Lar Van Der Jagt

Is the tech debt metaphor still useful? This conversation drove toward a consensus that the metaphor is still applicable but it’s meaning is shifting. We wound up talking securitization, financial literacy, and more.

the hard parts of building a business are - solving a real problem for real people - ignoring shiny ideas that are fun but distracting - prioritizing boring stuff that moves the needle - connecting with customers if anything, AI makes it *harder* to build a successful business

Temporal Ruby is GA ♦️ Build durable Ruby Workflows with native APIs, a Rust core, and a deterministic fiber scheduler. Read the post: https://temporal.io/blog/temporal-ruby-crash-proof-fibers

A reminder that you can always check out eight years worth of video from XOXO Festival, steadfastly and defiantly held in the war-torn city of Portland, Oregon. xoxofest.com/videos/

I finally read computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1976 classic “Computer Power and Human Reason.” This book deserves a massive revival in our current age of grotesque and largely thoughtless AI creep into everything:

We need to know what humans do before we argue that machines can do it just the same. There can’t be AI literacy without a literacy in being human: how we make meaning in work and life, distinguishing the artificial from the imaginary from the true. mail.cyberneticforests.com/human-litera...

As we mark the 80th anniversary of WWII's end, I’ve come to believe that in losing that Greatest Generation, we are losing more than just the memories of combat. We are losing the memory and experience of what it means to fight fascism and authoritarianism. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/what-we-lo...

As Weizenbaum lays it out here, the whole idea that “intelligence” is measurable and quantifiable is bullshit

@molily.de consistently captures nuance without pulling any punches

Great post by Andy here. Designing in the browser forces you to consider state. Recently I've seen things like cart buttons with no design for what happens when you click it. Does it open a modal? Navigate away? Prototypes in the browser bring this to the fore. piccalil.li/blog/the-tim...

… never been efficiency: it’s been the dismantling of US Govt infrastructure and expertise, as well as as data mining, to better control opposition etc. Think of it as ‘doing a Twitter’ to the US Govt: Musk bought Twitter to destroy it as a tool for opposition. It worked!

What if you took the core abstractions of Plan 9 from Bell Labs and put them in a WebAssembly module? progrium.xyz/blog/2025/sp...

There's a strong case that Eric Schmidt is the most dangerous actor in the AI world. He sells a zero sum, Sinophobia-infused vision of an AI arms race and preaches relentless data center expansion—and is happily received in the halls of power. @parismarx.com and I break it all down in this ep:

In short: I think Rails fell from dominance in no small part because of DHH’s disdain for JavaScript. This directly led to key failures on both sociological and technical grounds. Hating technology blinds you to the good parts of tech you don’t personally care for.

Do not let James Lindsay (or Richard Hanania) into our tent. They are not new allies, they haven't changed their ways, they are committed Nazis who see the tide turning and want to take the uniform off so they can hide among the winners.

This tracks with the proliferation of eugenics in the early-20th century, where many eugenicists advocated for sterilization precisely because public health measures allowed the “unfit” to survive longer and consequently have a greater chance of having their own kids

I think Brian points to something important: pop culture representations of Nazism showed it as something existing outside of history and politics, which did a massive disservice to understanding it as a political force that could emerge in other polities.

A piece of collateral damage in this new age is lack of understanding of the value of infrastructure. Quality infrastructure takes creativity, it’s fascinating, it’s crucial. We’ve lost the plot, relegating it to being described as a cost center. Infrastructure is muscle, infrastructure is bone.

Haha! Love this letter from Douglas Adams to his US editor about not Americanising the text of Hitchhiker's Guide. 🐋🌸

I think scientists who assume that brains work (only) by making deterministic calculations are making a categorical error; maybe similar to scientists who thought physics are purely Newtonian.

I'm happy to announce a major sponsorship of Hanami and @timriley.info. I want to see more useful frameworks and tools for building Ruby apps and I don't know of a better option today than Hanami. 🌸 www.mikeperham.com/2025/01/17/s...

part of what motivates conspiracy theories about climate crisis-driven catastrophes is trying to find someone to blame, totally, but also: conspiracy theories can make facts about who is profiting from climate crisis and who is evading responsibility for climate crisis sound like conspiracy theories

Mister Rogers never misses

So many of the British Invasion bands of the 60s and 70s were only able to exist because half of them were on the dole when they were starting out. Without 60s era social security benefits there'd be no Beatles. How many world-changing bands have we missed out on because of capitalism?

So when a health insurance company (or any other company or person ftm) says “it’s an AI deciding this” what they really say is “our executive leadership deliberately choose to let an AI decide they fully know is fundamentally flawed”. It always comes back to Weizenbaum’s book from 50 years ago.

Writing is thinking. It’s not a part of the process that can be skipped; it’s the entire point.

the artificial intelligence project is a fraud that plays on the trusting instincts of people — Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976

Explainers' paradox: - When building something there is power in abstractions. - When explaining something there is clarity in specifics.

Perhaps of interest, from @irisvanrooij.bsky.social. "Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science" by van Rooij et al. (2023–2024, preprint) osf.io/preprints/ps...

This new "Big Lesson" from Conway is in brief: "Think networks first, actors second" You can find the whole essay here: melconway.com/Home/pdf/Ubi... But see the excerpt below for why you should care.

Why RTO mandates will fail to deliver innovative software, as explained by Michael S. Malone ca. 1985

My cartoon for this weekend’s Guardian books. p.s. my latest book cartoons collection is Revenge of the Librarians: www.tomgauld.com/comic-books-v2