egoodwin.io

The Virtue of Laziness in an AI Enabled World

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 08:46:42 -0500

This is a great essay by Bryan Cantrill about the decline of laziness as a virtue in programming.

Of course, the implicit wink here is that it takes a lot of work to be lazy: when programmers are engaged in the seeming laziness of hammock-driven development, we are in fact turning the problem over and over in our heads. We undertake the hard intellectual work of developing these abstractions in part because we are optimizing the hypothetical time of our future selves, even if at the expense of our current one. When we get this calculus right, it is glorious, as the abstraction serves not just ourselves, but all who come after us. That is, our laziness serves to make software easier to write, and systems easier to compose — to allow more people to write more of it.

We ignore the value of laziness at our peril. I’m constantly asked if I fear that AI is going to take my job or destroy what our firm has built. The answer is quite confidently, no. I see too many people blindly trusting the stochastic parrots and shutting down their deep thinking capabilities while glazing over a wall of text. This lack of thinking is creating massive dislocations and opportunities for businesses if you can remain clear-headed through the noise.

Revive

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 19:51:30 -0500

It’s been awhile. I just reformatted my laptop and installed Debian Trixie. Reloaded Hugo and thought I would resume posting again.

The AI Tarpit

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 23:42:43 -0600

I’ve been noticing a trend of people sending me AI slop as insights. It’s been a slow burn, but it is increasing. A salesperson sending me obviously AI generated content, a four page value study filled with AI nonsense, a graphic portfolio of the most milquetoast content. Whatever it is, you can tell that it’s AI generated because of the cloyingly polite way it says nothing.

The thing that concerns me is the frequency with which otherwise smart people are missing the fact that it says nothing. The most obvious users of this nonsense are the “hussle bros”, the men and women who tell you that a second of peace and tranquility in your life is a second wasted in your all-consuming pursuit of wealth and prosperity.

I think the thing that is most annoying about it is the blandness. The most trite parables repackaged as business maxims. The reality of business is that it is boring and methodical. You post journal entries every day, you reconcile accounts every month, you budget every year. These are not blogworthy events, they’re hardly passing awareness events. When I worked in manufacturing, we would agonize over every ounce of scrap, every wasted step on the line, every basis point of improvement. But through it all there was a humanity to it. We used to laugh at the “GE Alumni” who would pilot into the plant. They never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

And that’s what’s happening today. There is a utility to these tools and they can make you more productive. But they also have a foolishness and a mediocrity to their answers that must be guarded against.

The worst thing you can do is assume that these things will be able to do all of your thinking for you and that your existence won’t be worse off because of it. There is a value in intellectual struggle that should not be overlooked.

The longer this goes on the more convinced I am that there will be lots of room for real artistic and commercial expression: in art and in commerce.

Linkroll - March 1, 2026

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:59:31 -0600

Cory Doctorow on the Offline Podcast talking about enshittification
HP Linux Imaging and Printing - currently wrestling getting my discontinued HP printer on Linux.
9Front released “Release” back in November
I’ve been playing around with Graphene OS
OpenBSD 7.8 has been released and it has Raspberry Pi support.
Open Source LLM models
EmailWiz - script to set up a linux mailserver
Overview of DbContext in EntityFrameworkCore

Starting up again

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:44:49 -0600

After a two year hiatus, I’m back to chronicling my thoughts online. I’ve been thinking alot about the early days of the internet and how much fun it was to be a part of it. Blogrolls and RSS feeds and just feeling like you could roll your own blog software and make something that was functional.

Maybe its all the AI talk about how content’s not going to matter anymore, because the bots are going to just autogenerate it for you now. I’ve always liked an underdog story, so maybe its time to revive human-generated content at the tail end of the human internet. At the very least it will be training material for the machines :)

Gary Gulman's Born on 3rd Base

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 09:42:26 -0600

The new Gary Gulman comedy special (streaming on Max) is amazing. Let’s face it, I’m probably never going to write about a comedy special that I don’t think is amazing, but Gary Gulman is a master of the craft and one of the all-time greats. He’s a comedian’s comedian and I devour everything he creates. This special does not disappoint.

