Unsurprising common pitfall w/ Claude. Paying too much attention to what is instead of what ought to be. "Yes — that's exactly the right model, and your restructuring is what makes the 'problem' I raised disappear. It was never inherent; it was an artifact of how the current code is structured."

Classicist here to inform you all that this is ancient Greek for summoning a cat

LLMs make it easier to both: - write less rigorous software - write more rigorous software than before. Both are valuable. It’s a fatal mistake to be confused about which mode you want to be in.

"It treats the brain as if it is an analytical philosopher, a machine evaluating logical propositions. But this is a faulty anthropomorphic projection, conflating the tools that scientists use to study nature with nature itself."

“No people are more often wrong than those who will not allow themselves to be wrong.” #LaRochefoucauld

If you invite Alan Kay to make a presentation, be ready for him to trash the very concept of an oral presentation at the beginning, especially in an educational setting.

Happy birthday, Alan Kay! Kay received the 2003 #ACMTuringAward for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing. amturing.acm.org/award_winner...

Happy Birthday to Ivan Sutherland, recipient of the 1988 #ACMTuringAward for his pioneering and visionary contributions to computer graphics, starting with Sketchpad, a groundbreaking interactive computer-aided design system, and continuing thereafter: amturing.acm.org/award_winner...

Today, I'm excited to announce our next title! "Augment" is a forthcoming book featuring a collection of essays on the future of personal computing — specifically, on the kind we’d like to see more of in the future, and the ideas that might help us get there.

“I now believe that thinking [...] is the best debugging tool of all, because it leads to better software.” #RobPike https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1941206

The Clojure documentary premieres live later today! Thanks to the folks who participated, Nu for sponsoring, and all those who helped in the development of Clojure and its community. I'll be in the chat, and I hope to see you there! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y24v...

“Software's like Egyptian pyramids: millions of bricks, no structural integrity, done by brute force and 1000s of slaves.” #AlanKay https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak “This country has given me endless opportunities…: The America we inhabit today bears almost no resemblance to the country I chose all those years ago” newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-a-nobel...

Stocks soar on 2-week postponement of Armageddon.

I really feel like once you're aware of "CEO said a thing" as a model of "journalism" you can't unsee it. It is fucking everywhere.

Clojure: The Documentary trailer just dropped 👀 April 16 premiere — 1 full hour on how #Clojure and its #community came to life. I'm helping out w editing/show notes and yooo.. IT'S GOOD Y'ALL. dont sleep on this. 🎬 youtube.com/watch?v=JJEyffSdBsk

Alan Kay Media Center /updates and link fixing at mprove.de/visionrealit... #AlanKay

“In language, in religion, in art, in science, man can do no more than to build up his own universe—a symbolic universe that enables him to understand and interpret, to articulate and organize, to synthesize and universalize his human experience.” — Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man

Claude Code is more fun than Netflix. Bravo.

Also, this Brian Eno quote has been really stuck in my head for weeks: "The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement. ... the question then is, "Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?""

This is very popular, yet WILDLY poor advice: “Be constructive, don’t complain about problems if you don’t have a solution” If you hear someone say this, please consider slapping them with a large trout. Being aware of problems is *incredibly valuable*, whether you have solutions or not! [1/n]

Yes, very good talk by Benjamin!

I’m Alex Vindman and I’m running for the U.S. Senate. Chaos, corruption and sky-rocketing costs are crushing ordinary people, while the billionaires and career politicians profit. I stepped up when my country needed a soldier and now I’m stepping up again to fight for Floridians.

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents border patrol officers at the National Border Patrol Council, calls on Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller to resign or be fired

Miller should be the target of Dem pressure. Yes, defund ICE, impeach Noem, sure. But if you want maximum change on the admin's behavior, focus on getting Miller out of day-to-day decisions. Drive a wedge by making him embarassing. Trump loves to blame someone else: make Miller the scapegoat.

If your goal is to produce some particular end product—a website, an app, an open-source project on GitHub—the sooner you can make it look like that end product, the better. With AI, it's never been easier. Get an idea. Sketch with AI. Make a demo! 🧐💡🛠 tugtool.dev/journal/get-...

Claude code is amazing for rapid prototyping!

Happy New Year! As of January 1, 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library are now open access, making computing research more accessible, discoverable, and reusable worldwide. Explore ACM’s open access journey: 👉 www.acm.org/publications... #OpenAccess #ACM

New Alan Kay talk — 75 Years of Graphical User Interfaces www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS20...

People mistakenly think prototypes are for discovering the right answer. They are most effective when used to find the right question.

A silver lining to coding with AI agents may be that we will finally accept the idea of programs as derivable artifacts.

TIL "netflix and chill" used to be "come up and see my etchings"

"Invention is translation of one kind of space into another." — McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

Title of my imaginary PhD thesis: "Software as temporary stabilization of constraints within a transformation space."

"Despite the marvellous plastic qualities they occasionally exhibit, emotionally they have always been (and always will be) true first cousins to the square of the hypotenuse." — William M. Ivins, Art & Geometry Ouch.

Beware of the domain model where everything seems easy but nothing of interest is possible.

this fall I worked with the core Git folks on writing an official data model for Git and it just got merged! I learned a few new things from writing it. github.com/git/git/blob...

Please Donate to the Internet Archive. $25 helps.... a lot. Useful to Journalists, Useful to Students, Useful to more than 2 million people a day. Collections growing at 150TBytes/day @internetarchive archive.org/donate www.cnn.com/2025/11/16/b...

"The very best creative people will only go to work in a few places." / "What I try to do is create the environment where these incredible people can make films." Man, this is what real leadership looks like. They don't make 'em like this anymore. youtu.be/R0XmBKsRJF8?...

"There is no royal road to geometry."

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

Lots of reasons to love using Clojure, but Netflix reminded us of why we don’t want to use anything else… In 12 years, over 7 different versions of Clojure (from 1.5.1 to 1.12.0) they had zero migrations! I don’t know how to express how amazing that is

This!

This was a really great event , amazingly good communication given the great range of disciplines, and a tribute to Sean and Jennan.

Happy Internet Archive Day to all who celebrate. The Internet Archive is hitting its trillionth webpage archived, and - as a long time collaborator and historian of both web archiving more generally as well as the Internet Archive specifically - am happy to join them for this milestone.

I hear from informed sources that these #NoKings rallies are more than twice as big as last time, making them easily the largest protests in US history. Thanks to everyone and especially organizers.

"Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands." — Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

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.