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.

"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.