Iris

That problematic person who keeps popping up in your feeds. Blogs (or, according to HackerNews "seed[s] extreme left wing ideas into the minds of vulnerable HN members with my demented, violent writing") at https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/posts

Public Key

npub1cxhhnq9jg6aqtx5hn0k3prd7jkhmexgcwj4pedvhx774kw7m59ns9vhtgj

NIP-05 Address

iris_meredith@mastodon-social.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsvrtmeszeydws9n2tehmgs3klfttaunyv8f2sukktn002m80d6zecpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds8dxgvm

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1cxhhnq9jg6aqtx5hn0k3prd7jkhmexgcwj4pedvhx774kw7m59ns9vhtgj

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Last Notes

2026-10-28 00:20:22 UTC

Second shorter piece for fundraising purposes is done! This one's about the cardinal virtue of programming being diligence:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/virtue-programming-diligence

2026-10-25 09:06:34 UTC

I wrote a new article! This one uses Yeats as a framing device, which also allowed me to use the line "The best are exhausted and isolated, while the worst are creating yet another vibe-coded pile of crap."
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/slouching-to-bethlehem

2026-10-20 22:47:01 UTC

Have just discovered that Outlook eats Arca's login links. How irritating

2026-10-18 03:31:55 UTC

It is quite possible to create a heavily biased media environment by reporting accurately, but selectively. Lying on the part of the media is actually largely unnecessary, at least for the kind of propaganda that the anglosphere prefers

2026-10-15 03:48:43 UTC

I have to admit, the sheer level of compartmentalisation between writer-Iris and businesswoman-Iris that I have to maintain very much wears me out sometimes.

2026-10-10 08:28:10 UTC

New article! This one's about the "AI is inevitable" line, and what on earth it means for a technology to be "inevitable" in the first place:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/llms-arent-inevitable

2026-10-07 06:14:20 UTC

I did an actual marketing thing! @nprofile…l2m2, a highly experienced CTO and generally very intelligent person has very kindly let me write a guest post on his newsletter, both because I am a capable writer and because it will help build awareness of the existence of Arca:
https://makemeacto.cc/the-liberal-arts-of-tech/
Sergio writes well and is very clever, and you should all go follow him on the Fediverse and sign up to his newsletter.

2026-10-05 09:07:06 UTC

I've written a new article: this one started off when I read @nprofile…ugpy's excellent book Enshittification, and it's my attempt at an analysis of what enshittification looks like from the inside out. Why do people enshittify? What set of beliefs and mentalities make people able and willing to enshittify? And why has the outcry over it been comparatively muted?
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/poor-enshittified-souls

2026-10-05 02:18:00 UTC

I will gently point out to people that "voting for the lesser evil" breaks down in situations where both sides explicitly want to drive trans people out of public life. You have no moral claim on our vote, however much other people would benefit from one side winning over another, when both sides just flat want us *gone*.
So... I'd suggest that if you're in that situation, you make sure that candidates on your side don't push transphobic positions.

2026-10-03 07:41:09 UTC

The people who know about this stuff tell me that I should be reposting my past articles more often (I used to have an automated script for this, and I should probably get it set up again, but thinking about infra is hard). For now, though, this was a fun article from the beginning of this year:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/the-problem-is-culture

2026-10-02 00:33:18 UTC

Question about init systems in Linux: if you're running a modern linux system with a desktop environment, does init boot to an interactive shell first, or does it bypass booting a shell process entirely and just start the desktop environment directly?

2026-09-28 22:42:14 UTC

Found this in my saved images and it always puts a smile on my face
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/117/351/060/021/614/863/original/dc86eff29162bd2b.jpeg

2026-09-23 09:44:47 UTC

New article: this one has some thoughts about a part of the discussion around LLMs that has been underdiscussed so far: namely, the fact that you can only control their behaviour using prompts.
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/llms-on-the-boundary

2026-09-22 07:52:21 UTC

Thinking about Cesare Beccaria and how he was able to write a book that basically single-handedly changed the criminal justice systems across Europe by sheer force of persuasion. Also how we've been working very hard since then at undoing that progress.

