Ted C. Howard
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tedchoward.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Ted C. Howard
@tedchoward.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
I create software for fun and profit. I'm an amateur urban designer (i.e. I play City Skylines and follow Strong Towns). I live in Dallas, and truly love my […]

[bridged from https://mastodon.social/@tedchoward on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
December 26, 2025 at 2:43 AM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
The two hardest problems in Computer Science are:

1. Getting up in the morning
2. Going to bed at a reasonable time
December 25, 2025 at 9:35 AM
It’s time for one of my favorite holiday traditions: On my last work day before the holidays, I play @somafm's Xmas in Frisco station in my office. https://somafm.com/xmasinfrisko/
Xmas in Frisko from SomaFM
SomaFM's wacky and eclectic holiday mix. Not for the easily offended.
somafm.com
December 19, 2025 at 5:54 PM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
I believe that Computer Science has a place in "The Liberal Arts Education"-- that is I think an understanding of how computers are made, programming and algorithms should be a part of what a "well educated" person knows regardless of their particular area of focus.

This is not the case at […]
Original post on sauropods.win
sauropods.win
December 16, 2025 at 11:47 AM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
December 13, 2025 at 11:36 PM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
In the _Starfleet Technical Manual_ , there is a throwaway detail of the LCARS user interface that when it is upgraded, users can still utilize the previous several versions. This is because their work is mission-critical and it is unacceptable to compromise the mission by forcing unfamiliar […]
Original post on mastodon.fixermark.com
mastodon.fixermark.com
December 5, 2025 at 7:01 PM
My 78-year old mother needs a new television. She watches broadcast tv and some streaming (Netflix and Prime Video I think). Her current setup is a non-smart TV (from back when all TVs were that way) for her "antenna channels” and an Apple TV for the streaming.

Since all TVs are "smart" TVs now […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
December 4, 2025 at 11:51 PM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
this fall I worked with the core Git folks on writing an official data model for Git and it just got merged! I learned a few new things from writing it. https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/gitdatamodel.adoc
git/Documentation/gitdatamodel.adoc at master · git/git
Git Source Code Mirror - This is a publish-only repository but pull requests can be turned into patches to the mailing list via GitGitGadget (https://gitgitgadget.github.io/). Please follow Documen...
github.com
December 2, 2025 at 5:00 PM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
Professor: Texas used to have universities

By abandoning free inquiry, Texas is abandoning the definition of university.

"If you’re an instructor at Texas Tech, you can extol fascism; but you cannot wonder aloud whether a mutation to the SRY gene on the Y […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
November 25, 2025 at 8:24 PM
I just got the following text from my kid: “If possible I really need you to check my computer for viruses. Please don’t ask.”
November 25, 2025 at 3:05 AM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
Dallas council members reject ICE-DPD partnership, back police chief

"We're not gonna support racism, we're not gonna take money cause all money ain't good money, and we're gonna support our chief of police." […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
November 7, 2025 at 2:24 AM
Any advice on installing Windows? My son needs to use the Windows version of Excel for a class he’s taking. His school computer is an M1 MacBook Air.

My current plan is to install Parallels and set up a VM.

I haven’t used Windows in a long time.

Will I have I set up a MS account? Is there a […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
November 6, 2025 at 12:16 AM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
This guy is such a sh*t-stain on local politics. Naturally he aspires to stain at the national level by kissing Trump's ass. 🧊

Dallas mayor wants to explore partnership with ICE after police chief declined

@dallasnews […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
October 17, 2025 at 11:27 PM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
Mark Lamster says don't tear down City Hall - D Magazine

"In general, it’s saddening how feckless this city is when it comes to maintaining the buildings and spaces that it owns. Specifically on this City Hall thing, I think it’s great that the News […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
October 17, 2025 at 11:16 PM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
Lamster: Keep your hands off Dallas City Hall 🏙️ 🏦

Why demolishing I.M. Pei’s iconic building would be a financial boondoggle and an architectural travesty.

@dallasnews

https://archive.ph/m9Quz […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
October 16, 2025 at 3:51 PM
This bums me out. I listened to Bo and Jim on KZPS in the late 90s, and followed him to “The Bone” and then back to "Lone Star.”

But I haven’t listened to morning radio in years now. (I would say that I'm part of the problem, but the real problem is the media consolidation that began in the […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
October 9, 2025 at 10:20 PM
Just finished Voyager in my #startrek franchise rewatch in release order. On to Enterprise.

