Tuesday, January 20

Daily News Stuff 20 January 2026

Here’s Someone Else’s Soundcloud Edition

Top Story

• Two things to clarify from yesterday. First, that quote at the top of the post explaining the DRAM Apocalypse was from Jatin Malik, an engineer at Atlassian.

Second, brains are computers.

• Agent psychosis: Are we going insane? (Armin Ronacher)

Apparently, yes:

You can use Polecats without the Refinery and even without the Witness or Deacon. Just tell the Mayor to shut down the rig and sling work to the polecats with the message that they are to merge to main directly. Or the polecats can submit MRs and then the Mayor can merge them manually. It’s really up to you. The Refineries are useful if you have done a LOT of up-front specification work, and you have huge piles of Beads to churn through with long convoys.

That’s from the Gas Town Emergency User Manual which would be a great name for a work of surrealist speculative fiction but is quite literally a user manual.

Looking at Gas Town (and Beads) from the outside, it looks like a Mad Max cult. What are polecats, refineries, mayors, beads, convoys doing in an agentic coding system? If the maintainer is in the loop, and the whole community is in on this mad ride, then everyone and their dæmons just throw more slop up. As an external observer the whole project looks like an insane psychosis or a complete mad art project. Except, it’s real? Or is it not? Apparently a reason for slowdown in Gas Town is contention on figuring out the version of Beads, which takes 7 subprocess spawns. Or using the doctor command times out completely. Beads keeps growing and growing in complexity and people who are using it, are realizing that it’s almost impossible to uninstall. And they might not even work well together even though one apparently depends on the other.

What is Beads?

Beads is a quarter of a million lines of code to manage Markdown files in Git repositories.

I have written entire enterprise systems with paying customers and decade-long track records that are no larger than that.

But I didn’t have agentic AI to help me, so they actually worked.

There’s a term in programming called technical debt, which measures the cost of a quick fix that you know you will have to rip out and fix properly one day.

Vibe coding is the technical debt singularity.

Tech News

• Minecraft-meets-Torchlight game Hytale supports modding out of the box. So someone modded in Hytale. (Tom’s Hardware)

You can play the entire game inside the game.

You can also run Windows 95 as a mod inside Hytale.

And Doom.

The game has been out for a week.

• Dumbphone owners have lost their minds: The deranged rantings of a smartphone owner. (Wired)

It’s hard to know where to even start with this. The author - self-reportedly Gen Z - has a crippling codependency with her iPhone, and her friends who have abandoned such devices for dumbphones are crippled without them.

They’re like walking, talking, quarter-million line codebases that can only do a single task, and fail even at athat.

• Minisforum is planning to introduce the DeskMini BD395i Max - a mini-ITX motherboard with a Ryzen 395 CPU, up to 128GB of soldered RAM, and a PCIe slot. (Notebook Check)

Okay. Sure.

Let me know when you have something out in a Zen 6, okay?

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: That’ll do, dog.

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