I believe in a world where every human is given the resources to reach their full potential.

I do not worship a Thermodynamic God. I am not a trans-humanist. I support humanity as-is. AI is only a valuable tech in so far as it serves humanity as a whole.

We are not going to accelerate our way to become gods. We need to decelerate, preserve our critical resources, and put all of humanity, not just the very wealthy, first.

I have a good friend who was passed on for a software engineering job because, according to the recruiter, he did NOT use an AI assistant in the coding test part of the interview. It was not for an AI company.

This is the biggest bullshit I've heard of in the tech industry in a long time.

They did not ask him to. They didn't hire him because he, effectively, didn't cheat in the interview.

Our industry is in a bad, bad place.

The big fork in the world's future I see now is if the AI collapse happens before January 21, 2029, and Trump bails them out at a staggering cost to America that has long term crippling consequence, or it happens after.

If it's after and we elect a leftist, we see a massive collapse of silicon valley equity that'll fundamentally change the balance of financial power, and will have a short term crisis for the world economy but will free us from Peter Thiel.

There's no win condition.

When I was in my 20s, in the 1990s, Boomers constantly complained that the world was shit and reminisced about the good old days of the 50s and 60s.

I vowed to not do that when I got old.

But now that I'm here, I can't help but feel like the 90s were vastly preferable to this shit present we've created.

I think the surprising thing happened and it actually did get worse this time, but I'm afraid I just got old.

If an individual contributor doesn't have any choices about which task in a sprint to work on, you have in no meaningful way implemented Agile. That - not breaking work into two week increments - is the defining feature of Agile. Management MUST be detached from task assignment for it to not be sparkling Waterfall.

One thing that the Perl6/Raku project got right is: The test suite is the spec. If it passes the test suite, it's a correct compiler.

I think this is the right answer for nearly any software project. Especially in the days of AI. The test suite is the spec. If it's not in the test suite it's irrelevant. If your vibe code passes the test suite without changing it, it's correct.

New projects start with a failing set of tests that get approved.

This is the way.

Got busted for never using the company Claude AI, oops. Boss actually looked at the usage reports.

Saved for now by the fact that Claude is absolute garbage and the invite link doesn't work.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@elizayer/116347399567674500

Yes, speed of writing code is not the bottleneck! This rant focuses on code review, but if you're at a place with a functioning QA department, that dwarfs code review.

I've definitely intentionally slowed down at jobs to not overwhelm QA. Everyone is much happier. The company was not staffed to handle my potential output, long before AI existed.

Code writing speed is never the problem at professional shops.

I'm hitting the point of 'old' where I'm spending less and less time online, because my old places for communities are now dominated by people so much younger than me that we don't share cultural touchstones any more.

I don't really know where to find cool 50-somethings that aren't all anti-woke but also aren't all activist-24-7 either.

I didn't really see this coming, the Internet has always been my haven. Now it's kind of not.

One of the reasons ThinkGeek's April Fools products worked so well is that we spent the entire month of March doing little else other than preparing for April 1.

The majority of the joke products had physical prototypes. The photography was real, which is why they didn't look like photoshops. They weren’t. They were handcrafted.

It wasn't something someone did on the afternoon of March 30th. You can't be epic unless you spend the time to do it right.

One thing to discuss in a session 0: How much are we prioritizing this game slot?

Because it deeply sucks to commit to a game and turn down invites for fun things because that slot is taken, and have other players casually cancel once a month or so for things like concerts and movie nights.

Get on the same page on day one. What is an event you will skip the game for?

I genuinely can't imagine pretending you don't poop for other people. Everyone has basic biology! It’s absurd this is a thing.
https://mastodon.social/@fesshole/115906157333144948

We're starting to forget, but techbros are not the natural state of things. The term was invented when these outside forces with MBAs and abhorrent lack of values started to invade tech, as a caution for companies to avoid working for.

Silicon Valley in the 90s and early 2000s was a bastion of progressive values and people took slogans like ‘Don't be evil' very seriously.

It's not inevitable that they win and we can build things of value without them still.

Trans people and credit, this is something people don't talk about much. When I transitioned, the credit bureaus did NOT transfer my long, excellent history to my new name. It all restarted at zero, which cratered my credit rating. It took years to fix the 'length of time with accounts' metrics. Nothing I could do about it.

Our systems aren't designed with trans people in mind and nobody makes accommodations. You suck it up a lot.
https://social.treehouse.systems/@mxsparks/115738391069779914

I hate going viral on Mastodon with a stray thought that people want to turn into my life's work. It's just a stray thought.

I think this is on to something. I'm a well paid software developer making in the vicinity of this line, and I've felt for a while that it should feel like I'm doing better than I am. I'm pretty frugal, don't travel, don't have kids, and I'm doing okay, but only just that. I can pay my bills but I'm not building up savings. I'm doing WAY better than most of my friends so I don't talk about it, but $140k salaries just aren't rich these days.
https://mastodon.social/@tess/115613452377202318

Humanity really needed librarians to own Internet Search, not venture capitalists.

Back in the late 90s, Apple tried to do handwriting recognition with the Newton, and it was terrible.

Palm instead made you learn a slightly modified shorthand, and it was super reliable. And PalmPilots were suddenly everywhere.

We're so afraid to make people think these days. But people are willing to learn new things if they get something out of it, and nobody wants easy and wrong in the long term.

I miss the PalmPilot era sometimes.

I grew up with a lot of racism in my house, and it seeped into my child brain in ways that's taken a lifetime to deconstruct. I wholeheartedly reject all of that ideology, but it's insidious and a massive amount of work to eradicate. It infects your thinking in so many ways.

However, I have done the work and continue to do so.

My reward: all the non-white, non-Christian friends I have. And wow, it's so worth it. Few things in life have a better return on investment! I wish they saw this.

One thing I loved about Rob as a ttrpg journalist is that he never ever dumped on D&D, WotC, and people who liked the popular thing. His world was wide enough for both. Instead he approached his job with enthusiasm and infectious positivity, and made it cool to play a broad range of games.

Most of the RPG journalism space is bifurcated into D&D only, or aggressively rude to anyone who isn’t committed to oppose WotC.

Less of that. More Rob Wielands.