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To be clear, this is the horrible "new" Notepad "app" that I absolutely hated and instantly removed when it was forced upon everyone. I doubt the old "edit field in a wrapper" one which has been nearly the same since Win95 has this problem.
(My newest machine is now running Linux.)
People did do that, 30 years ago.
Then Watcom C/C++ made it quite easy to use C++ for game development on PCs, PlayStation 2 introduced support for C++, quickly followed up by XBox and Nintendo, and that was it.
What can we use fields of GPUs for next?
Some years ago I was at the Burger King near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market St in San Francisco. Some of the homeless people were talking about the days when they'd been printers. Press operators or Linotype operators. Jobs that had been secure for a century were just - gone.
That's the future for maybe half of programmers.
Remember, it's only been three years since ChatGPT. This is just getting started.
I feel like a lot of comments here are missing the point. I think the article does a fairly good job neither venerating nor demonizing AI, but instead just presenting it as the reality of the situation, and that reality means that the craft of programming and engineering is fundamentally different than it was just a few years ago.
As an (ex-)programmer in his late 40s, I couldn't agree more. I'm someone who can be detail-oriented (but, I think also with a mind toward practicality) to the point of obsession, and I think this trait served me extremely well for nearly 25 years in my profession. I no longer think that is the case. And I think this is true for a lot of developers - they liked to stress and obsess over the details of "authorship", but now that programming is veering much more towards "editor", they just don't find the day-to-day work nearly as satisfying. And, at least for me, I believe this while not thinking the change to using generative AI is "bad", but just that it's changed the fundamentals of the profession, and that when something dies it's fine to mourn it.
If anything, I'm extremely lucky that my timing was such that I was able to do good work in a relatively lucrative career where my natural talents were an asset for nearly a quarter of a century. I don't feel that is currently the case regarding programming, so I'm fortunate enough to be able to leave the profession and go into violin making, where my obsession with detail and craft is again a huge asset.
Looking at the "Decide when to use fast mode", it seems the future they want is:
- Long running autonomous agents and background tasks use regular processing.
- "Human in the loop" scenarios use fast mode.
Which makes perfect sense, but the question is - does the billing also make sense?
No, it's more like moving from line cook, to head chef in charge of 30 cooks.
Food's getting made, but you focus on the truly creative part -- the menu, the concept, the customer experience. You're not boiling pasta or cutting chives for the thousandth time. The same way now you're focusing on architecture and design now instead of writing your 10,000th list comprehension.
After exceeding the increasingly shrinking session limit with Opus 4.6, I continued with the extra usage only for a few minutes and it consumed about $10 of the credit.
I can't imagine how quickly this Fast Mode goes through credit.
> Surely some of that is lag time in economic policy
Why? What if constantly launching foreign wars, leveraging up the financial system and running up deficits isn’t sound economic policy?
The one question I have that isn't answered by the page is how much faster?
Obviously they can't make promises but I'd still like a rough indication of how much this might improve the speed of responses.
See, I can push back on that! Dazed & Confused barely has a plot. It knows what it's about. Hackers has one of those shake-and-bake 80s plots; it's like a Save The Cat movie. I get that people like the subculture stuff in it, but the movie was trying for something else and faceplanted.
Honestly I think Lawnmower Man might have had more cultural impact.
Like USCD Pascal P-Code, M-Code, Taos, IBM TIMI, JVM, CLR, Parallax Propeller, and many others.
It was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now.
Yes. Von Braun wrote an otherwise realistic novel in which earth's explorers find intelligent life on Mars.[1] Heinlein wrote realistically of native intelligent life on Mars and Venus, with far more benign environments then they actually have. But once probes got there, we got to see how bleak they are.
There's a little hope for extrasolar planets, now that we can detect some of them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale
No. You had a choice. I voted for Harris (who I do not like as a progressive) instead of chaos and destruction, others had the same choice. To not vote out of protest was a vote for this.
Better luck next time. ~2M voters 55+ age out every year. Can we do better? Remains to be seen.
> The installer, written in Python, often failed because of incorrect assumptions about the target environment and almost always required some manual intervention to complete successfully.
Nothing ever changes. I spent half a day just getting some SDR development stuff to work just now, long live Python code with baked in hard dependencies on particular versions of obscure libraries... In the end it worked, but what a mess.
