What if I don’t want to abandon everything I enjoy just because someone else, who also likes/is part of those things, has differing views to mine?

“Creating is harder than criticizing. Much harder. This fundamental asymmetry shapes our intellectual landscape in profound ways.”

We Don’t Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders.
www.joanwestenberg.com/we-dont-n…
via Instapaper

I listen to a lot of ambient electronic music, especially while working. I get distracted by lyrics, so electronic/instrumental pieces are my go-to.

I really like Tom Eaton. If you’re into this kind of music check him out.

But they are still guilty of lacking the personal agency to fight it or leave in protest, and I still — potentially unjustly — condemn them.

“Nobody cares”

They really don’t.

Use Tailwind so you can save 25KB of CSS while you ship 25MB of JavaScript in your “Modern Framework”

I wish something existed like CircuitPython, but in Ruby.

“Being Principal Engineer must be great; you get to make all the decisions and work on the best projects.”

Reality: Makes few/no decisions, has to work endlessly toward consensus, spends way too much time dealing with crap like legal and regulatory requirements. Almost never writes code.

Grateful that in our Year-in-Review company all hands meeting our accomplishments are just reasonable B2B work that makes our customers’ lives better. Nothing about increasing engagement while we destroy the souls of our users.

We’re still hiring: grnh.se/a38072303…

A lot to take in here:

just four firms now control at least 97 percent of the $68 billion frozen potato market, the antitrust cases reveal. These four companies participate in the same trade associations and use a third-party data analytics platform — PotatoTrac — to share confidential business information. The lawsuits allege the firms’ collusion has driven french fries and hash browns to record-high prices.

jacobin.com/2025/01/f…

“The principle “Life cannot be delegated” is simply a guidepost. It keeps before us the possibility that we might, if we are not careful, delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.”

Life Cannot Be Delegated
theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/life-ca…
via Instapaper

“A general pattern seems to be that Artificial Intelligence is used when first doing some new thing. Then, once the value of doing that thing is established, society will find a way to provide the necessary data in a machine readable format, obviating (and improving on) the AI models.”

We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis
calpaterson.com/metadata….

I hate how the App ecosystem basically requires new functionality be to shoe-horned into an existing app. So many features would probably be better as their own app, but there’s no discoverability, and the ergonomics of switching/bridging apps are awful.