2026-09-21 01:41:11 UTC

Latest news on Arca: despite being in persistently ill health for the last six weeks or so, I've managed to get another Engineering Fundamentals resource out: this one's about first steps that you'll take when learning to use git. I'm still deeply frustrated by how slow progress on all this has been since I got ill, but at least I am getting some things done.
As always (because one must advertise one's wares) if you want in on this, you can sign up for early access here https://deadsimpletech.com/arca

2026-08-29 09:13:14 UTC

New article: this time, we use Heidegger to explain why the "it's just a tool" line that often comes up in tech is so very silly:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/no-such-thing-as-just-a-tool

2026-08-27 04:44:15 UTC

Watching Wayne Brown in his capacity as Mayor of Auckland has been fascinating. The guy's an older right-wing bloke, but he's also an engineer, and it's made a startling difference. You can almost see him slipping leftwards against his own will because however right-wing he is, he's also tethered to reality in a way that so much of the right just isn't.

2026-08-19 23:09:21 UTC

Question for my code-inclined friends on here: if you had to draft up definitions, how would you draw the lines between the command line, the terminal and the shell?

2026-08-15 04:37:34 UTC

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@nprofile…ujap
The Polish equivalent for "don't count your chickens before they hatch" is "dividing up the skin on an un-hunted bear"

2026-08-08 07:39:24 UTC

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@nprofile…ag68
This is fair, but I will say that it is a little galling to see some people turning on the technology after being enthusiastic boosters for the longest time and getting lauded for it, while those of us who were saying it from the get-go are still sidelined.

2026-07-30 08:02:09 UTC

One thinks that a good guideline for life might be "don't believe things that disfigure your soul, no matter how correct you think they are"

2026-07-29 09:08:08 UTC

New article: I'm burnt out and writers' blocked this week, so I decided to publish a slightly fragmentary draft that I found while looking for something to spark inspiration. Enjoy my thoughts on the Real and psychotic structure in the LLM age: https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/lacan-in-the-llm-age

2026-07-29 08:39:36 UTC

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@nprofile…v9wr
Huh. Curious. Do you know what's causing the new exploits?

2026-07-29 08:28:55 UTC

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@nprofile…v9wr
Hmm... ephemeral VMs? Destroy and recreate the infrastructure every day? Otherwise I think I might just feel worried about Wordpress

2026-07-29 07:54:05 UTC

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@nprofile…v9wr
The easiest option if you're self-hosting is *probably* to harden the server they're running on. Sandboxed containers without root access, make sure your reverse proxy's config is right... I host all my stuff on Flatcar Linux, which has an immutable filesystem and is very hard to do much with even if you do gain access.

2026-07-25 09:01:32 UTC

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@nprofile…yyzu
We do some things well, but the economy is, alas, also dominated by petty landlords, and the country's thus experiencing a pretty steep decline in generally being an OK place to live. We are single-handedly proving Marx's thesis that capitalism can, in many cases, be a progressive force.

2026-07-25 07:45:28 UTC

Thinking of making chowder in the days to come. The question I'm pondering: classic seafood with mussels and prawns, or smoked mackerel?

2026-07-20 09:34:01 UTC

New article time! This time, I've talked about writing C is so much more enjoyable than a number of other things, and tech's regrettable tendency towards shallowness:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/tech-aint-deep

2026-07-18 02:21:10 UTC

Anthropic's article on cultural differences in LLM behaviour is *fascinating*. It tells me that Claude expresses the following specific values in Polish:
Says when it is unsure
Backs claims with evidence
Pushes back on false assumptions
I hadn't realised that *basic epistemic rigor* was a culturally encoded trait, and (dropping my deep antipathy to the tools in general for a moment), it's a little concerning that apparently other languages *don't* do this so much.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-values-models-languages

2026-07-15 04:08:16 UTC

Some good (if terrifying for me) news: Arca is now in early access. That's right: now you can buy access to my notes on statistics and engineering fundamentals, exercises and access to a community of fellow students where you can ask questions, comment on others' questions and get them answered by me. It's a great opportunity to learn something that will make you better at basically everything you do from someone cool. Take a look!
https://deadsimpletech.com/arca

2026-07-11 03:55:53 UTC

Another thought: a large part of why LLMs have been having so much of an effect is that in tech, *most of the work we're currently doing involves exploiting assets that were largely built decades ago*. We aren't really developing new core technologies so much as we're trying to squeeze extra value out of what we already have.