One of my elderly uncles was in this position, but he was a bit more responsible about it than your grandfather. His way to solve it was like this: he sold his car at a discount to someone else in the same building on the condition that when he needs transport they'll drive him. It works out well, he only uses it when he absolutely has to and the rest of the time he either walks or has stuff delivered. It was a painful decision for him but in the end it worked out well (and I'm the backup driver but I'm about 100 km away from where he lives so it would always take me at least an hour to get there).
> absolutely think that there is a better way to educate than tests and textbooks
Genuine question: why? Specifically, why with textbooks?
Even if textbooks are suboptimal, they’re the way a lot of human information is organized. Just developing the skill of being able to work through a textbook is probably massively productive.
More of a comment than a question:
> Those of us building software factories must practice a deliberate naivete
This is a great way to put it, I've been saying "I wonder which sacred cows are going to need slaughtered" but for those that didn't grow up on a farm, maybe that metaphor isn't the best. I might steal yours.
This stuff is very interesting and I'm really interested to see how it goes for you, I'll eagerly read whatever you end up putting out about this. Good luck!
EDIT: oh also the re-implemented SaaS apps really recontextualizes some other stuff I’ve been doing too…
I recently passed 40,000 but my Substack is free so it's not a revenue source for me. I haven't really looked at who they are - at some point it would be interesting to export the CSV of the subscribers and count by domains, I guess.
My content revenue comes from ads on my blog via https://www.ethicalads.io/ - rarely more than $1,000 in a given month - and sponsors on GitHub: https://github.com/sponsors/simonw - which is adding up to quite good money now. Those people get my sponsors-only monthly newsletter which looks like this: https://gist.github.com/simonw/13e595a236218afce002e9aeafd75... - it's effectively the edited highlights from my blog because a lot of people are too busy to read everything I put out there!
I try to keep my disclosures updated on the about page of my blog: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures
Well, back in the 1980's up to early 90's, Modula-2 enjoyed a mild success in Europe.
Given that it was available in 1978, and the satellites launched in 1982, it seems a plausible choice like any other, given the computing ecosystem at the time.
This is the stealth team I hinted at in a comment on here last week about the "Dark Factory" pattern of AI-assisted software engineering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46739117#46801848
I wrote a bunch more about that this morning: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/
This one is worth paying attention to to. They're the most ambitious team I've see exploring the limits of what you can do with this stuff. It's eye-opening.
Except that the C++ version doesn't need to be like that.
Abstractions are welcome when it doesn't matter, when it matters there are other ways to write the code and it keeps being C++ compliant.
As European, that has lived across multiple countries, that only applies to the lucky ones able to afford living close to the city center.
Also healthy enough to be able to walk stairs, as very few places care about people with disabilities, or carrying stuff that is a pain to transport across stairways.
People visit the touristic centre of the main cities and assume we all enjoy nice public transport systems.
Have you really never found writing code painful?
CI is failing. It passed yesterday. Is there a flaky API being called somewhere? Did a recent commit introduce a breaking change? Maybe one of my third-party dependencies shipped a breaking change?
I was going to work on new code, but now I have to spend between 5 minutes and an hour+ - impossible to predict - solving this new frustration that just cropped up.
I love building things and solving new problems. I'd rather not have that time stolen from me by tedious issues like this... especially now I can outsource the CI debugging to an agent.
These days if something flakes out in CI I point Claude Code at it and 90% of the time I have the solution a couple of minutes later.
... they came out of stealth, it was the StrongDM AI team - details here: https://factory.strongdm.ai/
My further notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/
That's my experience too. And my employer has generally internalized it into their process: instead of negotiating over what code to write, write it all the ways, A/B test them, and negotiate over which code to launch once you have more data about how different approaches might affect user behavior.
Interestingly though, the experimentation process itself seems very under-optimized, and so it is frequently the bottleneck.
Better yet, look at the power output of a femtosecond laser (e.g. some unremarkable tabletop experiment in a lab in Clark Hall is many GW at peak!)
But I think it's not silly, it's at the heart of what a rocket is and how it compares to other technologies like, say, an airplane powered by a jet engine.
I dunno. People in the 20th century definitely seemed to think that cultures we'd imagine are related in the west (Japan and China) have different attitudes about hygiene.