Called “Born on 3rd Base”, the special is a great follow-up to his last special “The Great Depresh”. The last special was an honest look into the darkness of coming to grips with his crippling depression and getting much needed treatment. It shed a light on mental illness in a sympathetic and warm way that both entertained and humanized the topic. This special at first glance leaves all that behind and deals with broader social topics of income inequality and social stigmas. But dig just a little bit beneath the surface and you’ll see that Born on 3rd Base subtly explores the environment and relationships in his life that fed his depression growing up.

Gary’s comedy is always so tightly packed, with a ton of asides and divergences that all pay off by the close of the show. His style is always warm and genuine, with a gentle mocking tone that allows him to poke fun at your everyday foibles while still being on your side. But underneath that gentleness is a razor-sharp edge that points to how much anger he has for political pandering, and inexact platitudes that cause real harm. He starts off his bit on income inequality by tearing apart the refrain that “Welfare programs cause generational poverty because it rewards laziness” and meanders through the special until he lands on a touching story of his father scrambling to afford hockey gear for his son after school sport budgets got cut as part of a bill that reduced property taxes in his hometown. All along the way, he makes references to classic literature, pop culture music and cinema. He makes a passing reference to Edwin Abbott’s Flatland while dissecting the indignity of a Pop Tart. The best part of his style is that it is almost a throwaway reference, it’s not necessary to get the thrust of the joke. But for those who are familiar with the fact that it is both a satire of Victorian culture and an exploration of geometry, the joke is that much richer as he uses the blandness of a Pop Tart to skewer those who look down on the poor. And the best part is that a good chunk of his audience have probably had a lukewarm reaction to poverty, but there’s a good chance they will reframe their views by the end of the special.

His comedy doesn’t appear to intrinsically have a higher purpose, he’s just honestly reflecting on his absurdist view of his life and the world around him. But he so meticulously crafts each word in his routines that, like great literature, fundamental truths emerge.

In short, if you are a comedy fan, check out his special. If you’re not familiar with his work, enjoy working through his back catalog as well, because it’s all gold.

Link Roundup

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 14:55:41 -0500

The incredible philosophy of Ange Postecoglou
Swift.org The Swift homepage got a facelift with more tutorials
Blocking a Floating Tremolo on a Guitar
BSD Now podcast - I’m really enjoying this podcast
RunBSD.info - who uses BSD and why?
The History of BSD Jails - I’m always amazed at how little work BSD Jails are and how much work Docker is
LawrenceTV - more people need to love Lawrence as much as I do

Being Clever

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 12:37:23 -0500

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about coding styles lately. One of the interesting things about the space that my firm plays in is that it attracts people that are technologically inclined but have not typically had prior coding experience. A lot of the folks come from accounting and finance backgrounds. As such, they don’t have the background in things like version control, CI/CD, code reuse and refactoring, or any sort of true development best practices.

What this causes a lot of times is a lack of understanding of how to avoid pain in the future. For example, you don’t comment your code to understand what the code does today, you comment it to understand what it does six months from now after you haven’t looked at it in awhile.

This has really hit home as we’ve been brought in to fix some work that we didn’t originally do ourselves. Picking up where another firm left off and having to pick your way through their work has been an interesting exercise. And I’ve landed on a new personal axiom of software development.

The cleverness of a solution should be inversely proportional to how long it needs to be functional

If you’re going to put some clever trick into your code that does some whiz-bang thing to get it working, make sure it’s not pertaining to some important function that is going to be around for awhile. The reason for this is that when other people go to look at your code, they are not going to be nearly as clever as you are. Included in that group of coders is future you. Basically, the more tricky and slick you are with code, the more likely you are to royally screw things up when you go back to work on the codebase in the future.

