Nate Finch

When does the new album drop? That's some sick cover art.

I built two things in two days that I'd wanted to exist for years. Opus 4.6 made it possible, and I don't even have any kind of optimized workflow for it yet.

Programming will never be the same. And maybe that's ok.

Say you have

func Speak(msg string, upper *bool, repeat *count)

Mage can now call this as

mage speak -upper "this is all uppercase"

or

mage speak -repeat=2 "say this twice"

and of course, this still works

mage speak "this comes out as-is"

(obv depending on the implementation of speak)

Big update for Mage. I shipped optional arguments (flags)! Something long desired but difficult to get off the ground. Opus 4.6 took my description and nailed it in one shot.

I just had to tell it to update the website with docs. Shipped in v1.16.0

magefile.org/targets/

Example below

And it has happened: Hegseth and Trump declare Anthropic a supply chain risk.

Every company that has government contracts will be barred from using Claude code.

It is an attempt to outright destroy the company because they did not consent to mass surveillance of Americans and AI kill bots.

Wow.

In the 500k-ish lines of go code for my project at work, we have 4 fallthrough statements.
One was used incorrectly.
Two fell through to default and probably should have the default logic moved outside the switch.
Just one was arguably necessary.

#golang pro-tip:

Fallthrough literally falls through to the *next* case statement, no matter what the next `case xxxx` statement checks.

Fallthrough does not continue checking case statements and it doesn't jump to the `default:` statement.

In case you were looking for something to wear on a night around town.

Yas
bsky.app/profile/nate...

my grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor, was Anne Frank’s neighbor in Amsterdam, and Oma thinks this comparison is perfectly apt

In the world of professional cryptographers, the question is a settled matter: as of early 2026, Signal is the best encrypted messaging app for all but the most utterly pathological of edge cases.

You can't hand thousands of people guns, immunity from prosecution, and a power fantasy culture, and expect anything other than a bunch of trigger happy terrorists.

This is what our system explicitly encourages.

If I can't shoot pepper balls at the police, they shouldn't be able to shoot them at me (without having to prove to a judge that it was self defense without other recourse).

No officer should be able to murder someone on video and walk away any more than I could.

All of these ICE and CBP mf'ers deserve to be in jail. Congress needs to end qualified immunity. Being a state or federal officer does not *lower* the bar for your actions, it *raises* it. You are supposed to be trained. You are supposed to defend our rights, not violate them.

Great post! Talking about YAGNI is the real sign of an experienced engineer in my opinion.

One of the most important powers of a senior engineer is the ability to say "No", and have people actually listen.

Do not hesitate to use this power to protect your team and your project.

Many people will ask "how" to accomplish something, but few will ask *if* this is a thing that should be done.

Meme of Ron Swanson in which the top image has an officer challenging Ron in a park. The meme text at the top says "You can't just ignore the 4th ammendment!" The subtitles for the scene have Ron saying "Not to worry, I have a permit." The second image is a piece of printer paper that just has "I can do what I want" printed on it. The meme text on the image says - This is just a memo that says "I can do what I want"

ICE, evidently

Having data objects as interfaces w/ logic tends to cause you to add unrelated logic into each of the implementation types. This means you end up with parts of your logic for X feature spread across a bunch of other packages/files, which makes it hard to keep that code consistent and understandable.

#golang hot tip - if an interface is 95% Getters, you should probably instead use plain old struct fields, and use logic at creation time to populate the fields differently for different types.

Separating logic and data will make your code easier to maintain and understand.

Today's task: Trying to convince product that we don't need special logic to mark a particular category of requests as free... when those requests only amount to 0.2% of the average user's costs anyway.

This is like buying a $10 meal and worrying about whether they charge you 2 cents for the straw.

I have had to take this card out of *the 99* of bracket 3 decks because it's so gross. Sure, people should run more removal, but still....

*from Afghanistan, geez.

Subscribing as this is relevant to my interests. ICE has been doing their gestapo impression in our area, and among other things, two of my daughter's best friends are from Afghani and their parents are some of the same ones brought to the US after they helped US troops.

I really liked it when I was looking at it back several years. I should poke at it again and see how it has changed over the years.

Adding the ability to write (safe) runtime-executable scripts to a statically compiled program is pretty cool IMO.

I even wrote a little wrapper back in the day to make it easier to give starlark access to your program's data. No idea if it's still necessary in the current iteration (back then, it was pretty cumbersome to pass a struct value to a starlark script, for example, so my library did it for you).

It's like they implemented "Python: just the good stuff".

I really like it as a way to give end-users safe ways to programmatically extend your software (even though that's not really what it's designed for... it's designed more as "smart config").

Lol omg slightly shorter 😂

Without unique error codes, all the client can do is display your error message and give up in the dumbest manner possible.

With error codes, the client can behave more intelligently - maybe show a dialog to request access to the directory, maybe show the list of trade-restricted countries, etc.

For example, maybe you return 403 forbidden - is that because the user made a request from a Trade Restricted country, or because they tried to read a directory they don't have permission for, or because they tried to delete a file they have read-only access to?

Responding with json allows you to definite any number of unique error codes to fit your service's specific needs. This is exactly like returning well-known error types in Go. Clients can programmatically handle known errors, rather than just displaying an error message and giving up.