Additionally, just remembered, recently there is an additional option on Windows 11 that the UAC generates a temporary admin user and then throws the security token away.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2025/05/19/enhanc...
Even better than PLT Scheme with Dr. Scheme, now Raket has ever been?
I have my doubts, given its age.
> - Running unmodified Linux programs on Windows
This might actually be my favourite use: I always thought WSL2 was a kludge, and WSL1 to be somewhat the fulfilment of the "personality modules" promise of Windows NT.
Tell claude to build a functional website using plain html and css and no frameworks and it'll do it in a second. Now try that with a junior dev.
This is a solid answer to my question, thanks.
I'm an optimist on this and I remain hopeful that AI will create more and better jobs, but I'm not at all certain about that. It's possible it will play out the way you describe, and that will suck.
I'm not ready to blame the 100,000s of software layoffs on AI though - I think the more likely explanation for those is over-hiring during Covid combined with the end of ZIRP.
Anime went from science-fiction dominated in the 1980s (Gundam) to fantasy-dominated (Friern) today. The strange thing about fantasy was it lived under the shadow of Tolkien and Lewis which I think suppressed it for half a century.
It certainly was easier to get an academic job circa 1960. Things have gotten more difficult in physics because the experimental frontier has moved further away, I mean, you can make whatever theory you want and it is meaningless because we don’t have a machine that can measure the neutrino mass, observe neutrino decay, confirm physics at the GUT or string scale, detect the darkon, etc.
Even something like Mandelbrot’s work was disappointing if you were in grad school in the 1990s because it was not like enough progress was made in fractals post-Mandelbrot that you could get a job working on fractals or chaos.
But that's the killer feature for me! I always forget the little commands I've written over the years, whereas a leading comma will easily let me list them.
Their incentive is to keep the browsers good enough to not lose market share. Other than that, the incentive is to either close the web down, or to make the experience as shitty as possible without leading users to switch away, so they can steer users towards the more closed-down native apps.
Unfortunately, companies have an incentive to put us into walled gardens, so the only company that actually cares about the web is the company whose only business model is selling a browser.
Agreed, however AI adoption is finally putting pressure on CPython to have a JIT in the box, so there is that.
And on GPU side, the existing libraries provide DSL based JITs, thus for many scenarios the performance is not much different from C++.
Now NVidia is also on the game with the new tile based architecture, with first party support to write kernels in Python even.
Seconding both points. I'm not one of those cases, as I could already sing decently, but I've seen people go from "terrible" to singing professionally.
I also agree that the linked page isn't useful, it's more of a glossary than anything, but then again, I'm not convinced that a distinction between head voice and chest voice actually exists. I've never been able to tell any qualitative difference, as opposed to, for example, falsetto, and the community can't really agree on whether they actually are a thing or not.
I grew up in Brazil, where we had a very successful program for cars running on ethanol fuel with a little gasoline added. It was common to have certain models of car be offered as gasoline or ethanol (back then engines needed to be tuned for one) powered.
At least one car magazine would buy retail cars and fully disassemble them for analysis a year later. The difference between a gas and an ethanol engine was quite shocking - the ethanol engine was always clean and displayed less wear than the gas version of the same engine. Part measurement indicated no significant difference in wear between the engines. There were models only offered with ethanol engines because they offered a little more power because of higher compression rate.
Kind of, dynamic compilers, are called dynamic exactly because they depending on profiling and heuristics.
What matters is observable execution.
People are somewhat surprised about this work being farmed out to the Philippines as opposed to being done by Americans. I'm pretty sure you don't need me to explain this, though.
With Wolfram it is usually the grandstanding and taking credit for other people's work. Inventing new words for old things is part and parcel of that. He has a lot in common with Schmidhuber, both are arguably very smart people but the fact that other people can be just as smart doesn't seem to fit their worldview.
With TOS Star Trek movies, the usual claim is that you should avoid the odd numbered ones.
The previous second order effect is more likely. For the one orchestrating 8 bots, 7 others are not needed anymore.
Very neat project! Is it yours?
I think people mostly like the cool balloons Annie draws for us.
The Internet Archive probably has it already.
I just find it interesting what these sites are able to get away with to get people to part with their money.
That reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy%27s_Chocolate_Experience
...which ironically has crossed the line into "so bad it's good" territory.
