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Immortality always sounded like a curse to me. But especially now, having passed the halfway point of the average wealthy male life expectancy. Another scoop of life as big as the one I've already been served seems more than enough, thank you very much. Does that strike you as morbid? It's funny, people seem to have no problem understanding satiation when it comes to the individual parts of life. Enough delicious cake, no more rides on the rollercoaster, the end of a great party. But not life itself. Why? The eventual end strikes me as beautiful relief. Framing the idea that you can see enough, do enough, be enough. And have enjoyed the bulk of it, without wanting it to go on forever. Have you seen Highlander? It got panned on its initial release in the 80s. Even Sean Connery couldn't save it with the critics at the time. But I love it. It's one of my all-time favorite movies. It's got a silly story about a worldwide tournament of immortal Highlanders who live forever, lest they get their heads chopped off, and then the last man standing wins... more life? Yeah, it doesn't actually make a lot of sense. But it nails the sadness of forever. The loneliness, the repetition, the inevitable cynicism with humanity. Who wants to live forever, indeed. It's the same theme in Björk's wonderfully melancholic song I've Seen It All. It's a great big world, but eventually every unseen element will appear as but a variation on an existing theme. Even surprise itself will succumb to familiarity. Even before the last day, you can look forward to finality, too. I love racing, but I'm also drawn to the day when the reflexes finally start to fade, and I'll hang up the helmet. One day I will write the last line of Ruby code, too. Sell the last subscription. Write the last tweet. How merciful. It gets harder with people you love, of course. Harder to imagine the last day with them. But I didn't know my great-great-grandfather, and can easily picture him passing with the satisfaction of seeing his lineage carry on without him. One way to think of this is to hold life with a loose grip. Like a pair of drumsticks. I don't play, but I'm told that the music flows better when you avoid strangling them in a death grip. And then you enjoy keeping the beat until the song ends. Amor fati. Amor mori.
The average age of Apple's board members is 68! Nearly half are over 70, and the youngest is 63. It’s not much better with the executive team, where the average age hovers around 60. I’m all for the wisdom of our elders, but it’s ridiculous that the world’s premier tech company is now run by a gerontocracy. And I think it’s starting to show. The AI debacle is just the latest example. I can picture the board presentation on Genmoji: “It’s what the kids want these days!!”. It’s a dumb feature because nobody on Apple’s board or in its leadership has probably ever used it outside a quick demo. I’m not saying older people can’t be an asset. Hell, at 45, I’m no spring chicken myself in technology circles! But you need a mix. You need to blend fluid and crystallized intelligence. You need some people with a finger on the pulse, not just some bravely keeping one. Once you see this, it’s hard not to view slogans like “AI for the rest of us” through that lens. It’s as if AI is like programming a VCR, and you need the grandkids to come over and set it up for you. By comparison, the average age on Meta’s board is 55. They have three members in their 40s. Steve Jobs was 42 when he returned to Apple in 1997. He was 51 when he introduced the iPhone. And he was gone — from Apple and the world — at 56. Apple literally needs some fresh blood to turn the ship around.