In the case of us coming in behind someone else’s work, they did some cool tricks to get things working. And we stubbed our toes on every single one of them. And the worst part is, the code was documented…it just wasn’t front and center as we were working on it. When we finally isolated what was going on, there were plenty of simple and intuitive options they could have chosen to do the same thing, but they opted for the slick way to do it, and it ended up biting us.

I play Xonotic now

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 00:28:39 -0500

FreeBSD has been my server operating system of choice for the past two decades. I may have started on Linux (with a Walnut Creek CD of Linux Slackware), but after I got out of university I started toying around with the *BSD flavors (particularly FreeBSD and OpenBSD). FreeBSD is clean, has sensible defaults, and frankly, the ports and package system is just hassle-free when it comes to getting up and running. If you’re at all wanting a Unix system that is dependable, a great platform for development, and running simple services, FreeBSD is hard to beat.

Over the past year or so I started toying around with FreeBSD Jails. While I’m not an expert on the topic, they’ve proven useful for a few services that I like to run on our home network. Best of all, they run in independent environments, meaning I don’t have to worry about them stomping on each other as they get upgraded and maintained over time.

All of this leads me to Xonotic. I was bouncing around the internet recently and came across some old news about Unreal Tournament getting cancelled. In the process I discovered that some open source developers had taken the open sourced Quake Engine code and used it to build Xonotic.

Waxing nostalgic, I decided to throw up a jail and install it on my main server. I fired it up and was immediately back in my 20s, running through platform maps fragging everyone I could.

This game is fun! The graphics are definitely 2006/2007 era, but I think that’s part of the charm for me. It’s fast moving and visceral, and the player models and weaposn are really cool and well done. Now that I’ve got a dedicated server, it’s pretty trivial to log on and play a 5-10 minute round of Deathmatch or Capture the Flag. And one of the things I like about it is that the gameplay options are straight ahead. I was up and running with a dedicated server very quickly. A few key mappings later and I was running through the deathmatch map rotation.

The one thing that was not straightforward was the configuration script for the server. The sample startup scripts that were supplied with the base install of Xonotic were designed around a Linux installation structure. Since I installed via the FreeBSD packages, the filenames were slightly different, and the executable path and the data path for maps was different. It took a little mucking around to identify the path differences and adjust the script accordingly. What I ended up doing was creating a xonotic server user inside the jail to run the server, and set up a server.cfg file in that user directory to set the defaults for the server to run. Finally, I created a server startup script called xonotic_server_freebsd.sh to launch the server by reading in the config files, and then wrapped all that in a script called xonotic_tmux.sh, that launches a tmux session, kicks off the startup script, and detaches the session. This allows me to keep the session running on the server after I log off, but also allows me to ssh in, reattach to the session and make modifications as needed.

Needless to say, I’m having way more fun with this than I should be.

The Ups and Downs of Being a Dynamo Fan

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 11:29:42 -0500

Being a Dynamo fan is not for the faint of heart. After a decade of malinvestment and terrible strategy moves (e.g. permanently trading away an international player slot on the roster), a definite case could be made that it’s easier building an expansion team franchise from scratch than rebuilding the Dynamo. And after seeing St. Louis and FC Cincinnati this year, I don’t think many would argue the reverse.

Still, a lot has been accomplished in a relatively short amount of time, and hope springs eternal in H-Town.

Which is what makes this last week so difficult to take. Between Open Cup and regular season play, the Dynamo have had a run of a lot of games to play these past 10 days, with another road-game coming up this Saturday.

After losing to MNUFC on the road in the regular season game, the team returned to Texas for a solid, but stressful game against Dallas where they drew 1:1. For the most part I thought the team showed signs of continuing their forward trajectory into the season, with a rock-solid defensive showing, an excellent midfield that appeared sloppy at times, and a completely uninspired attack.