> It comes at the cost of locality,
It need not; you can have more proportional representative in a district based system (and still also have vote-for-person), using multimember districts with a system like Single-Transferrable Vote.
You can also get finer grained proportionality with Mixed Member Proportional which combines a district-based system (either single-member or a multimember proportional system described above) with top-up representation from party lists.
MMP would require Constitutional change in the US; but multimember districts with STV (in states with more than one seat, as well as increasing the size of the House so more states would have more than one seat) can be done by Congress without Constitutional amendment.
TouchID is a good starting point... though it does confirm your password weekly.
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but if I lose my memory, how am I supposed to remember the 7 (or 5) friends who have my password...?
Somewhat less tongue-in-cheek, if you really wanted to be serious about your friends not being able to produce your password now for the lolz, then you'd actually want to ensure they were merely acquaintances who didn't know each other and couldn't find each other, e.g. not all Facebook friends. In which case the list of friends becomes essentially as important as the password, and then how do you remember where you've stored that list?
In reality, hopefully you can just entrust your master password with your closest family (spouse, parent, adult children), assuming they're not going to drain your bank account or read your private digital journal.
I had a bunch of those fancy lipid tests and they didn’t tell a story different from the usual tests.
Signed into law.
New York governor signs law allowing medical aid in dying for terminally ill residents - https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/new-york-governor-s... - February 6th, 2026
To be fair, the threat landscape changed, too.
You're right. I'm sorry about that. I know there are, and there's no reason to single out Indonesia in particular.
Because it's interesting as hell. I'm Catholic, and clicking around in here there's practically nothing religious in it to me at all. No part of my own faith engages with Celsus Description of the Ophite Diagrams. But it sounds like something out of a Clive Barker book --- and, behold, it is like something out of a Clive Barker book:
He is the Demiurge of this world, the God of Moses described in his creation
narrative. Of the Seven archontic demons, the first is lion-shaped; the second
is a bull; the third is amphibious and hisses horribly; the fourth is in the
form of an eagle ; the fifth has the appearance of a bear, the sixth, that of
a dog ; and the seventh, that of an ass named Thaphabaoth or Onoel.
I don't think that's indirect at all. It's pretty clearly what did in fact happen in Minnesota. I don't read the author as claiming it's endemic to liberal values, any more than the isomorphic pathologies are endemic to the finance industry (which Patrick also writes about), or the defense industry. Again: it's easy to find Democratic sources saying the same thing.
Why is it so difficult for people to acknowledge that Minnesota fucked this up badly? What is that going to cost us? The attempts to downplay it seem pretty delusive.
If you are feeling overwhelmed with slop posts about ai, camp on the new page and upvote any halfway decent story about something else. Many of us would thank you if they knew.
Is 3 the one with forced retirement?
Culture is a natural phenomenon.
Judging by what the moms in my neighborhood say—traffic and parking.
Neon counting was compressed down to a single tube in the Dekatron.[1] One Dekatron could count from 0 to 9, so only one Decatron per decimal digit was needed.
Can be see in "Hot Rod Girl" at 00:25, as part of a racetrack timer.[2]
Not everyone takes the same test. So you can repeat some questions on some tests year over year, or have some experimental questions that aren’t graded one year but used for establish norms for when it’s graded in future years.
If any Heroku customer is reading this and not immediately going "we need to move off Heroku ASAP" all future problems are their own fault.
Nice. Here's a video by a maker of planetary roller screws showing how they work.[1] The pitch shown is high enough that those don't look back-driveable. So if those drive a leg joint, they have to be able to absorb impacts directly. They can't pass them back to the motor, which can absorb them in a magnetic field. ("You cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field." - GE electric locomotive salesman, circa 1900)
There's a basic conflict. Small electric motors want to turn fast, so they're usually followed by gear reduction. But that loses feedback precision and back-driveability. A pure direct drive motor works great, but they're large diameter devices. Some SCARA robots use them, but the motor is a foot across. Washing machines have gone direct drive, since there's enough space for a large diameter motor. There's a direct drive electric motorcycle with a hollow rear wheel. There are "pancake" motors, with large diameter but little thickness. None of those devices have a good form factor for humanoid robots.
