is. Back in 2024, the AP Stylebook changed its specification for the formatting of telephone numbers. From now on the telephone number that used to be … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Rules For Lisp Programs

Over at tfeb.org there’s an amusing post on rules for Lisp programs. The rules boil down to: Write only in Lisp Don’t use Lisp OOP constructs Don’t use the Loop macro Avoid package-qualified names The list is obviously meant to … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: AI FOMO

Observant Irreal readers will have noticed that I hardly ever write about AI and its attendant hoopla. I recognize that it has shown itself useful in certain restricted domains but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s mainly a magic … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: User Hostile Websites

A month ago I wrote about why I was still using an ad blocker. The TL;DR was that unfiltered websites have become too horrible to be usable. Ads popup to cover the content you’re trying to read, videos play—and loudly—without … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment