Links, May 15th, 2026

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I have both been busy, and finding a lot of stuff that’s crossed my plate either not worth sharing, or more of something I’m sick of talking about, however good it may be.

§Tube Archivist

This has been a great tool for our NAS for a number of reasons, but perhaps the best one is that it gets away from Youtube’s distraction infrastructure.

§Why you should refuse to let your doctor record you

The only post about LLM tools this week, but it’s about protecting yourself:

So what’s the big deal with “AI” charting? Here are nine reasons why we recommend refusing to consent to the use of scribing tools in healthcare settings:

§The Kirby Frame

I’ve (unfortunately) been dealing with a lot of people lately who are arguing things in bad faith. This is the only way I’ve found to maintain sanity.

This is a trap. They will not change their mind and they are not your audience. They are lying because they want to do something. Your audience is not the liar, but other people hearing those lies. Your goal is to help other people understand what those lies are meant to accomplish.

To avoid the trap, you have to eat their frame. By “eat their frame,” I mean respond with a frame that contains and explains what they’re doing.

§Self-blame isn’t blameless

Blame shuts down learning. That’s true whether the blame comes from a manager, from a peer, or from self-blame. A satisfying-sounding explanation arrives early in the conversation, everyone accepts it, and the exploration that would have surfaced the actual contributing factors never happens. The document captures a neat narrative. The action items address the narrow issue. The next incident reveals that the narrow issue was a symptom of something deeper that nobody investigated.

“I should have caught that” is a thought-terminating cliché that sounds like insight, but isn’t. It works just as well whether someone else says it or the person says it about themselves.

One of the things that an ADHD diagnosis helped me with was realizing that I don’t need to be better about time management – I need systems which help me become better at it.

Blameless incident post-mortems are that kind of mindset shift.

§Ways of moving

From Mandy Brown

I HEAR SOME VERSION of this about once a week: “I’ve been doing this thing for 15, or 20, or 25 years, and I don’t think I can do it anymore. But when I think about what else I could do, I draw a blank.” One of the questions I am wont to ask when I hear this is, what would you do if money was no object? And often—not always, but often enough to be a pattern—the floodgates open up.

I’ve heard similar statements from a lot of people lately, including myself.

§The “Passive Income” Trap Ate a Generation of Entrepreneurs

From Joan Westenberg

Somewhere between 2015 and 2022, “passive income” stopped being a boring financial planning term and became, I don’t know how else to put this, a salvation narrative. I mean that literally. There was an eschatology if you want to get nerdy about it. The Rapture was the day your “passive income” exceeded your monthly expenses and you could quit your job forever. People talked about it with that exact energy.

§Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKES

a satire:

Executive Summary: A security incident occurred. It has been resolved. We take security seriously. Please see previous 14 incident reports for details on how seriously.

§The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code

From Ally Piechowski, a “code doctor” consultant, there are some ream gems in here:

The first thing I usually do when I pick up a new codebase isn’t opening the code. It’s opening a terminal and running a handful of git commands. Before I look at a single file, the commit history gives me a diagnostic picture of the project: who built it, where the problems cluster, whether the team is shipping with confidence or tiptoeing around land mines.

§The Psychology of Code Reviews: Why Smart Developers Accept Bad Suggestions

Code reviews are supposedly objective evaluations of technical merit. In reality, they’re complex social negotiations influenced by power dynamics, cognitive biases, and unspoken hierarchies. Understanding these psychological forces is crucial because they determine which code ships, which patterns persist, and ultimately, the quality of our systems.

The stakes are higher than most teams realize. When good developers accept bad suggestions, it’s not stupidity—it’s human psychology overriding technical judgment.

Yep.

§I Left Port 22 Open on the Internet for 54 Days. Here’s Who Showed Up.

It wasn’t hooked up to a real computer, but a honeypot. The results are interesting:

Out of 7,556 attacking IPs, only 28 ever opened an interactive shell. That’s 0.4%. The rest were pure automation — fingerprint and move on.

But those 31? They’re the interesting ones. They typed commands. They made typos. They explored. They had intentions.

§The Boring Internet

From Terry Godier, a piece about the new internet versus the old internet

The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with.

Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill.