Benoît Fleury

A lot of wisdom in less than 10 minutes: writing, knowledge, shallow explanations, ignorance, ambition, greed, bad incentives, inequality. youtu.be/TqmIHVF7Kco?...

We should maximize the amount of proof we can get out of AI while the money cannon is on. It's like early days of Uber, except the benefits are 100x more tangible. A fully-verified hw+sw stack? That's like gold everyone can share w/out having to divide. Generational opportunity.

② It seems to me someone should explain the something similar to humanity in a broader context. You do not exist in the earthly environment. Rather, you are a part of it — and inseparable from it. Its destruction is your destruction, and no space colonization fantasy will save you.

"In Context" aka it's all about the verbs... www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5eO...

“Languages should be designed not by adding features but by removing weaknesses that make more features seem necessary.” #Abelson and #Sussman

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

Having agents make phone calls to (eg) restaurants a loss. It exposes a lack of an API. Restos will be overwhelmed and buy agents to handle the calls. Two giant software stacks will churn taking OOM more time and energy to imprecisely do what an API call could have nailed. ↵

The bureaucraticization will continue until resilience improves

"For engineers with grounding, AI is a multiplier; without it, AI creates a productivity illusion in which output outpaces understanding." Read more about the future of software engineering in our latest issue of #ACMSubstack newsletter, "Queue: In Practice." Read & subscribe: buff.ly/P1A6JZc

I think this is a big gap in software design culture. There's lots of commentary on visual design and micro-interaction, but remarkably little explicating conceptual and structural design. This section from Magic Ink is lodged in my mind. buff.ly/Bl9JwTv

straight back again to France.

The fundamental solution is to remove the political class altogether by permitting only one or two political terms in any person's life.

“There's no sense being exact about something if you don't even know what you're talking about.” #JohnVonNeumann

Alan Kay on our feeble attempts at navigating the world: "One of the simplest — and worst — manifestations of this is to choose a tiny subset of the world to live in, and then to insist that it is the world." www.quora.com/Can-an-AI-co...

Unsurprising common pitfall w/ Claude. Paying too much attention to what is instead of what ought to be. "Yes — that's exactly the right model, and your restructuring is what makes the 'problem' I raised disappear. It was never inherent; it was an artifact of how the current code is structured."

LLMs make it easier to both: - write less rigorous software - write more rigorous software than before. Both are valuable. It’s a fatal mistake to be confused about which mode you want to be in.

"It treats the brain as if it is an analytical philosopher, a machine evaluating logical propositions. But this is a faulty anthropomorphic projection, conflating the tools that scientists use to study nature with nature itself."

“No people are more often wrong than those who will not allow themselves to be wrong.” #LaRochefoucauld

If you invite Alan Kay to make a presentation, be ready for him to trash the very concept of an oral presentation at the beginning, especially in an educational setting.

Happy birthday, Alan Kay! Kay received the 2003 #ACMTuringAward for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing. amturing.acm.org/award_winner...

Happy Birthday to Ivan Sutherland, recipient of the 1988 #ACMTuringAward for his pioneering and visionary contributions to computer graphics, starting with Sketchpad, a groundbreaking interactive computer-aided design system, and continuing thereafter: amturing.acm.org/award_winner...

Today, I'm excited to announce our next title! "Augment" is a forthcoming book featuring a collection of essays on the future of personal computing — specifically, on the kind we’d like to see more of in the future, and the ideas that might help us get there.

“I now believe that thinking [...] is the best debugging tool of all, because it leads to better software.” #RobPike https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1941206

The Clojure documentary premieres live later today! Thanks to the folks who participated, Nu for sponsoring, and all those who helped in the development of Clojure and its community. I'll be in the chat, and I hope to see you there! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y24v...

“Software's like Egyptian pyramids: millions of bricks, no structural integrity, done by brute force and 1000s of slaves.” #AlanKay https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak “This country has given me endless opportunities…: The America we inhabit today bears almost no resemblance to the country I chose all those years ago” newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-a-nobel...

Stocks soar on 2-week postponement of Armageddon.

I really feel like once you're aware of "CEO said a thing" as a model of "journalism" you can't unsee it. It is fucking everywhere.

Clojure: The Documentary trailer just dropped 👀 April 16 premiere — 1 full hour on how #Clojure and its #community came to life. I'm helping out w editing/show notes and yooo.. IT'S GOOD Y'ALL. dont sleep on this. 🎬 youtube.com/watch?v=JJEyffSdBsk

Alan Kay Media Center /updates and link fixing at mprove.de/visionrealit... #AlanKay

“In language, in religion, in art, in science, man can do no more than to build up his own universe—a symbolic universe that enables him to understand and interpret, to articulate and organize, to synthesize and universalize his human experience.” — Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man

Claude Code is more fun than Netflix. Bravo.

Also, this Brian Eno quote has been really stuck in my head for weeks: "The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement. ... the question then is, "Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?""

This is very popular, yet WILDLY poor advice: “Be constructive, don’t complain about problems if you don’t have a solution” If you hear someone say this, please consider slapping them with a large trout. Being aware of problems is *incredibly valuable*, whether you have solutions or not! [1/n]

Yes, very good talk by Benjamin!

I’m Alex Vindman and I’m running for the U.S. Senate. Chaos, corruption and sky-rocketing costs are crushing ordinary people, while the billionaires and career politicians profit. I stepped up when my country needed a soldier and now I’m stepping up again to fight for Floridians.

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents border patrol officers at the National Border Patrol Council, calls on Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller to resign or be fired

Miller should be the target of Dem pressure. Yes, defund ICE, impeach Noem, sure. But if you want maximum change on the admin's behavior, focus on getting Miller out of day-to-day decisions. Drive a wedge by making him embarassing. Trump loves to blame someone else: make Miller the scapegoat.

If your goal is to produce some particular end product—a website, an app, an open-source project on GitHub—the sooner you can make it look like that end product, the better. With AI, it's never been easier. Get an idea. Sketch with AI. Make a demo! 🧐💡🛠 tugtool.dev/journal/get-...

Claude code is amazing for rapid prototyping!

Happy New Year! As of January 1, 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library are now open access, making computing research more accessible, discoverable, and reusable worldwide. Explore ACM’s open access journey: 👉 www.acm.org/publications... #OpenAccess #ACM

New Alan Kay talk — 75 Years of Graphical User Interfaces www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS20...

People mistakenly think prototypes are for discovering the right answer. They are most effective when used to find the right question.