Holiday gathering reminder 🎁 If your guests test w/rapids twice before the event, 48 hours apart, it’ll catch 63% of Covid cases even if they have no symptoms. Testing 3x improves that to 79%! This is how we curb the annual January surge that gave me Long Covid—thanks for protecting yr community 🤍

If you're looking for the proper anti-Zionist response to the mass murder in Australia, it's pretty simple at this stage You just say, "Holy shit it is really bad that that happened, and I hope the perpetrators are brought to justice" Keep it simple, folks

Medical professionals: Why are people turning away from medical science and turning to quackery? Also medical professionals: I don't think I can help you, so I'm referring you back to the specialist who referred you here and cant see you again for 8 months, until then you'll have no treatment plan.

It is not a stretch at this point to say that, if you are using a Ring doorbell, you are an ICE collaborator. Amazon readily provides data to LEOs and ICE. Don't want to be an ICE collaborator? Then don't use Ring.

Your yearly reminder that “holiday” celebrations that only include Christian traditions are not, in fact, inclusive even if you don’t use the word Christmas, so tbh I’d rather you just say it’s Christmas.

just great

We had even put this specific genie back into its bottle until Google affiliated researches said, "Hey, it turns out if we throw the entire corpus of the internet at an LLM it might actually be more useful." And then when people asked if they had obtained that data ethically they kinda shrugged.

I wrote my most personal blog post to date. It summarizes some of my personal feelings and experiences in the Ruby/Rails community. afomera.dev/posts/2025-1...

Hey can y'all do me a favor? If you run across any post-incident write-ups from companies affected by the AWS outage, could you send those to me?Feel free to leave a link in the comments, or you can drop them here: www.thevoid.community/submit-incid... Thanks!

My house is going to be the it house for Halloween this year.

Any remote (US) volunteer/part-time paid opportunities in criminal justice reform/transformative justice? Particularly interested in counteracting the use of police surveillance tools. My background is in sociology, computer science, and public interest technology. #JobSearch #NonProfitJobs

Never have I ever seen people more in need of hearing the term "sociotechnical system".

When a person has a history of harassment, their presence, or simply the threat of their presence is intended as and received as harassment by their victims. Abusers and harassers understand and weaponize this.

I shared this earlier because I think it is so funny but then I also thought to myself, what advice would I (a learning scientist by background, married to someone who teaches programming) actually give a developer who feels bad reading this? How can you avoid writing this? A few tips:

It would be great if we could go a year without a tech conference being planned on a high holiday.

On a similar note. Anyone else weirded out by the fact they decided this would happen on a high holiday?

The people pointing out that "Antifa has no central structure or leadership, how are they going to target this order?" fails to understand how this administration works. Maximum ambiguity give the maximum room to maneuver.

"It hasn't been that long since I cleaned my office" he says as he proceeds to find a Windows XP installer disc and a @quinnypig.com business card from before The Duckbill Group existed.

If you consider yourself a #PublicInterestTech technologist, what is your current job title and what has your job history looked like? Reposts welcome 💕

When people said we wanted the Democratic party to fight more, we meant we want them to fight the Republicans, not people in their own party who are further left.

There is no universe in which this is defensible.

Why does it feel like every 4 year old is in a secret competition to determine who can be the most dramatic 4 year old?

I hear both transphobes and normal folk talking about Testosterone as a performance enhancing drug and Estrogen as performance decreasing drug, and that's dude centric and not true. T and E are both performance enhancing drugs for sports. They just enhance different aspects. Let's talk powerlifting

“AI is coming to take our jobs” no it isn’t. It’s a CEO named Gary taking some shitty advice from a VC who has never had a real job in their life, trying to maximise their quarterly earnings by firing as many people as they can get away with to make number go up, and it isn’t sustainable

My child has received "goat socks" as a gift and my new fear is that he'll be talking about them, misspeak, and anyone in earshot who was internet aware in the aughts will call CPS on us.

Welp. I've joined the ranks of people who've been laid off. Would love to hear if anyone is hiring managers in the platform/sre/telemetry/incidents/etc. space.

This news has absolutely gutted me today. Jeff was the kind of person who became friends with everyone and made lifelong memories for people right after meeting him. There are so many places where his presence will be sorely missed. His memory will be a blessing.