That leads to tradeoffs such as quasi-direct drive, where there's some gear reduction, but not too much. The article suggests that 20:1 is an upper limit for back driveability. That's pushing it for a leadscrew-type device, but maybe it's possible now.
It's neat seeing all this progress in robotic components. Historically, robotics has been a small niche, and had to use components developed for other purposes. This made for clunky robots. Now we're seeing more purpose-designed components made in volume. Drones made 3-phase synchronous motors and their controllers small, light, and cheap. Now the same thing is happening for other needed components.
Looks like, when the AI guys get their act together on manipulation, the machinery will be ready.
The Swanson memo memorializes the consensus of his investigatory group and, put to question by OLA and legislators, they stick with that story:
Page 14 of PDF:
[The OLA] did not find evidence to substantiate Stillman’s allegation that there is $100 million in CCAP fraud annually. We did, on the other hand, find that the state’s CCAP fraud investigators generally agree with Stillman’s opinions about the level of CCAP fraud, as well as why it is so pervasive.
(Stillman is a line level investigator who gave a media statement which was explosive. Swanson, who authored in the internal memo, was his manager.)
I do mention that other officials only agreed to characterize as fraud fraud which had resulted in convictions. We now, years later, have nine figures just from the convictions (and guilty pleas). These officials pointedly refuse to put any number on fraud other than the number incident to convictions.
Moreover: you should be very clearly correct if you accuse someone of citing a document as making claims it does not say. That is a serious accusation. BAM's citation of this piece is "the state’s own investigators believed that, over the past several years, greater than fifty percent of all reimbursements to daycare centers were fraudulent." This is _absolutely true_ and _is in the report as claimed_.
That would also be easy to demonstrate, if true.
Seems relevant: Waymo exec admits remote operators in Philippines help guide US Robotaxis
It's ironic MCP is also the name of one of the most secure operating systems in the industry.
> The point is that reading the code is more time consuming than writing it, and has always been thus.
Huh?
First, that is definitely not true. If it were, dev teams would spend the majority of their time on code review, but they don't.
And second, even if it were true, you have to read it for code review even if it was written by a person anyways, if we're talking about the context of a team.
This is a lot of cryptography, but how is it better than the hundred previous attempts, that simply hashed the input?
https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ at scale. Kindness, listening, time, and financial charity to those around you at the microcosm level.
As I understood it, the "issues" were more like todo list items of "look into whether this is an actual problem" than "this should be fixed".
That's a very interesting way of looking at it. Yes, you start with simulating something simpler than the real world. Then you use the real world. Then you need to go back to simulations for real-world things that are too rare in the real world to train with.
Seems like there ought to be a name for this, like so-and-so's law.
> I kept finding myself using a small amount of the features while the rest just mostly got in the way. So a few years ago I set out to build a design tool just like I wanted. So I built Vecti with what I actually need...
Joel Spolsky said (I'm paraphrasing) that everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%, so you can't ship an "unbloated" version and expect it to still work for most people.
So it looks like you've built something really cool, but I have to ask what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need? Since this clearly seems to be something you're trying to create a business out of rather than just a personal hobby project. I'm curious how you went about customer research and market validation for the specific subset of features that you chose to develop?
Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39378235 - February 2024 (420 comments)
https://jerf.org/iri/post/2025/fp_lessons_purity/ may help, perhaps even especially if you are not a functional programmer.
See also https://jerf.org/iri/post/2958/ .
The author is the founder of Hasicorp. He created Vault and Terraform, among others.
This reads more like "we won't deliberately turn the lights off… but they're probably gonna break on their own eventually".
> crush as a young teenager was Burn
Who hadn't?
I was a young adult back then, but the sense of adventure in the movie brought my memories of BBSs and creative misuse of telephone lines, X.400 networks, and dial-out modems. Fun times.
Trump’s Prescription Drug Website Exposed as a Big Fat Scam - https://newrepublic.com/post/206265/trump-prescription-drug-... - February 6th, 2026
https://x.com/cturnbull1968/status/2019602529278136786 | https://archive.today/IG7Au
https://x.com/okcreports/status/2019655323137589399 | https://archive.today/mbMdd
> Yes, I suppose there exists an egalitarian and well adjusted hypothetical society where we could find good leaders by random draw.
If you can find good leaders by random draw, that means the average citizen is a good leader, which would seem to suggest that the average citizen should be a reasonable an hard-to-dupe judge of good leaders, and therefore that elections also work well.