Next came a hometown rematch against MNUFC in the US Open Cup where we won 4:0. I was at that game and got to see the team up close. We got to see Aliyu on the field at the front and I was impressed by how much it transformed our attack. As promised, he’s a player that gets in behind the defense and disrupts the line. There were several times it was obvious that he’s still settling in, and had no idea where he should be, but the potential was obvious from the moment he got on the pitch. It became even more evident that following Saturday against Austin, where the Dymamo ground down the Austin side in a 2:1 match. Not only were we hopeful this season, but we were shaping up to be dangerous. The rest of the league hadn’t noticed yet, but we are becoming the kind of team that would disrupt all sorts of playoff aspirations for bigger, better teams. The rebuild was happening faster than I had hoped. While not perfect, we had depth in defense, one of the best midfields in the league with a serviceable second string on the bench and we were starting to get an attack worth talking about.

Of course, just when you start getting cocky, it all comes crashing down. Last night’s 6:2 loss to Vancouver was a travesty. From the opening Vancouver goal less than 20 seconds into the match, to Houston regaining the lead at 2:1, and then through the rest of the game, we looked off. And not just off, but defeated. The mentality was lacking, the execution was lacking, and the team vision was lacking. The low-point for me was Nelson Quiñones getting sent off with a red card for a face slap to a rival player. The physical contact was minimal and not truly worthy of a red card in terms of danger to the player. But the move was obviously aggressive, made in full view of the ref, and was definitely targetd at the player’s head. All of this made the call fair given the standards of the league. And all of it was due to a lack of composure and professionalism from one of our supposed rising stars. It was the culmination of a series of events in game that just harkened back to last year where the team just looked angry and incapable of being considered much of a threat in the league.

And that’s the rub right now. I very much want to believe this turnaround is happening and brighter days are ahead. But when you see a performance like last night you realize how much further we have to go.

Procrastination

Wed, 24 May 2023 21:55:05 -0500

I don’t know what it says about me that, whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed with things to do, I get this urge to modify me emacs config files.

Github Pages DNS

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 00:04:16 -0500

I just spent way longer than I should have configuring DNS to handle GitHub Pages verification process. I’ve enabled https now and verified the domain. I had no idea that GitHub Pages squatting had become so problematic.

Anyway, onwards and upwards.

That felt good! Dynamo vs. Galaxy

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 20:40:54 -0500

What a game! Not the prettiest soccer I’ve ever seen, but being in the stands for the Dynamo/LA Galaxy game felt good. At this point we’ve:

Been undefeated at home this season
Maintained a clean sheet at home for all three games
Got a player (Amine Bassi) who has gone four games and scored a penalty shot in each game. This is the longest consecutive penalty shot streak in MLS history.
Got a solid back-line and midfield setup that can manuever around the field and create open spaces to play into as well as service from the back.
Have a team that is controlling the ball and is generally possessive for most of the game.

What we don’t have:

Someone who can consistently get in the penalty box and effectively shoot on goal.

What the LA Galaxy game showed us was a team that is effectively playing together, trusting each other to play their positions and getting creative on how to open up the opponents defense. Ben Olsen promised us that you would see more players crashing the box and that is what we saw.

And our defense! I LOVE our defensive line! Bartlow, Hadebe, Steres, Clark…legitimately fun to watch.

He also promised us a gritty play style that punished opponents and wore them down. If the number of fights on the field and red cards on Saturday was any indication, these players got under the LA Galaxy’s skin and made them lose their cool. When the fights broke out, the fans went ballistic as well, showing that Houston’s desire to bleed orange is there, ready to be rekindled with a team that can be dependable.

A 3-0 victory felt nice! And if you think about the fact that 2 of the 3 teams we’ve lost to this season are sitting at the top of the league (and deserve to be there), our record is looking pretty positive at this point. We’re definitely a work in progress, but I’m feeling really good about the fact that this team is lightyears ahead of last year and the year before.

Kyle Kinane's new special is amazing

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 08:27:20 -0500

Nothing more to say other than the title. Kyle Kinane’s new special is amazing! It’s going to be released on YouTube on March 30th, but I was more than happy to pay for the paid release version on 800 Pound Gorilla. Highly recommend you do the same!

Kyle Kinane Trailer V1 from Ian on Vimeo.