A good 70% of the fighting over AI would have been avoided if VC hucksters (and gullible access journalists) hadn't conflated incrementally useful automation with computational sentience to make money

You know, a company with an incident analysis program is a little bit like the mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it, and danged if he knows how to use it.

Are you (or someone you know) interested in helping organize @chicago.devopsdays.org ? forms.gle/29DdJBcMGGew...

So I just want to be clear that the gentile President's anti-immigrant goons illegally assaulted and kidnapped the leading Jewish candidate for Mayor in New York City for walking into a federal building for the crowd that is keeping track of The Antisemitism Problem

I've seen a number of things talking about the cost of queries to LLMs going down. Can someone who is more plugged in to the economics of this tell me if: A) This is the natural progression of the tech improving? B) The costs are going elsewhere (eg. Google subscription cost increases)?

Why do some have a shit time with LLMs for programming while others love it? To succeed, the latter group tacitly creates tons of scaffolding and gain weird new skills. While it works, this posts explains how doing all that is an incidental consequence of bad interaction design in coding AI agents.

One thing I've noticed is how similar in tone some of the pro-AI blog posts are to posts from 15 years that would shit on PHP and anyone who was still writing it. We've spent my entire career trying to weed these kinds of takes out of our profession. Why are we giving those takes airtime again?

"Think of AI as a junior developer" Oh, interesting. That'd imply helping junior devs learn and building understandable systems would be a massive force multiplier. Yet you seem entirely opposed to doing so? Nothing says leadership like treating peers worse than your IDE's autocomplete, I suppose.

Please, don’t let Jonathan Joss’s story die down. Please, don’t do this to Indigenous people on Pride month. Please, recognize his whole neighborhood was in on his premeditated death and killed his dogs and burned his childhood home. PLEASE REALIZE this is a hate crime against a gay AND Native man.

This was a profoundly disappointing article to read, and I'm surprised that you wrote it. I'm even more surprised that Kurt insisted you post it on the company blog. I will revise my expectations of fly.io going forward. But out of respect, I will spend some time and tell you why I am disappointed.

The equivalent of slop in software development is the feature factory. It's hard work having a strategy and coming up with ideas. It's sad when you test them and they don't work. But it's easy to measure "number of features shipped" and the number never goes down! So managers measure "velocity."

In regards to that AI article going around... If you have a stated goal to get unproductive conversation unstuck, anyone with basic writing and argumentation skills knows that if you are a complete jackass to the other side, that they will dig in and further entrench their opinions.

Ok I’m all for saying that LLMs are good for stuff actually. I’m not even doubting that. I’m saying: at what cost?

It's no surprise the "discourse" around everything is so impossible. We're near constantly in this state of amygdala hijack, and that is not a good place to have a deep, thoughtful discussion, regardless of the character limits or features of a social network.

The RTO conversation always feels sad from my living-in-a-remote-place point of view. Doing my job without remote work implies any of: - uproot & drop everything and people in my life - forego more than 2/3 of my compensation - switch careers There’s not much to debate for me in this situation.

I have a lot of thoughts about the remote work discussions going on, but the biggest one I don't see getting discussed: For people who were not working remotely and used to working remotely prior to March 2020, it is not possible to fully mentally separate remote work and pandemic related trauma.

"There are too many meetings!" Is a truism, that doesn't help anyone. It's not specific enough to be useful. For a given meeting: What purpose was that meeting serving? Is that purpose still needed? Was that meeting even satisfying that need? Should that need be met in another way?

:: BREAKING NOW: Multiple polling places across Milwaukee are running low or have run out of ballots as turnout is at record levels. MKE Election Commission is aware and sending out fresh ballots. If you are in line -- or know someone who is -- ballots are on the way.

“When you don’t have a code of conduct it signals that your space is not safe.” @kat.lol delivering truth at #MonkiGras

thought: granular permissions are actually kinda bad for most users because they aren't sophisticated enough to audit them, they blindly click 'accept all', which actually results in poorer overall security/privacy outcomes

Too often, “Architecture” is treated like a noun. A thing. A fixed blueprint. But in complex systems, fixity is fragility. What if we approached architecture as a process instead? 🧵

We are still in the pandemic, right now. The phrase you are looking for to describe 2020 is "early in the ongoing pandemic". The phrase you are looking for to describe 2021 is "earlier in the ongoing pandemic".