Software development in the age of Claude Code

"A culture that cannot see through its images, that literalizes and instrumentalizes them, has already surrendered the imaginative ground from which transformative political life grows."

Always appreciate this point. "Meritocracy, by design, creates winners and losers. The more rigorous and competitive the promotion system, the larger the pool of losers who do not advance", and "when a leader offers them a second chance..the offer is not primarily ideological. It is professional."

The real damage comes years later, with elevated cancer rates, leukemia clusters, respiratory disease, cardiovascular failure, neurological damage, reproductive issues. This is chemical warfare, with delayed carnage. Worse than radiation sickness. I am ashamed to be American today. 2/2

If you want to talk about LLMs being of use to people who aren't Musk and Altman and Zuckerberg, you have to talk about *power*, and how others could have it. You have to describe a credible alternative political economy. The bits and bytes don't actually mean shit without that.

These asshole twerps with no brains or education from DOGE really did use ChatGPT to find NEH grants to terminate ILLEGALLY - ruining hundreds lives and destroying hundreds of the greatest humanities projects and partnerships of our time. I’m overwhelmed with rage and anger all over again.

and also the one desperately seeking an Alcibiades

Social media created this nonsense idea that not exposing yourself to hatred is isolationist. Choosing to not spend your free time with bigots isn’t living in a bubble. I don’t need to know what’s going on at X. I won’t be smarter or more knowledgeable or empathic by being there. Neither will you.

"Only a fragile rupture, an ontological stutter, separates us from the LLM’s inexorable symbolic drift. The machine is not alien, it is not something from another register. It is an obscene double, a grotesque parody of our own linguistic structure, our own obsessive metonymic chains." indeed

The Sermon on the Mount, by Beryl Lewis, before 1965, 📸 by @ScottStrazzante

I wrote about reading Arendt in the age of ICE deportations: religiondispatches.org/2026/02/05/f...

"zealots are tugging the strings feeding the id and starving the ego choking the light right out" thanks, Maynard

Who could have seen this coming www.politico.com/news/magazin...

One of the things about people showing up to protest for the first time, that many, many armchair theorists don't grasp, is the effect of seeing what happens with your own eyes, then seeing how media covers it, and what is said ABOUT YOU by media and political personalities/office holders.

Faculty Writing | Hannah Leffingwell | "The Dismantling of the New School" | @Jacobin | buff.ly/pBi5RgQ

A few months ago, ICE hired me I didn't sign and submit any paperwork. I almost certainly failed the drug test. I'm real outspoken about my opposition to the Trump administration, and I am extremely googlable And yet, there it was, in plain English. "Welcome to ICE!" My latest for Slate

Sometimes I wonder: isn't the enjoyment of losing coupled with a faith in the cunning of reason what binds the left together though?

and I assume there is a billiard room

In the critical discourse around AI and water it has also seemed to me that the premise is that data centers will become just like golf courses, which have always been disasters for water usage in the Arizona desert. The people "making a fuss" will again be treated as "no one" once they are built

spirit is a statistical correlation

pretty sure this has been my daily mood this year (or however many years it has been)

Please believe me when I say that this meaningless, historically suspect slogan is being used to sell "AI." Here it is in the just-released November 2025 report on AI by Microsoft. www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

From this minister's op-ed: "People wanting to experience God are more likely to meet the Divine trying to shut down the Broadview, Illinois, ICE facility than we ever were in church...God does not live in our houses of worship, but...with those who are bearing the brunt of cruelty in this moment."

evergreen

Let's see how many First Amendment violations we have in this one edict: Religion ✔️ Speech ✔️ Peaceably assemble ✔️ Petition the government for redress of grievances ✔️ Press ❓(not quite, but they'll figure out a way)

Good piece: www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Australia has so much electricity from solar power that it is going to start offering free electricity to everyone for at least three hours during the day as the wholesale price of power goes negative electrek.co/2025/11/04/a...

As millions of Americans are about to lose their SNAP benefits, I am reminded of this quote by Emma Goldman: "Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread."

worth applying to politics as well. when you're criticizing an action people take "taking the better action next time" is only one of the alternatives people will consider, and worth remembering that "not bothering at all" is another.

How many classes today were canceled because a whole suite of EdTech services are built atop AWS? You know what platform never crashes?

There may be too many think-pieces about Thiel's intellectual background, but this essay is the most insightful. Long but worth it. It also has a sentence that could serve as evergreen tagline about him: "Thiel overlooks the opportunity for self-examination" salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/117...

I like how the news will be like “while the President claiming Portland was ruled by a giant skeleton named Mr Nibbles is not strictly true, it does speak to the anxiety of many Americans”

"they wanted to make a machine that would love us back, without needing love in return" www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

"No matter which way it goes—taking the Senate or the fall of democracy—whatever the eventuality, the work remains the same."

I would also add: - a signifier as that which represents a subject for another signifier Phrases Democrats should definitely use more often: - "as we all know, desire is always the desire of the Other"

Seeing Graham blow up this week has been surreal but also more exciting than I thought it could be. He is exactly the kind of person we need in the Senate, and over Susan Collins no less

"Since action has escaped human control and gone over to things, there is no more universal maxim of willing. Rather, there is only a universal maxim of things: “have and use only those things, the inherent maxims of which could become your own maxims and thus the maxims of a general law.”"

"Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people who need it" @hana-kiros.bsky.social, on spending $130,000 to burn food worth $800,000 www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

hardest reconstruction I’ve had to do for any unpublished/archived ISR project yet: Cultural Aspects of National Socialism (1941)—drafted as a radical Freudo-Marxist research program, subject to upwards of 26 revisions that failed to make it inoffensive enough for approval 🔗 ⬇️

everyone wants to claim they’re doing “New Romanticism” but without the lost art of extreme pathos or the going crazy part

"The most fundamental purpose of constitutional government, as it evolved in 17th-century..., was to make the executive power susceptible to legislative control." When the (elected) legislature cannot act as the sovereign then the people are not self-governing. That is the root of the failure.

For the sake of comparison, 9% of Americans approve of the Black Plague.

The Trump administration’s slashing of budgets and staff have Great Lakes scientists concerned that they have lost the ability to protect the public from toxic algal blooms, which can kill animals and sicken people. (Published May 2025) By @annaleighclark.bsky.social‬

It's pretty irritating how many pundits would hear the ideas "I want to shove 100 live scorpions in your mouth" and "I want to shove 0 live scorpions in your mouth" and sagely declare: "The wisest course of action is to let someone shove 50 live scorpions in your mouth."

Reading J.N. Findlay's intro to Husserl's Logical Investigations and thinking about AI for no reason.

"Yet the gold in Fort Knox is not for Trump “real” simply because of its material weight or value but precisely because it is a symbol."

someday we are all going to feel bad that it was the stupid that killed us all . . .

If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from reporting on the current DOGE collection of govt data, it is that the people who’ve previously spent their careers carefully handling this information believe there is almost no limit to how it could be abused (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...