Special education isn't a "nice thing to have." It isn't "charity" or doing something to make us feel better. It is a right. The right to a Free Appropriate Public Education is codified in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, signed by a Republican president.

No Kings. October 18th. Free speech is action. Please join in. www.nokings.org

We can interpret Euclid's first three postulates as *independent* primitives to construct figures made out of line segments. The postulates let you change independently the magnitude and the orientation of the line segments.

"We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically." www.ru.nl/en/research/...

Abstraction, probably the most important idea in computing.

Crafting a new cover letter...

The main problem of design is finding the right independent primitives for your domain. Why independent? Because the user should be able to compose the primitives to solve their specific problem. You can fail by being too high-level or too low-level.

This month marks my 40th anniversary using #emacs. I cannot think of any other software with that kind of staying power.

+1 REST is an architectural style for worldwide hypermedia applications. What you want for the API of your distributed system is RPC.

Not just art. Talking. Writing. Editing. Designing. Coding. Thinking. Doing well at anything takes years of practice. Ceding that to a machine defeats the whole purpose of taking pleasure from one's chosen path in life.

my statement on Ai from the mini-comic I'm making as syllabus for a new class I'm teaching this fall. It's simple, but I pretty much said all I have to say on it - it robs you of decisions and struggle - and the joy of being surprised. It robs you of learning...

"There is, perhaps, no surer mark of folly than an attempt to correct the natural infirmities of those we love." — Henry Fielding, "Tom Jones"

"Because — as humans — we suffer from many cognitive biases — and a deep one is “confirmation bias” — it’s critical — no matter how much we think something is true — to maintain a little area where doubt can operate." — www.quora.com/If-Alan-Kay-...

“Languages should be designed not by adding features but by removing weaknesses that make more features seem necessary.” #Abelson and #Sussman

My 2-sentence summary of the Clojure philosophy: Software should be defined in terms of abstractions, not concretions. But beware of bespoke abstractions, an oxymoron.

Funny how we force engineers to write ADRs for every trade‑off, yet billion‑dollar strategic bets live in hallway whispers and fluffy slide decks. What if we treated business decisions like architecture? Context, options, trade‑offs, metrics, all in a repo, version‑controlled and reviewed?

I'm just starting to read Edgar Morin and it is connecting a lot of dots for me about complexity, order, organization, science, knowledge... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_M...

"In an age of informational chaos, the Wayback Machine feels like one of the few institutions that never lies to us." Nice comment from Current Affair editor www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-to-...

great stuff @alexanderobenauer.com in a world of tech slop, this quote feels relevant as ever:

"The important change happened within me." This is about the danger of becoming "tool-brained". The tool here is formal methods but that could be about any other tool 👀

"Open-ended ecosystems are where meaning is made. The meaning comes from the system surprising itself." — gordonbrander.com Open-ended ecosystems ... that's what it is all about. We're on a discovery trip, understand it, enjoy it, contribute to it.

Software design begins with asking how should the activity it is intended to support be carried out.

Re-reading all my books by Jacob Bronowski (thanks unemployment) made me realize how much of my worldview derives from his writings.

The value of your software system today is given by its external functionality. Tomorrow, its value is given by how well you can adapt it. This depends on your ability to understand the system’s internals enough to guide its evolution. Invest in this ability as if your business depends on it.

We're so used to our data living in vertical silos we don't control that we can't even imagine what it would be like if our data could safely flow to wherever we needed it. In an era of infinite software, code and data should flow like water.

it is impossible to generate code comments from source code because good comments are definitionally based on things not in the source code (intent, counterfactuals, experiments, etc.)

It’s a good time to rewatch Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

"We become better humans when we learn to shape and amplify that wild but amazing tool between our ears without becoming captive to it."

Last night, I gave a talk about AI, programming, & vibe coding www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WC8...

I agree, it is a historical accident. It is really unfortunate. Alan Kay said it better: "The most disastrous thing you can ever learn is your first programming language."

"A system as a whole is not an object but a way of looking at an object. It focuses on some holistic property which can only be understood as a product of interaction among parts."

And here's a gift link for anyone who needs it: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

"The cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart;

This thread has five new predictions for the next ten years up through January 1st, 2036. I will incorporate these and others into my yearly prediction update on January 1st, 2026. rodneybrooks.com/predictions-...

You can’t hear any of your fellow diners anymore at restaurants, and you’re often packed in elbow-to-elbow too. The restaurants seem to think that their dumbass, me-too, “enjoy” food-service concept is meant to replace the social experience you you hoped to achieve through eating food with friends.

I'm proud to be a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Here is their statement today. It is strong, and one that all Americans should be able to stand behind. And it is critical of the current POTUS. www.amacad.org/news/board-s...

I think there is a huge opportunity to bootstrap an OHS on top of #atproto. dougengelbart.org/content/view...

"Basic idea here is that there is often — even “usually” — some “meta math” under most problems. Spending some time trying to articulate and represent this will often result in much tinier, easier to understand and debug systems."

I have been working on an ATProto Clojure SDK for the past few weeks with @vanderhart.net. It is still under development but it does enough to re-implement the statusphere example app in Clojure (see examples directory). Feedback (and contributions) welcome! github.com/atproto-clj/...

# avoid the nightmare bicycle

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"His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable." (Stephen Dedalus)

A lesson I keep learning in different contexts: don't organize early. Dump it all in a big pile, put it all in one flat folder. Organize only sparingly, and only after things settle.

What does the Socratic method, the scientific method and residuality theory have in common? They ask you to work hard to find defects in your "theories". Through questioning in philosophy, experimentation in science, and stressor identification in software engineering.

Painting as metacognition www.patreon.com/posts/painti...

An important, essential column. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/o...

The program is up and tickets are live at www.hytradboi.com/2025/#program. I'll keep updating this thread as the last 10 talks hit camera-ready.

While type systems and tests are useful software tools, the risk that they become intellectual prosthetics in large teams is real.

Happy 100th Doug! Miss you, although I'm glad you're not seeing this. Can't believe it's been 12 years. dougengelbart.org/content/view...