I guess I should say that it’s been a long road…
October 8, 2025 at 4:36 AM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, and the first great war for your thumbs

https://aresluna.org/steve-jobs-jef-raskin-and-the-first-great-war-for-your-thumbs/

<- the 2 different generations of NeXT keyboard, the Canon Cat, & some truly scary Japanese kana keyboards...
Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, and the first great war for your thumbs
Comments
aresluna.org
September 23, 2025 at 11:24 AM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
Crucially, we need to rebuild journalism at the local level. Local newspapers are all but gone. Local TV is more and more under the thumb of Trumpists. "Pink slime" so-called news -- funded by extremists and dishonest in every way -- is growing.

We'll have to rebuild it all, collaboratively.
7/8
September 19, 2025 at 12:51 AM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
We are modernizing the user interface

Pray we do not modernize it further
July 31, 2025 at 4:18 PM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
What happened to Dallas’ public transit network of the 1930s? 🚋

“For a lot of people, it was just a reliable, quick way to get around. There was kind of a sweet spot there, around 1900 to 1930, before improved roads and cheap automobiles, where the […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
September 15, 2025 at 1:29 PM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
This is a helpful and frightening perspective on why Americans have such different views of who Charlie Kirk was. Screenshot from FB; original poster's name is in the screenshot but I'm not typing it because she might not want it searchable outside FB:

"One thing that […]

[Original post on c.im]
September 13, 2025 at 10:42 PM
Reposted by Ted C. Howard
Stop Outsourcing Your Thinking to Abstractions

https://vaibhawvipul.github.io/2025/09/10/Stop-outsourcing-thinking.html

<- the number of senior Linux company executives I've dealt with to whom this applies would terrify you.
Stop Outsourcing Thinking
# Stop Outsourcing Your Thinking to Abstractions Your next production outage won’t be caused by what you know. It will be caused by what your abstractions hid from you. Three days. Five engineers. One memory leak. Zero understanding of the actual system. This is not a front-end or back-end problem. It’s a systems problem. We’ve built an industry of engineers who know **tools** but not **mechanics**. * * * ## The Abstraction Trap Abstractions are leverage. Until they become crutches. I’ve interviewed engineers who can orchestrate Kubernetes but can’t explain how a scheduler works. Who can build data lakes but can’t reason about network partitions. Who can train neural networks but can’t derive a gradient. They know which button to press, not why it works. * Using Kafka doesn’t mean you understand distributed messaging. * Using PyTorch doesn’t mean you understand automatic differentiation. * Using Terraform doesn’t mean you understand state machines. Every abstraction layer you adopt without understanding compounds its tax. First, it takes your performance - hidden latency you’ll never profile. Then your debugging - stack traces through seventeen layers you didn’t write. Then your creativity - solutions bounded by what the tool permits. Finally, your autonomy - when the abstraction fails, you wait for a patch instead of fixing it yourself. You stop seeing systems. You only see interfaces - someone else’s mental model, frozen in an API. You become an operator of other people’s thoughts, not an engineer of your own. * * * ## Reclaiming System Thinking Before you rely on the abstraction, understand the layer it hides: * Before Spark, understand distributed computation. * Before gRPC, understand TCP. * Before large language models, understand probability and optimization. This isn’t about rejecting abstractions. It’s about **regaining optionality**. Knowing when to bypass, reconfigure, or replace the tool entirely. Engineering, not just assembling. * * * ## Practical Countermeasures 1. **Rebuild a Core Primitive.** Write a toy scheduler, a toy message broker, a toy neural net. Not for production — for comprehension. 2. **Read Source.** Trace one frequently used function to the bottom. See where the magic ends. 3. **Deliberate Constraint.** Solve a problem without the framework first. Add abstraction only if it reduces net complexity. 4. **Learn the Layer Below.** If you run infra, learn operating systems. If you run models, learn math. If you run distributed systems, learn networking. * * * ## The Courage to Engineer Tools want you to be a consumer. Systems thinking demands you be a creator. Yes, abstractions encode best practices. They prevent classes of errors. They save time. But they also breed helplessness. When the abstraction fails, do you wait for a patch - or do you peel back the layer and solve the problem yourself? The best engineers I know are fluent across layers. They work with abstractions, around them, or without them entirely. They understand that every framework, library, and platform is just a snapshot of someone else’s mental model — not a law of physics. Stop asking, _“How do I do this in X?”_ Start asking, _“What is this system really doing?”_ Stop outsourcing your thinking. Tools will change. Systems endure. * * * _When you understand the wheel, you know when to invent the wing._ * * * reach out on x or github or email for more. _Note - This is from my perspective and learnings as a founding engineer. This is my personal take on engineering and systems thinking. Not affiliated with any company or my current employer._
vaibhawvipul.github.io
September 11, 2025 at 12:41 PM