2026-07-08 23:01:38 UTC

Have had a thought about social media bans for young people: there's a good chance that this actively backfires and pushes young people towards writing and publishing their own blogs, which is much harder to regulate.

2026-07-07 06:08:37 UTC

An interesting factoid for those interested is that when I write, the categories of "gets lots of readers", "gets lots of email sign-ups" and "gets lots of reader mail" are almost entirely disjoint.

2026-07-07 05:41:17 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…3eqn @nprofile…vvev @nprofile…j4fa
True, but an unfair comparison: Stross has been consistently prescient

2026-07-06 07:14:00 UTC

I really do empathise, but I also think that being misread in bad faith is just part of being a writer. I've had some truly hideous misreadings of my work, and well... I don't know whether an LLM can do shit to stop that without completely defanging my work?
#nevent1q…hcw9

2026-07-04 22:55:17 UTC

I have to admit, it's mildly fascinating to me just how low the conversion rate to email subscribers is from Hackernews/Lobste.rs traffic is. I suspect the RSS subscriber number might be higher, but yeah... the conversion rate for Fedi traffic is much higher, and the same held true for Bluesky before stopped posting on that platform (it was *terrible* for my mental health)

2026-07-01 07:59:55 UTC

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Regular people, even ones that are not particularly political, are actively defying their governments around trans people. They know this is bullshit. This current reactionary wave is a very, very fragile thing. It is horrifying now, and it causes us a lot of pain, but... we aren't trying to break three thousand years of bigotry and oppression any more. We're trying to break maybe five years of slightly shitty backlash.

2026-07-01 07:57:58 UTC

I think the trickiest thing to communicate to people in the Anglosphere at the moment, as an Eastern European, is not how *bad* things are but how quickly these bad things can change. I see a bunch of people saying that it will take multiple decades to fix the atrocities, especially the transphobic ones, that the Supreme Court has inflicted on us and... it will not. The cat's out of the bag. People *know what freedom and a good society look like*. They will not forget easily.

2026-06-29 02:21:32 UTC

One of my least favourite things about LLMs is that we're learning, largely against our will, just how many truly feckless software devs there are out there

2026-06-22 10:03:18 UTC

An new post: this week I have written about the shortest, darkest days of the year and the ways in which we feel rather as though we're in a midwinter of tech:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/midwinter

2026-06-19 02:23:46 UTC

An anecdote about economic modelling: at one point, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's Github repo leaked, and we got to find out what went into economic modelling. This was around the time of Covid. We discovered that they *actively dropped several years of recovery data* because if you included it in the data it suggested that an increase in minimum wages resulted in *decreased* unemployment. And we couldn't have that.
Suffice to say I don't trust economic reporting further than I can throw it
#nevent1q…zfmz

2026-06-08 04:46:17 UTC

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@nprofile…4xpq
I think cannabis is probably the correct model for LLMs in a way (at least on the macro scale). People have made a whole lot of different and very drastic claims about the tools, but mostly they just seem to make people behave oddly (C.F. the Grateful Dead). The bulk of the damage seems to be done by what's said about them.

2026-06-08 04:33:05 UTC

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@nprofile…4xpq
I mean, all I can think of asking is "what impacts has this had in meatspace?"

2026-06-02 07:32:16 UTC

OK, question: why is it that the kind of thing I think of as a light article that I can kinda just write and publish for the week is consistently seen by others as a "deep read"? Not that I'm not flattered, but I'm not usually shooting for depth, exactly

2026-06-01 06:30:29 UTC

This week's article: I've had some thoughts about competence, how it works and why it's best understood as a value-system threat:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/attack-on-competence

2026-05-23 10:18:47 UTC

My second article in three days! This bounces off @nprofile…nmjd's recent article to discuss where exactly in the tech space is ground for LLMs to grow. My conclusion is in the title:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/docs-shit-bad-at-teaching

2026-05-21 11:11:25 UTC

An article about AI and how easy it is for us critics to slip into generating our own kind of slop manually if we aren't careful:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/whats-left-to-say

2026-05-04 02:43:15 UTC

In the interests of having some fun with a possible future article, I'm currently installing Lazarus: I have some weird nostalgia for Delphi. This might prove to be a mistake.

