This is nuts. Abolish golf? One of those slogans that makes you sound like a crazy person but is sensible and correct.

Ah, the height of British culinary achievement — a factory-made sandwich that alleges to be seafood yet is somehow shelf stable, sold in drug stores wrapped in plastic, which dares to declare itself superior to a fast food hamburger by pretending to be in a different category.

Let's stipulate that at least some software engineers who claim AI tools make them vastly more productive are neither lying nor misjudging their own productivity. This is not true for all or even most, even among people who happily adopt the tools. So what can explain the difference?

a bit of professional news I'm very proud to share: AWS is officially a Row Zero customer!

There's been a lot of discussion in recent days about the influence of the Stranger in local elections. I had a lot to say about their impact in school board races, which is so decisive that we could say they now effectively appoint the board:

How do whales hydrate? My old favorite counterexample to the claim that everything you might want to know is googleable turns out to also be a useful demonstration of why you shouldn't trust LLM chat bot output.

The Status Interview – Or How To Write Up a Senate Purge List talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-s...

It's a shame that the ST:TNG episode "Conspiracy" came in s1, when multi-episode arcs were still not really a thing. It could have made a very good arc!

Still waiting for Chuck Schumer's "wait for Republicans to do something once Trump's approval is low enough" strategy to bear fruit.

Yeah, the entire caucus is responsible for this, regardless of their vote

Primary all of them everywhere. Hound them at town halls. Show up at their offices. Call or write to them about every issue. That cadre of this party has to go. Clean house.

Since the Democrats worked extra hard to hide who actually supported this, I think the No Kings/Resistance position should be to primary every Democrat unless they publicly call for Schumer's ouster this week Either they go into total rebellion mode, which they won't, or the people will

Will you be moving to replace the current party leadership in the Senate, or are these just empty words while other retiring senators take the heat for the rest?

The Stranger got one endorsement really wrong this year. As @lisarivera.bsky.social points out, they should have endorsed Sarah Clark for school board. Rivera, herself endorsed by the Stranger when she was on the board and a 2020 delegate for Bernie Sanders to the DNC, makes an excellent case:

PSA for Seattle procrastinators: If you're voting today or tomorrow, USE A DROP BOX, NOT THE MAIL! The USPS won't guarantee your timely ballot is postmarked on time. Locations of ballot boxes: cd.kingcounty.gov/en/dept/elec... More details: publicola.com/2025/10/03/p...

At Row Zero we get amazing speeds ingesting data from Snowflake and other databases that can export column-oriented data. But there's a long tail of data stores that we're forced to slow down for, because they only allow row-oriented export. Here's hoping we can change that!

Seattle Voters: King County elections has recommended (in an email, for some reason they haven't posted this on their website) that you place your ballot in a drop box after Oct. 28, due to concerns that USPS may not postmark your ballot in time to be counted.

Fun to see which services I rely on are overly dependent on us-east-1

Wondering who to choose for Seattle school board? All Together for Seattle Schools, the parent org that came together to successfully fight the mass school closure plan in 2024, did the research and knows the inside story -- and trusts Sarah Clark, Joe Mizrahi, Vivian Song, and Jen LaVallee.

This is the slate!

Took my 3yo to No Kings Seattle. 1 hour each way and 3 hrs at the event. Not one complaint. Usually shy kid feeling the protest energy and striking up convos with strangers. Demanded I "say it!" whenever a chant started up. Dozens of compliments on her sign. My shoulders so tired. So, so worth it.

Saw Erika Evans out today, too!

Seattle No Kings from the monorail

So difficult not to violate my rule against posting my kid online. The video of her holding her protest sign and shouting, "No Kings! Yes Democracy!" is sooooo cute.

AAUP v. Rubio is out, and look at how it starts. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

every time an amazon linux update shows me this I get a little heartburn

I was told the people of Italy were going to be paying these tariffs.

Watching the Star Trek TOS episode "Patterns of Force" and there's a bit where Kirk is shaking a sleeping old man. "Professor! You've got to speak!" he says, trying to get him to take a stand against literal Nazis. A little too on the nose for the current day.

The short version: We must unite with people with whom we do not agree 100% on anything but preserving democracy. The only thing that will overcome the authoritarian regime is people - many people - people of good will. They are all our allies. Act like it.

So apparently CM Strauss is asking for feedback about neighborhood center expansions in the comprehensive plan. This kind of thing typically puts a finger on the NIMBY side of the scale, but he's doing it, so let's make sure this is circulated to pro-housing people in D6.

I'm sure google interprets "Ending their browsing session" as "Got what they were looking for from the AI summary". For me, whenever I accidentally use google search on my phone (frequent), seeing the AI summary is a quick and easy reminder that I should have used @kagi.com

The bosses all understood this is what voting for Trump was voting for. If youre a worker and you thought it was for cheaper groceries or lower rent or access to burrito taxis or whatever you got conned

The Wrath of Khan is great but I do wonder why Chekov didn't think to mention "oh I know a guy on Ceti Alpha V" when they went to survey the Ceti Alpha system

Me who liked plain, boiled Brussels sprouts as a kid in the 80s: "whither the bitter fruit of my childhood longing?"

TIL "kan ye" is mandarin for "look at me", but like with an especially arrogant, slangy way of saying "me"

@capitolpolitics.news took over some other account with over 30k followers. When I asked this in response to their sus "sorry bluesky doesn't let us limit our posts reach", they blocked me so other people they tricked into following them wouldn't see it.

Perhaps the greatest casualty of the AI bubble so far is the death of "grok". Perfectly cromulent word for decades, now means "was willfully naive enough to believe Elon Musk".

Saw this on LinkedIn, and learned that Amazon measures "developer experience" as "number of developers we can fire or avoid hiring".

Replace Find with Find and Replace tickled that I got to write a commit with that message for rowzero.io

Turns out C-3PO is just an LLM with the system prompt "talk like C-3PO from Star Wars"

I have gazed too long into the abyss (Excel) gregat.es/excel-numeri...

The Republic as we knew it is over. We are living through a culmination of a) an 80-year movement to undo the New Deal's reconstruction of the United States as a modern state, b) a 60-year movement to reverse the Second Reconstruction, and c) a 50-year movement to undo post-Watergate reforms [1]

New, from me: The DOGE project was sold as tech disruptors who would revolutionize government. To try to understand why DOGE has failed, I point to lessons that other technologists who worked in government learned, but DOGE ignored. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/what-doge-...

DOGE is about more than destroying state capacity, setting up a panopticon, and granting no-bid contracts to corrupt billionaires. It's also about probing the limits of "how many alert banners can we add to government websites?"

less timidating sith lords: Darth Candescent Darth Ferior Darth Telligent Darth Nocent Darth Tern

Row Zero finally announced our $10M funding round! It's been a real whirlwind since we officially launched. I think we've already seen that people and businesses really respond to the product, and I'm very excited about where we're going.

Expecting the Schumer strategy of letting Trump wreck the country and hoping Republicans do something about it eventually to pay off right about now!