RE: https://chaos.social/@joeposaurus/116663759113913705

Summary:

⁃ Eric Schmidt said they intended great things for the WWW.
⁃ But bad things happened too. Somehow. (Shift to passive voice.)
⁃ Now AI is coming.
⁃ You, Youth of Today, should want to be involved, to bring your humanity to where the decisions are made.
⁃ Left unsaid, the big question: Like you didn’t, Eric, when you were CEO of Google? Shouldn’t we be talking about how to avoid failing like you (don’t acknowledge you) did?

Good point, but…

NEW POST

Thoughtworks internal IT use a workflow for agentic programming called Structured-Prompt-Driven Development (SPDD). Wei Zhang and Jessie Jie Xia describe how this works with a simple example with details in a github project.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/structured-prompt-driven/

Hypertext 2: Zettelkasten. https://blog.oddly-influenced.dev/2025/10/30/hypertext-zettelkasten.html

"A Zettelkasten is a particular sort of hypertext document as well as a technique for creating it. My aim in this post is to give you an understanding of a Zettelkasten document – its parts and its whole – and, more importantly, show something of what it’s *like* to work with a Zettelkasten. A Zettelkasten will appeal to some people much more than to others, and I’d like you to be able to predict where you’d fall on that spectrum.”

Surfacing from replies (see context upthread).

I’ve watched the pendulum swing back and forth multiple times in my career between “code reuse ftw!!” and “no dependencies!!” The one thing I can say with confidence is that both those extremes as dogma are ridiculous and costly. It’s all tradeoffs; you can’t escape the part where you think carefully and contextually.

1/ https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/115237696859291899

Believe there is good in the world. Be the good in the world.

Cory Doctrow's PyCon keynote. Many topics that need more widespread discussion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydVmzg_SJLw

I'm so glad you asked. These are general overviews of some of the most famous kinds of ants that everyone should know about.

@golgaloth

The Wood Ant Supercolony
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXKn1f5yVe0

Atta Cephalotes: The Leafcutter Ants, Ants who Farm Fungi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n0SkIGARuo

Weaver Ants (Ants who live in trees and make silk nests)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSmM3fVHwQQ

Army Ants (Ants that inspired horror stories)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prwdLQi2LFQ

Bull Ants (one of the largest ants)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vRRYsVUkwU

30 years ago today the first WikiWikiWeb launched. Thanks, @k9ox!
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/WikiWikiWeb

I'm devoting time to Ward Cunningham and friends' Federated Wiki. Experimenting with having both a podcast+transcript and a wikified retelling of the same story. I'm very attached to linear narrative, but I think the "Miller columns” of the federated wiki have a lot of potential for blending narrative and linkiness.

https://critical.wiki.oddly-influenced.dev/view/reading-critically/view/royce-1970

This is not exactly going to be a help in pumping out new podcast episodes. Rather the reverse. Enter: guilt. Still: experimenting is fun.

My understanding of the popular understanding of "technical debt" may be out of date. In your experience, when people say that phrase in casual conversation, do they *primarily* mean:

* crappy code that someone ought to fix sometime?

* deferring some useful action because the near-term benefits outweigh the additional cost to doing the action later?

* getting a partial solution out quickly because it will teach you what a better solution would look like, despite that meaning rework?

I made a thing: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hnD9_HCasrc

Selling arguably the most beautiful guitar ever 😭 My Duesenberg Starplayer TV Blue Sparkle 😭 https://www.sweetwater.com/used/listings/250140-used-duesenberg-starplayer-tv-blue-sparkle

I hope y’all are taking care of yourselves and each other. There’s lots of bullshit in this world and it can be a lot. The world is a better place with you in it.

Be well and good night, friends.

#Christmas

This is absolutely horrific and I love it.

I am slowly transforming into my final form:
That old guy who remembers how it was and who has read things.

A post over on bsky has a lot of likes.

To be fair, it's about Jill Lepore dismantling the cult of "disruption".
The Disruption Machine
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine

P.S. always read Jill Lepore.

@GeePawHill Gary Moore's 'Trouble ain't far behind' came on as I'm doing some coding this evening and I was reminded you posting what you were listening to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wrzls5yeanA

In August 1981 we had a persistent problem with the RP06 on our PDP-11/70 crashing disks. It even crashed once while the DEC repairman was standing next to it trying to figure out why the previous pack had died. We collected a few dead packs, and they were forming a pile. Lillian, never one to miss an opportunity, suggested building a mobile. ...

Hundreds more publications have joined the Fediverse through Flipboard's federation. Here's the first thread, I'll do another tomorrow.

If an account posts too much, try following one of its "sub-accounts" instead, as mentioned in each post. Alternatively use Mastodon's Lists feature.

US NEWS
@npr
@MotherJones2021
@abc
@PBSNewsHour
@USAToday
@CBSNews
@msnbc
@AssociatedPress
@Jezebel
@MsMagazine2019
@vanityfair
@RollingStone
@NewYorker
@TheBulwark
@RollCall
@CivilEats

🧵 1/3

There is no ~ this week in security ~ newsletter this week, but you can still sign-up any time and read past newsletters at https://this.weekinsecurity.com.

Instead, this week, I'm sharing some of my favorite cyber (and related) newsletters that I subscribe to and recommend because they're awesome in their own ways.