I grew up in the 80s in Copenhagen and roamed the city on my own from an early age. My parents rarely had any idea where I went after school, as long as I was home by dinner. They certainly didn’t have direct relationships with the parents of my friends. We just figured things out ourselves. It was glorious. That’s not the type of childhood we were able to offer our kids in modern-day California. Having to drive everywhere is, of course, its own limitation, but that’s only half the problem. The other half is the expectation that parents are involved in almost every interaction. Play dates are commonly arranged via parents, even for fourth or fifth graders. The new hysteria over smartphones doesn’t help either, as it cuts many kids off from being able to make their own arrangements entirely (since the house phone has long since died too). That’s not how my wife grew up in the 80s in America either. The United States of that age was a lot like what I experienced in Denmark: kids roaming around on their own, parents blissfully unaware of where their offspring were much of the time, and absolutely no expectation that parents would arrange play dates or even sleepovers. I’m sure there are still places in America where life continues like that, but I don’t personally know of any parents who are able to offer that 80s lifestyle to their kids — not in New York, not in Chicago, not in California. Maybe this life still exists in Montana? Maybe it’s a socioeconomic thing? I don’t know. But what I do know is that Copenhagen is still living in the 80s! We’ve been here off and on over the last several years, and just today, I was struck by the fact that one of our kids had left school after it ended early, biked halfway across town with his friend, and was going to spend the day at his place. And we didn’t get an update on that until much later. Copenhagen is a compelling city in many ways, but if I were to credit why the US News and World Report just crowned Denmark the best country for raising children in 2025, I’d say it’s the independence — carefree independence. Danish kids roam their cities on their own, manage their social relationships independently, and do so in relative peace and safety. I’m a big fan of Jonathan Haidt’s work on What Happened In 2013, which he captured in The Coddling of the American Mind. That was a very balanced book, and it called out the lack of unsupervised free play and independence as key contributors to the rise in child fragility. But it also pinned smartphones and social media with a large share of the blame, despite the fact that the effect, especially on boys, is very much a source of ongoing debate. I’m not arguing that excessive smartphone usage — and certainly social-media brain rot — is good for kids, but I find this explanation is proving to be a bit too easy of a scapegoat for all the ills plaguing American youth. And it certainly seems like upper-middle-class American parents have decided that blaming the smartphone for everything is easier than interrogating the lack of unsupervised free play, rough-and-tumble interactions for boys, and early childhood independence. It also just doesn’t track in countries like Denmark, where the smartphone is just as prevalent, if not more so, than in America. My oldest had his own phone by third grade, and so did everyone else in his class — much earlier than Haidt recommends. And it was a key tool for them to coordinate the independence that The Coddling of the American Mind called for more of. Look, I’m happy to see phones parked during school hours. Several schools here in Copenhagen do that, and there’s a new proposal pending legislation in parliament to make that law across the land. Fine! But I think it’s delusional of American parents to think that banning the smartphone — further isolating their children from independently managing their social lives — is going to be the one quick fix that cures the anxious generation. What we need is more 80s-style freedom and independence for kids in America.
When things are going well, managers can fool themselves into thinking that people trying their best is all that matters. Poor outcomes are just another opportunity for learning! But that delusion stops working when the wheels finally start coming off — like they have now for Apple and its AI unit. Then you need someone who cares about the outcome above the effort. Then you need an asshole. In management parlance, an asshole is someone who cares less about feelings or effort and more about outcomes. Steve Jobs was one such asshole. So seems to be Musk. Gates certainly was as well. Most top technology chiefs who've had to really fight in competitive markets for the top prize fall into this category. Apple's AI management is missing an asshole: Walker defended his Siri group, telling them that they should be proud. Employees poured their “hearts and souls into this thing,” he said. “I saw so many people giving everything they had in order to make this happen and to make incredible progress together.” So it's stuck nurturing feelings: “You might have co-workers or friends or family asking you what happened, and it doesn’t feel good,” Walker said. “It’s very reasonable to feel all these things.” He said others are feeling burnout and that his team will be entitled to time away to recharge to get ready for “plenty of hard work ahead.” These are both quotes from the Bloomberg report on the disarray inside Apple, following the admission that the star feature of the iPhone 16 — the Apple Intelligence that could reach inside your personal data — won't ship until the iPhone 17, if at all. John Gruber from Daring Fireball dug up this anecdote from the last time Apple seriously botched a major software launch: Steve Jobs doesn’t tolerate duds. Shortly after the launch event, he summoned the MobileMe team, gathering them in the Town Hall auditorium in Building 4 of Apple’s campus, the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists. According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question: “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he told them. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.” The public humiliation particularly infuriated Jobs. Can you see the difference? This is an asshole in action. Apple needs to find a new asshole and put them in charge of the entire product line. Cook clearly isn't up to the task, and the job is currently spread thinly across a whole roster of senior VPs. Little fiefdoms. This is poison to the integrated magic that was Apple's trademark for so long.
