Nate’s Dotfiles A couple of nuggets I picked up: mise.local.toml lets me add personal tool configuration to any project – even one whose mise.toml I don’t control, or that has none at all. .git/info/exclude works like .gitignore, but for my eyes only. .gitignore is itself tracked by git; .git/info/exclude ignores files without recording the exclusion in the repository. Three Inverse Laws of AI In a nod to Isaac Asimov’s laws for robots, the author proposes three laws for the humans using them – incomplete by their own admission, but worth chewing on: Non-Anthropomorphism Non-Deference Non-Abdication of Responsibility It all comes down to one habit: keep exercising critical thinking. Appearing Productive in The Workplace — No One’s Happy What discipline looks like, in this environment, is almost embarrassingly old-fashioned and may seem obvious to most of you until you try to avoid it. Use the tool where you can verify precisely what it produces. Never ask a model for confirmation; the tool agrees with everyone, and an agreement that costs the agreer nothing is worth nothing. I’ve been using this example with my non-tech friends: ask the 🤖 for a contract to sell your car in California and it will happily produce one, brimming with confidence that it’s sound. I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t judge it. I can skim it for anything obviously crazy, but I don’t know what’s missing, what it fails to protect me from, or whether every clause is even legal. We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations—and it scaled (2026) A clear account of moving the locking mechanism from Redis into the database to guarantee atomicity, with FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED put to great effect. The idea new to me was the “replenishing” pool: a set of reservable items large enough to absorb concurrent locks, yet small enough to stay practical.