Choose Boring Technology Gets Its Decade-Later Vindication

The 2015 post 'Choose Boring Technology' by Dan McKinley resurfaced on HN and the top comment was simply 'aged well.' The discussion brought back the concept of 'innovation tokens': every engineering team gets roughly three, and spending one on an unproven technology means you have fewer left for the things that actually differentiate your product. Commenters noted that reliable software 'doesn't get the flashy posts' but that the compound value of not chasing new things is enormous.

This is landing on the same day as a flood of AI model releases, and that timing is not coincidental. The implicit contrast is obvious: every new model, framework, or AI tool is a potential token spend. Most of them will not pay off at the rate their release-day hype implies.

The systemd-journald thread runs parallel to this. A researcher found that a single log line triggers 49KB of disk writes on ext4 and 110KB on btrfs, and commenters reacted with genuine shock followed by 'I knew something was off but assumed it was my setup.' Boring, reliable infrastructure is failing in non-obvious ways that only surface when someone actually measures.