Dynamo Home Opener vs. Austin FC

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:01:47 -0500

Last night was the first Houston Dynamo home game of the season. For a lot of reasons I was excited for this one.

New Ownership & Management

New owner Ted Segal bought into the club at the end of the 2021 season, and since then has proven that he’s serious about making this club a serious contender in the league, and is willing to invest to do so. This season opener was the first opportunity to get a glimpse of what that might look like. Sure, last season included the signing of Hector Herrera, a top Mexican player from Atletico Madrid, but this was the first full offseason that the new ownership has had to sign new players, upgrade the facilities, and make front and back-office staff changes. I won’t go into everything that’s been done, but I point all this out because one of the changes involved upgrades to Shell Energy stadium.

The New Stadium

Shell Energy Stadium (formerly PNC Stadium, formerly BBVA Stadium) got a pretty drastic facelift over the summer. New mesh seating was installed, new restaurant contracts were signed, and the East portion of the stadium was fitted with a new East Club experience geared towards more high-rolling fans and corporate seating.

I was eager to check out the changes firsthand.

Upon walking in, the hallways to the stadium looked refreshed, but largely the same at first glance. As you went further in, you noticed the new restaurants that were operating. The smells of the food were much more pleasant and apparent, as there were a lot of unique flavors available for purchase (BBQ, Mexican, and Vietnamese via Roostar).

But heading out to the field was a whole different matter. The seats are NICE! Very comfortable, and the field looks like a modern club stadium fitting of a city like Houston. Overall, the facelift modernizes the stadium, and I’m excited to be able to watch the rest of the season in this environment.

The Game

It’s no secret by now that the Dynamo got the 3 points with a 2-0 game over Austin FC. Austin is a tough rival, but this was their third game in the last week, so one can be forgiven for not reading too much into this victory. Having said that, there were lots of positives about this game for a fan who was watched this team scrape bottom of the league for the better part of a decade.

The game was a blast. The Dynamo didn’t have many moments of brilliance, but they managed to get the ball in the back of the net. Steve Clark had a really solid game at goalkeeper and kept the clean sheet. Hector Herrera eschewed his usual position of defending midfielder and pressed forward to attack and scored his first goal since signing with the team. I’m not sure if this was part of the original game plan, or just him being a team captain and showing the newer guys how it’s done. Regardless, his goal off of a great give-and-take assist from Griffin Dorsey showed that this team is figuring out how to link up inside the box and can be dangerous if you’re not paying attention.

It’s still a VERY new team, and they haven’t had a chance to solidify how they’re all going to play together. Because of this there were plenty of sloppy passes, incoherent play execution and general mistake-making. However, they all played aggressively and dominated most of the important stats (shots on goal, passes, corner kicks). Also, I was shocked at how physical our players were in comparison to Austin, especially in the second half. Amine Bassi is shorter than most of the Austin team, but he looked positively ecstatic to be bodying a number of their players throughout the game.

I’m not calling this team a finished product at this point, but I am optimistic about what next season will bring. I may even be convinced to be optimistic about this season if they get more polished, but maintain this level of intensity throughout the season.

Why now?

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 13:23:38 -0500

It’s 2023…who the heck is still blogging?

I’ve never been a committed blogger. I’ve created six or seven different blogs in my lifetime, including rolling my own static blog engine back in the day, and let them die out over time. I was an early adopter of Userland Radio, Blogger, and Tumblr.

So, why this blog? Why now? In short, the tools have just become so easy and so controllable, and the world has become more interesting, and I feel like I have something to say. I don’t really have an agenda with this blog, but I do have a point of view on a number of topics. Sitting at the intersection of Finance and Technology gives me a vantage point that I’ve learned is rather unique.

So, my initial intent is to blog about topics that interest me. Soccer (particularly the Dynamo and MLS in the US), Wall Street, practical programming concepts, tech projects and finance/economics,

I’m old enough now to realize I’m mostly doing this for me. I’m happy to have you along for the ride, though.

First Post

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 23:35:56 -0500

First post on Hugo!