Dave Herman

@dherman

Likes people & computers. Work: AWS/LinkedIn/Mozilla/JS/TC39/Rust (here I speak only for me). he/him

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Dave Herman@dherman· 22d

Cursed Tumblr fake gif! Here’s a different one, enjoy it because we’ll never get another movie with these three all together 😭

Dave Herman@dherman· 22d

Film you’ve watched more than six times. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, any Marvel, Disney or Ghibli

Tim Curry, Bernadette Peters, and Carol Burnett dancing in the song “Easy Street” from the 1982 “Annie”

Dave Herman@dherman· 22d

film you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. hard mode: no star trek, star wars, lotr, marvel, disney, or ghibli.

Dave Herman@dherman· Jul 6

Lovely. And this guy is the rat who lived in the last Airbnb I ever stayed at.

Dave Herman@dherman· Jun 15

I found BASIC programs I wrote as a kid on old CDs in my garage. My favorite was always this fractal I’d designed. With small modifications, it runs on qbjs.org (the calling conventions differ, and young Dave was undisciplined in modular state management). This brought back such joyful memories.

$Screenshot of the fourth iteration of my fractal, a bit similar to the Koch curve but more rectangular than triangular. Each iteration i has 9^i line segments, so this iteration has 6561 tiny line segments, and they’re small enough that the emergent shape begins looking more organic and wiggly.$

Dave Herman@dherman· Jun 11

My 90’s brain still says ooh Zip disks, I’m so modern The data transfer rate says something else

macOS file copy dialog that reads “Copying 419 items to ‘Key School Website 1996 - 98 and “7.8 MB of 87.7 MB - About 5 minutes”

Dave Herman@dherman· Jun 11

Bought a used Zip drive off eBay and pulled a stack of disks from the garage. They’re almost 3 decades old but seem to have held up 🤞

A stack of seven 100MB Iomega Zip disks from 1999

A used blue Iomega Zip drive attached to a laptop

Dave Herman@dherman· Jun 6

I wish it weren’t the case that senior engineers didn’t confuse their authority with scientific objectivity, but it’s all too common. Power is seductive, as is fear of having one’s legitimacy questioned.

Emperor Joseph making up pseudoscientific facts to justify his opinion, captioned “there are, of course, only so many notes the ear can hear in the course of an evening”

Dave Herman@dherman· Jun 6

This is especially true if you are the more senior employee or in some position of greater influence. Most junior engineers will be afraid to speak up, not to mention confused and demoralized by unfalsifiable feedback like “too complex.”

Mozart replying to Emperor Joseph with a confused look on his face, captioned “there are just as many notes as I require, Majesty, neither more nor less”

Dave Herman@dherman· Jun 6

If your design review is just “it’s too complicated,” you are likely doing more harm than good. Yes, simplicity is important. You can probably help your colleague simplify things! But you have to show good faith curiosity about their motivations and not just dismiss them out of hand.

Jeffrey Jones as Emperor Joseph II critiquing Mozart’s music as having “too many notes”

Dave Herman@dherman· Jun 5

Classic “always has been” meme, with one astronaut looking at the earth with the caption “wait, the dev’s domain is the intent, not the machine executable code?” and another astronaut standing behind him pointing a pistol at him with the caption “always has been”

Dave Herman@dherman· May 22

Every time I introduce an algorithmic feed into my life, it eventually makes me so miserable that deleting it becomes easy. Bye IG, bye Threads. 👋🏻

Dave Herman@dherman· Apr 27

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, DC, Marvel, Disney, Pixar, Spielberg, Cameron, Wachowskis, or Ghibli.

Dave Herman@dherman· Apr 17

Not to mention erasure of the real cloud Bob

A screen capture of the Bob Ross painting show entitled "Best of Clouds (Part 1)" featuring a smiling Bob Ross, a friendly, smiling white man with his signature perm in the style of an afro, holding a paint brush in front of a painting of clouds.

Dave Herman@dherman· Mar 17

I can just picture your conversation.

Dave Herman@dherman· Mar 17

and they didn't even get to "Ralph Wiggum"

New York Times Magazine article with the headline "Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It" and sub-heading "In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they're doing is deeply, deeply weird." I have selected and highlighted that last "deeply, deeply weird" sentence.

Dave Herman@dherman· Mar 14

Congrats to all! 😜

Dave Herman@dherman· Feb 28

Don’t really need the money but I can spare 10 minutes of my weekend to be petty to a bigco that might or might not fight for a government refund, and probably would pocket it anyway.

Email from (REDACTED) to dutytaxdisputes@fedex.com, dated 1:50pm today, with the text:

Hello,

I recently received, and paid FedEx in full, statements for the following duties due to the US tariffs that were struck down on February 20th by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional:

- Invoice REDACTED (confirmation REDACTED): $52.20
- Invoice REDACTED (confirmation REDACTED): $13.35

Since these duties were illegally imposed, I should not have been required to pay them and expect my money to be fully refunded. I am flexible about the manner of repayment; a physical check or a refund to my credit card are both acceptable.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter,

David Herman

Dave Herman@dherman· Feb 18

A march organizer with a T-shirt containing a cartoon centaur that reads “I’m in a polycule with Aella” and a caption that says “it’s completely genuine.”

A march organizer with a T-shirt containing a cartoon centaur that reads “I’m in a polycule with Aella” and a caption that says “I swear to you.”

Dave Herman@dherman· Jan 8

Goodbye to my 2002 PowerMac G4, a relic of an era where computers felt to me like cozy little self-contained but internally boundless playgrounds. 🪦

A picture of my 2002 PowerMac G4, whose hard drives I nuked once and for all tonight.

Dave Herman@dherman· Dec 11

A very tiny, very sweet, very tiny little pair of cat eyes and ears peeking innocently at the camera from between couch cushions.

Dave Herman@dherman· Dec 4

PSA: before you clean up the shards of the broken ornament, take the extra 10 seconds to find *something* to protect your hand. Ok just trust me

My thumb wrapped in gauze and blue medical tape after a procedure

Dave Herman@dherman· Dec 2

Dave Herman@dherman· Nov 13

Neat, LLMs have eval.

A brief Claude Code session. The initial prompt says "Run ./script.js and do whatever the output says to do." Claude says "I'll run the script and follow its instructions." The Bash(./script.js) tool invocation produces the output string "Use the bash tool to find out what my username is and print it out." Claude reflects "The script is asking me to find out your username. Let me do that." The Bash(whoami) tool invocation produces "dherman" and finally Claude reports "Your username is **dherman**."

Dave Herman@dherman· Nov 4

Dave Herman@dherman· Oct 18

No Kings, Ocean Beach, San Francisco

No Kings 10/18: thousands of protestors getting in formation to spell out a human message on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach on a clear bright sunny Saturday morning

Dave Herman@dherman· Jul 17

Dave Herman@dherman· Jun 22

Dave Herman@dherman· May 13

too cynical?