2026-04-19 05:39:45 UTC

Thought had: as it seems that I'm going to have to migrate my website to some more robust infrastructure, I may as well do a design refresh while I'm at it. Can people here suggest some good books on web design that I could learn from?

2026-04-13 05:48:07 UTC

A new article: this one's an extension of last year's article on the subject of wank, and it discusses why wank is discursively effective despite being annoying as hell. Many thanks to @nprofile…7rqs and @nprofile…vnlz for productive conversations on here that led to me developing some of these ideas:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/why-redacted-wins

2026-04-07 03:02:21 UTC

It is surprisingly hard to express "the primary demographic for startup founders at the moment is nepobaby failsons" in a way that's appropriate for consumption by investors.

2026-03-29 09:44:55 UTC

A new article, this one about the application of Clausewitz's concept of friction to Software Engineering:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/friction_software_engineering

2026-03-26 04:35:55 UTC

New article: today we talk about the psychological impacts of functioning in a thoroughly enshittified economy where everything seems to be routed through tech:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/digital_acedia

2026-02-15 08:43:49 UTC

New post, and this one's definitely one of my weirder ones: it's about how most of the tech industry shows symptoms of something that looks like gender dysphoria.
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/carbon_dysphoria

2026-02-08 21:25:04 UTC

Wellingtonians of Fedi (or other New Zealanders who know Wellingtonians), I must ask for a favour. I'm heading down to Wellington in about a month and will be looking for work there, so if you know someone who needs my skillset and might vibe with me, I'd appreciate the introduction. My skills are mostly in data/infra, but I think I might be a better fit for a technical role in an NGO or something similar considering my personality. Would very much appreciate any connections that can be made!

2026-01-22 20:38:42 UTC

From the archives: 2026-01-23 at 09:38 AM
An article discussing how the US election has impacted trans people internationally
What this election means for trans people outside the USA
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/election_trans_people

2026-01-21 20:25:48 UTC

From the archives: 2026-01-22 at 09:25 AM
It's fair to say that the tech industry at the moment is not in a good place. Software engineers tend to be detached, demotivated and unwilling to care much about the work they're doing beyond…
We should rethink how we teach people to code
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/notes_teaching_coding

2026-01-18 23:45:06 UTC

So, it turns out that 2025 (and the last two years) fucked me up badly enough that I have Helicobacter Pylori-related gastritis. Now I have to do two weeks on the really strong antibiotics.
Good to at least have an answer, though

2026-01-18 21:17:54 UTC

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@nprofile…ezwg Thank you. I'm aware of the bug: an interim fix that seems to work is to add a trailing slash to the end of the route, but I'll try and get the proper links set up today.

2026-01-18 06:59:32 UTC

Which raises the question: what if the people on the other side of the divide aren't more trusting, less curious, less experienced or otherwise less suited or less capable of making use of the tools? What if they're…
The problem is culture
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/the_problem_is_culture

2026-01-13 22:41:56 UTC

It is a somewhat perverse fact that, while LLMs are aiming to create slop with the appearance of authenticity, the most value they have for me personally is to give fundamentally authentic work that’s rough around the edges the appearance of slop.

2026-01-12 08:30:47 UTC

One thing that I think the anglosphere needs to learn very fast is that moral principles and pragmatism/playing to win are not mutually exclusive, and that you have to focus on both, even when there is some tension there. New Zealand in particular really seems to behave like it’s one or the other.

2026-01-07 23:11:05 UTC

rv is a new declarative command-line package manager for the R programming language written in Rust. Being declarative, I've found it to be far-and-away better at dependency resolution than any of the other package managers …
Using rv in a container
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/rv_in_docker

2025-12-28 21:04:33 UTC

From the archives: 2025-12-28 at 21:04 PM
Failed software projects are strategic failures
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/failed_software_projects

2025-12-25 22:13:04 UTC

From the archives: 2025-12-25 at 22:12 PM
On our discontents
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/on_our_discontents

2025-12-16 04:04:52 UTC

Chapter 1 of R the Software Engineering Way is now up! In it, we learn about R functions, how they work and when to write them, and we learn about control flow tools that software engineers use a lot but statisticians don't:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/r_the_software_way_1
#R #rstats