We didn’t used to need an explanation for having kids. That was just life. That’s just what you did. But now we do, because now we don’t. So allow me: Having kids means making the most interesting people in the world. Not because toddlers or even teenagers are intellectual oracles — although life through their eyes is often surprising and occasionally even profound — but because your children will become the most interesting people to you. That’s the important part. To you. There are no humans on earth I’m as interested in as my children. Their maturation and growth are the greatest show on the planet. And having a front-seat ticket to this performance is literally the privilege of a lifetime. But giving a review of this incredible show just doesn’t work. I could never convince a stranger that my children are the most interesting people in the world, because they wouldn’t be, to them. So words don’t work. It’s a leap of faith. All I can really say is this: Trust me, bro.
More in programming
At first, it sounds obvious: if we want to save the planet, we should do less. Fewer people, less consumption, smaller footprints. I believed this too—so much so that I once thought having kids was irresponsible. But the more I looked into it, the less sense it made.
A deep dive into Testing Library's .toBeVisible() and .toBeInTheDocument() matchers, exploring their differences, use cases, and best practices
A week ago, somebody added malicious code to the tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action. If you used the compromised action, it would leak secrets to your build log. Those build logs are public for public repositories, so anybody could see your secrets. Scary! Mutable vs immutable references This attack was possible because it’s common practice to refer to tags in a GitHub Actions workflow, for example: jobs: changed_files: ... steps: - name: Get changed files id: changed-files uses: tj-actions/changed-files@v2 ... At a glance, this looks like an immutable reference to an already-released “version 2” of this action, but actually this is a mutable Git tag. If somebody changes the v2 tag in the tj-actions/changed-files repo to point to a different commit, this action will run different code the next time it runs. If you specify a Git commit ID instead (e.g. a5b3abf), that’s an immutable reference that will run the same code every time. Tags vs commit IDs is a tradeoff between convenience and security. Specifying an exact commit ID means the code won’t change unexpectedly, but tags are easier to read and compare. Do I have any mutable references? I wasn’t worried about this particular attack because I don’t use tj-actions, but I was curious about what other GitHub Actions I’m using. I ran a short shell script in the folder where I have local clones of all my repos: find . -path '*/.github/workflows/*' -type f -name '*.yml' -print0 \ | xargs -0 grep --no-filename "uses:" \ | sed 's/\- uses:/uses:/g' \ | tr '"' ' ' \ | awk '{print $2}' \ | sed 's/\r//g' \ | sort \ | uniq --count \ | sort --numeric-sort This prints a tally of all the actions I’m using. Here’s a snippet of the output: 1 hashicorp/setup-terraform@v3 2 dtolnay/rust-toolchain@v1 2 taiki-e/create-gh-release-action@v1 2 taiki-e/upload-rust-binary-action@v1 4 actions/setup-python@v4 6 actions/cache@v4 9 ruby/setup-ruby@v1 31 actions/setup-python@v5 58 actions/checkout@v4 I went through the entire list and thought about how much I trust each action and its author. Is it from a large organisation like actions or ruby? They’re not perfect, but they’re likely to have good security procedures in place to protect against malicious changes. Is it from an individual developer or small organisation? Here I tend to be more wary, especially if I don’t know the author personally. That’s not to say that individuals can’t have good security, but there’s more variance in the security setup of random developers on the Internet than among big organisations. Do I need to use somebody else’s action, or could I write my own script to replace it? This is what I generally prefer, especially if I’m only using a small subset of the functionality offered by the action. It’s a bit more work upfront, but then I know exactly what it’s doing and there’s less churn and risk from upstream changes. I feel pretty good about my list. Most of my actions are from large organisations, and the rest are a few actions specific to my Rust command-line tools which are non-critical toys, where the impact of a compromised GitHub repo would be relatively slight. How this script works This is a classic use of Unix pipelines, where I’m chaining together a bunch of built-in text processing tools. Let’s step through how it works. find . -path '*/.github/workflows/*' -type f -name '*.yml' -print0 .yml in a folder like .github/workflows/. It prints a list of filenames, like: ./alexwlchan.net/.github/workflows/build_site.yml \0) between them, which makes it possible to split the