Beth

I still can’t get over how the data Richard Dawkins relied on in The Selfish Gene changed once we had no-fault divorce and economic opportunities for women, and yet he absolutely refused to reconsider his conclusions. Some people are just sexists.

If you are a dramaturge or geographer or in any other field focused on contextual semantics, the next five years will be an excellent time to get into building software.

The parts of programming that remain after the AIs get good are the parts I’ve spent ten+ years working to get programmers to care about. This is going to be a wild journey for the industry.

I guess Tesla thought people were looking for hop in these dark times

Computers have always been smarter than us, for some definitions of “smart”. That is why we use them.

Humans make lousy supervisors. If we want reliable outcomes, either machines have to be reliable enough to not need supervision, or we need to have the machines be supervisors while humans do the work.

One time I wrote up a generative design system for creating novel broths for a friend on a liquid diet. That’s souper intelligence.

If we call these generative tools “super intelligence”: A. we can keep calling non-generative machine learning “artificial intelligence”, distinguishing it from the stuff folks hate B. we can change the definition of “super” to mean “unreliable and mediocre”, which will make “super car” very funny

Fascism, Taylorism, and Communism are all the same thing: a power fantasy where central control isn’t a complete disaster.

Every time I burn my toast, I get to blame a Democratic Socialist.

I was looking through old Massachusetts State House budget amendments and I got excited because there was one called “Revolutionary Spaces”. It was about 18th century buildings. Establishment politicians love history, but don’t want to be a part of it.

I am going to be appearing at the Danvers Democratic Town Committee that day, but folks in the Boston area: you should check this out. It’s my favorite professor and my favorite panel moderator (now both awesome authors)

For the good of the entire open source community and all open source contributors, these people need to be sued into the ground

This is the book I recommend to anyone wanting to move from Senior Software Engineer to Staff+ Software Engineer. Cross-team organizing so we can do our jobs well is a totally different skill set. This book explains how.

This is how people in power are using the tools we built. It is the responsibility of every programmer to stand up and resist.

AI companies should absolutely use AI for anything they are selling it to customers to do. Customers should only buy these tools if their risk budget, like Anthropic’s, includes “it is fine if our entire source code leaks”.

I saw this coming a year ago. It is part of why I am running for Congress. Democrats have to be ready to take our seats, whether or not Republicans want us to.

This is what I’ve been saying. And why I’m running for Congress. The problem isn’t that Democrats went “too far”. It is that our party hasn’t have the guts to stand up for Democratic values against the ridiculous anti-tax elites.

Anyone know which Democratic strategist is telling their candidates not to put policy positions on their website? When I said Democrats should try to act less like elitist Harvard academics, I didn’t mean they shouldn’t say anything at all 🤦

Notice how many establishment Democrats (including some of my opponents) are still active on Twitter. Sure explains a lot.

Humans + computers beat computers alone. Unfortunately, capitalism & our tax code don’t care if things work well. They just want to not have to give people jobs.

It is too bad the word “refactoring” never escaped computer-land. Having a way to say “make something better without breaking it” is incredibly useful.

Trying to summarize the news now is wild: “He announced the hunger games, went after Tomboy X, handed out a donativum by stealing troops’ housing, illegally named a building after himself, murdered five more people, convicted a judge, and ranted for 18 minutes on tv about how great things are.”

Alone is just My Side Of The Mountain for grownups

In 2005 I decided to forever hold a grudge against Larry Summers. That decision keeps looking better and better.

When Donald Trump said he wanted a war with Canada, I didn’t realize he meant retroactively losing the war of 1812.

Infrastructure is like crochet hooks. If we only ever buy the hooks we are absolutely sure we need, each project can require a lot of work to get started. We might give up rather than go to the store for just the one idea. When we invest in a set of typical hooks, we end up making way more things.

The flow of money represents the wants and needs of everyone in an economy. The problem with having billionaires is the same problem as trying to add huge numbers to tiny numbers using floating point. Except that in this case the “tiny numbers” that get lost are “normal people’s wants and needs”.

One challenge I am finding on this campaign: I have great political metaphors that work for very niche audiences.

“It is our fingers on the keyboard” is one of the important lessons for programmers. We are accountable to our users and coworkers for the code we write. When we are told to do our job badly, we don’t even have to say “no”. We can just not do that.

That moment when I was excited to tell @martinfowler.com all about this management book I found that explains why functional companies split into Deserts and Forests, only to discover he had cited the same book twenty years ago in his summary of Agile 🤣

My favorite part of running so far is connecting with skeptics. People have a picture in their head of a “trans socialist”. It isn’t usually a curious motorcycle-riding homeowner with a pickup truck who is nearly impossible to offend. That moment of confusion can be the start of a conversation.

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Oath breakers have no honor.