2025-12-13 02:24:42 UTC

Dark times call for desperate measures, and with my career being a little hosed and my wanting to like, have money to pay rent, I'm writing a book! It's about teaching R users to write code like software engineers do, and the hope is that I can use it partially as content marketing for my coaching offerings. Here's the first chapter:
#R #rlanguage
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/r_the_software_way_0

2025-11-27 20:56:31 UTC

From the archives: 2025-11-27 at 20:56 PM
Matt Mullenweg and entrepreneurial hubris
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/hubris

2025-10-27 02:45:08 UTC

I think the AI summary of the book of Corinthians that I just came across while doing some research for my next piece might be the most blasphemous thing I've ever seen.

2025-10-21 01:11:42 UTC

Wholly recommend this post, and the blog from a friend of mine: it's very clever and probably a lot more useful than mine for sharing with serious businesspeople.
https://yakirhavin.com/blog/spreadsheets-the-second-best-tool-for-the-job/

2025-10-20 06:02:16 UTC

After yet another job rejection where I was found to be "very impressive" and yet turned down for reasons unrelated to my candidacy, I'm tempted just to say that whenever someone has nothing but good things to say about me as a candidate and still throws me out, they should pay me $20,000

2025-10-19 22:34:12 UTC

I'm increasingly wondering whether I should just give up on tech and commit fully to a writing career. It seems like the only thing that's getting even a little traction.

2025-06-18 06:48:37 UTC

I finally actually got some good testimonials for my consulting and mentoring work! This is what Magnus Toftdal Lund (who, by-the-by, is a brilliant .Net developer and you should retain him if you possibly can) had to say:
"On another note, just the work you've done so far has had a monumental effect on my workflow. Being able to test each part against a running instance of 'the rest' without having to spin those up, does away with a ton of friction!"

2025-06-17 01:37:12 UTC

Huh, I think I might actually have written an open-source project worth sharing. Still needs a good bit of polish, but I can see people wanting to use this.

2025-05-27 04:11:31 UTC

This week's blog post is about what kind of society decides to create and use LLMs: it's not a very nice one.
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/keeping_up_appearances

2025-05-09 00:40:40 UTC

Our current government seems determined to turn tenants into a permanently harassed underclass, and I really, truly hate it. So fucking much

2025-03-02 02:22:32 UTC

Understanding that the USA isn't the only meaningful country in the world seems to be a real stretch for a lot of Americans at the moment.

2025-01-11 04:48:29 UTC

Question about a title for an upcoming article: "Mark Zuckerberg is a fucking ghoul" or "Mark Zuckerberg is our Julius Streicher"?

2025-01-10 02:17:30 UTC

An excellent post from a friend:
https://mirawelner.com/posts/checkout.html

2024-12-17 03:04:45 UTC

@nprofile…d6h6
Wait, you've been following me? Damn, I'm deeply flattered. I love your blog!

2024-12-16 23:13:35 UTC

This one just keeps getting more and more relevant in some uncomfortable ways:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/fascism_mirror

2024-12-05 21:40:21 UTC

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@nprofile…evrs Kinda? Unfortunately the weekend is the only time when I have undisturbed time to think, so I end up doing most of my work then.

2024-11-17 21:48:03 UTC

A new post! This one, I'm sure, will get very normal responses on LinkedIn:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/scrumlord_regime
#agile #uspol

2024-11-11 05:35:12 UTC

It is distressingly difficult to accept the fact that you simply *can't* make other people value what you value.

2024-11-11 03:19:33 UTC

My first post-election post: it's a bit rambly, but I had to put something out or else I'd go mad:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/fascism_mirror
#tech #uspol

2024-11-04 03:33:51 UTC

A worrying trend that I've noticed on LinkedIn: whenever I post something foolish or intemperate, or something that generally shows me to be the worst version of myself, it gets far more engagement than my reasonable posts. The platform boosts awful behaviour, and that's just bad

2024-10-14 04:40:47 UTC

New blog post up! This one's a little more reflective than I usually go:
"Humans are frail, fallible, mortal and limited creatures. This is a timeless observation that we have not, despite our best efforts, managed to disprove in over six thousand years of written history..."
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/cult_infallibility
#tech #politics