filenames in the next step. By default it uses a newline, but a null byte is a bit safer, in case you have filenames which include newline characters. .yml as a file extension, but if you sometimes use .yaml, you can replace -name '*.yml' with \( -name '*.yml' -o -name '*.yaml' \) -path rules, like -not -path './cpython/*'. xargs -0 grep --no-filename "uses:" xargs to go through the filenames one-by-one. The `-0` flag tells it to split on the null byte, and then it runs grep to look for lines that include "uses:" – this is how you use an action in your workflow file. --no-filename option means this just prints the matching line, and not the name of the file it comes from. Not all of my files are formatted or indented consistently, so the output is quite messy: - uses: actions/checkout@v4 sed 's/\- uses:/uses:/g' \ uses: is the first key in the YAML dictionary. This sed command replaces "- uses:" with "uses:" to start tidying up the data. uses: actions/checkout@v4 sed is a pretty powerful tool for making changes to text, but I only know a couple of simple commands, like this pattern for replacing text: sed 's/old/new/g'. tr '"' ' ' uses: actions/checkout@v4 sed to make this substitution as well. I reached for tr because I've been using it for longer, and the syntax is simpler for doing single character substitutions: tr '<oldchar>' '<newchar>' awk '{print $2}' actions/checkout@v4 awk is another powerful text utility that I’ve never learnt properly – I only know how to print the nth word in a string. It has a lot of pattern-matching features I’ve never tried. sed 's/\r//g' \r), and those were included in the awk output. This command gets rid of them, which makes the data more consistent for the final step. sort | uniq --count | sort --numeric-sort tally. 6 actions/cache@v4 This step-by-step approach is how I build Unix text pipelines: I can write a step at a time, and gradually refine and tweak the output until I get the result I want. There are lots of ways to do it, and because this is a script I’ll use once and then discard, I don’t have to worry too much about doing it in the “purest” way – as long as it gets the right result, that’s good enough. If you use GitHub Actions, you might want to use this script to check your own actions, and see what you’re using. But more than that, I recommend becoming familiar with the Unix text processing tools and pipelines – even in the age of AI, they’re still a powerful and flexible way to cobble together one-off scripts for processing data. [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
JavaScript went against the grain in only using floating point numbers initially, and now we pay the price
Immortality always sounded like a curse to me. But especially now, having passed the halfway point of the average wealthy male life expectancy. Another scoop of life as big as the one I've already been served seems more than enough, thank you very much. Does that strike you as morbid? It's funny, people seem to have no problem understanding satiation when it comes to the individual parts of life. Enough delicious cake, no more rides on the rollercoaster, the end of a great party. But not life itself. Why? The eventual end strikes me as beautiful relief. Framing the idea that you can see enough, do enough, be enough. And have enjoyed the bulk of it, without wanting it to go on forever. Have you seen Highlander? It got panned on its initial release in the 80s. Even Sean Connery couldn't save it with the critics at the time. But I love it. It's one of my all-time favorite movies. It's got a silly story about a worldwide tournament of immortal Highlanders who live forever, lest they get their heads chopped off, and then the last man standing wins... more life? Yeah, it doesn't actually make a lot of sense. But it nails the sadness of forever. The loneliness, the repetition, the inevitable cynicism with humanity. Who wants to live forever, indeed. It's the same theme in Björk's wonderfully melancholic song I've Seen It All. It's a great big world, but eventually every unseen element will appear as but a variation on an existing theme. Even surprise itself will succumb to familiarity. Even before the last day, you can look forward to finality, too. I love racing, but I'm also drawn to the day when the reflexes finally start to fade, and I'll hang up the helmet. One day I will write the last line of Ruby code, too. Sell the last subscription. Write the last tweet. How merciful. It gets harder with people you love, of course. Harder to imagine the last day with them. But I didn't know my great-great-grandfather, and can easily picture him passing with the satisfaction of seeing his lineage carry on without him. One way to think of this is to hold life with a loose grip. Like a pair of drumsticks. I don't play, but I'm told that the music flows better when you avoid strangling them in a death grip. And then you enjoy keeping the beat until the song ends. Amor fati. Amor mori.