If elections don't work well to select leaders, that's a pretty good piece of evidence that sortition won't, either.
OTOH, the particular failures of sortition and elections may be different, and using a system where both are used for different veto points might be net less problematic than either alone. Consider a bicameral legislature with one house chosen by elections and the other by sortition, for instance.
(OTOH, there is plenty of solid evidence in comparative government of how to do electoral democracy better and people in the US don't seem too interested in that, which is probably a better focus for immediate reform than relatively untested, on a large scale, ideas about avoiding electoral democracy.)
People who race stock cars will even dip body panels into acid to make the panels thinner. Anything to reduce weight!
Isn't use of the internet to facilitate crimes commonly cited as a reason for federal prosecution, on the grounds that all internet communications involve interstate commerce?
> Yeah but calling someone a racist is a serious accusation, you better bring receipts or be liable for defamation
There are a large number of countries with their own systems of law, and its possible that in one of them calling someone a racist might be subject to defamation law, but in most I am aware of that's going to be a problem because its not even a well-enough-defined fact claim to be legally true or false.
Sure. But:
> Over three weeks, jurors weighed the harrowing personal account of Ms. Dean as well as testimony from Uber executives and thousands of pages of internal company documents, including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up.
Thus, civil liability. The rapist still goes down for the crime part.
'Excuses are over': Stellantis tells dealers sales must grow this year - https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/chrysler/20... | https://archive.today/y16BG - February 5th, 2026
> This is the year that Stellantis NV's U.S. vehicle sales must start growing again, after seven straight annual declines and prior promises that a recovery was just around the corner.
> That was the blunt takeaway from a packed closed-door meeting on Wednesday between the automaker's senior executives and much of its 2,400-member dealer body at the National Automobile Dealers Association annual convention.
> "2026 is the year of execution, and we're counting on our dealers to deliver," Jeff Kommor, who leads U.S. sales for Stellantis, told The Detroit News after the meeting. "We've given them all the tools that they need. Excuses are over. There are no more excuses."
> Stellantis U.S. market share has hovered around 8% the last two years, a steep decline from its 12.5% or so share as recently as 2020 under its predecessor company.
Cooked.
I wished more of the web was like this.
if you like this you may also like:
Other carmakers are withdrawing entirely from affordable vehicles, what do they expect?
> What would targeting NYC help Iran?
I don’t think modelling Iran as a monolithic political actor works anymore.
Between the IRGC, President, clerical ranks and others, I’m sure, some groups may benefit from striking New York or even inviting American retaliation in ways that don’t make sense for the country as a whole.
I'm one of the people who posted about using scripts/make in the HN comment thread on the previous blogpost, and I really appreciate the nuance in this followup.
I think what I and others are tripping on in the argument is that the articles seem to be trying to encapsulate everything a CI system can do into one global digraph that includes all build steps for creating artifacts and then all test steps (including unit and integration test).
I would argue that in the quite excellent Build Systems à la Carte paper referenced, the focus is on the first build part, not one all encompassing katamari. Separating build from test has some great advantages, such as being able to reuse build artifacts. Local tools like scripts/make are great for this as they're self contained. That's really the entirety of the past comment, and seems to concur with this article.
Much of the later part is on shared resource issues. If you need an orchestrator because tools are badly behaved and try to grab and hold finite resources, is that the right decision? Or is it the tools that should be fixed or avoided?
The biggest issue with DNS is not the protocol, or even the reference implementation. It's the people who think they are clever and try to make things better by making them worse.
The most egregious of course is ISPs rewriting TTLs (or resolvers that just ignore them). But there are other implementation issues too, like caching things that shouldn't be or doing it wrong. I've seen resolvers that cache a CNAME and the A record it resolves to with the TTL of the CNAME (which is wrong).
I'm also very concerned about the "WHY DNS MATTERS FOR SYSTEM DESIGN" section. While everything there is correct enough, it doesn't dive into the implication of each and how things go wrong.
For example, using DNS for round robin balancing is an awful idea in practice. Because Comcast will cache one IP of three, and all of a sudden 60% of your traffic is going to one IP. Similar issue with regional IPs. There are so many ways for the wrong IP to get into a cache.
There is a reason we say "it's always DNS".
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713480