My latest newsletter is about how generative AI companies are risking the lives of the most vulnerable by releasing tools that affirm dangerous delusions -- and the potential human consequences. And it's about why nobody seems to be freaking out about it. whatwelost.substack.com/p/how-many-p...

the rats nest that is the flow of money in AI compute is so unbelievably complicated and circular that i had to make a diagram

had to dig out some old embedded programming concepts and Java concepts from my memory before it clicked. Kotlin compiler feels a lot more Java-y than Kotlin-y, but that makes sense given the JVM is (historically) Kotlin's primary build target, or maybe that's just the general shape of a compiler

I did figure out how to rewrite it as a compiler plugin, but yeah my brain hurts

rewriting a KSP as a Kotlin compiler plugin over the past week has really kicked my ass. I thought I had a good mental model of code generation, but it turns out that was just based around the nice abstractions of Java's annotation processing and KSP.

LLMs love to write 10 unit tests where a single one would suffice 😭

Very disappointed by this. It increases the barrier of entry to making apps, as it seems likely that it will require you to create some sort of developer account just to install an APK you develop.

Google product development in 2025

Does anyone know how to motivate teams to review and merge Renovate/Dependabot PRs?

The Glean AI integration for Slack support channel requests is not only useless, but actively harmful, in my opinion.

one of the worst app UX that I run into regularly is the swipe-to-delete feature within the Google Authenticator app. it's way too easy to delete a code that could leave you locked out of your account. yes, there is a confirmation dialog, but it's presence just tells me they know it's a shitty UX.

I didn’t vote for Gillibrand or Schumer the last time I had the chance. I left it blank. It felt good. It felt right not supporting their behavior. I will never vote for them again. I will never tell them I support their actions. I will never let my guaranteed vote give them freedom to betray me.

idk if there's a better way, but burning most of a day verifying that an AI generated PR does not, in fact, do what the author purports it to do does not feel very satisfying.

Shout out to Cursor for kicking off thousands of unnecessary Gradle builds per day, unnecessarily inflating our local build counts and making our local build data set almost entirely useless

👀🚗🤖 @kaeawc.bsky.social

Metaprogramming with @anthonycr.bsky.social 🎉🙌🤠 Programming programs that program programming programs #AndroidDev

Happening today, see you later 🤖

Time to early vote. No Cuomos

Documented my efforts to get Gradle Configuration Cache reuse on CI with detail about latest performance efforts #AndroidDev #Gradle www.jasonpearson.dev/gradle-confi...

NYC Comptroller Brad Lander was just arrested by Trump’s ICE agents because he asked to see a judicial warrant. This is fascism and all New Yorkers must speak in one voice. Release him now.

This article links tech layoffs that started in 2022 to a Section 174 change in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which ended immediate R&D write-offs. The assumption was companies using savings from the tax cuts to cover the increased tax bill on R&D spending. Instead they’ve cut headcount.

The criminalization of riding a bike in this city, while car drivers continue to kill people, is beyond imagination and parody

Kotlin coroutine anti-pattern: making analytics functions suspending

I don't think enough people in tech understand just how much the tech layoffs in 2022 and beyond (maybe even 2021 at more aggressive companies) were a direct result of the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act changing R&D tax exemptions to be amortized over 5 years for FY 2022.

10 years ago, in college, I turned down an offer to buy a privacy-focused app that I built, rather than risk my users' data being exposed. Instead, I licensed the app's source code to them for half the money, and accepted a job offer to work on their forked version of the app.

Happy to announce that I'll be talking about Metaprogramming with Kotlin Symbol Processing in June at @droidcon.bsky.social NYC 🤓

Published a new version of my test fake generating framework that simplifies the API for verifying parameters using custom matchers! github.com/anthonycr/Mo...

Updated my Mockingbird library to improve the error message when users forget to apply the KSP dependency 🐦‍⬛ github.com/anthonycr/Mo...

There's a cottage industry of people who have never once spent time advocating for an accessible transit system who claim that congestion pricing is "ableist," and folks, those people are full of shit.

Also, released a new version of my verification mock generator Mockingbird to support verification of abstract classes 🐦‍⬛ github.com/anthonycr/Mo...

I finally rewrote my Kotlin annotation processor that generates static string content from resource files into a combined Gradle plugin + KSP and released the updated version github.com/anthonycr/Me...

As I said earlier tonight, the content and tone of the letter - and the fact that it was fed to a pair of reporters at The Post first - make it abundantly clear what the letter was intended to accomplish: Drum up negative headlines about urban/transit safety. Let's not be naive about this.

New Yorkers: Call Sen. Gillibrand’s office to vote NO on cloture and NO on the Republican Spending Bill. They vote in the morning. ☎️: (202) 224-4451

Adams must be removed. The city cannot sustain being governed for nearly a year by a Mayor who is being coerced by Trump admin in order to escape charges. This corruption poses a real threat to the people of the city. He should have resigned a while ago, but will not. So it’s time for him to go.

New blog post: Parallelism with Android SQLite blog.p-y.wtf/parallelism-... What started an ANR investigation ended up with a deep dive into Android SQLite's connection pool... #AndroidDev

Signed up for DeepSeek, and the first Android question I asked it, it answered more correctly than ChatGPT

so painful watching my food pantry force us to use the world's worst google sheet to do registration week after week, when plentifulapp.com exists

no

Working on a small isolated Android team for so long really insulated me from realizing just how huge the knowledge gap has gotten between experienced and inexperienced devs thanks to improvements to build tooling (ty JetBrains and Google). Thankfully this doesn't cause problems that often.

Reddit is testing blocking access to their mobile website to encourage users to download the app. I can’t believe they found a way to make their mobile web experience even more user hostile. 🤦🏾‍♂️

Fuck Reddit for shutting down 3rd party apps. 3rd party apps ARE Reddit, and without them, they're just another shitty disposable social network

Thankfully my Windows machine has been humming along. Only issue I've run into is my mic volume getting set to zero when connecting through a dock, easily resolved without rebooting though

My MacOS experience of late has deteriorated into a roulette of needing to reboot my machine DAILY for one of the following reasons - Mission control stops working - Workspaces stop working - DNS can't resolve any hostnames

starting to think some of those twitter employees weren't "extra"

When I was younger after a terrible breakup where I lost everything and didn't have access to my own funds for months I was food insecure. I wore my best clothes and put myself together whenever I went to the food pantry because I was so broken inside. She just wants poor people to suffer.

It's funny that the only useful video subscription I have (Twitch Turbo) is the only subscription that randomly cancels itself. I wish my Netflix subscription had accidentally cancelled itself instead

Fascinating: humans unexpectedly regained their advantage in Go because they created situations AIs never had seen in their training data https://franklantz.substack.com/p/the-afterlife-of-go?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1435607&post_id=117118804&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

AI advancement is really impressive and I'm excited to see how we can push the tech to make our jobs easier, but the fact that people seem to think that GPT-3.5 is sufficient when it's got like a 20% accuracy rate for me over the past couple months makes me think it's just hype

I'm 30 today 😌

It's wild watching the CEO of this app talking about building community and trying to improve the app, while a board member Jack simultaneously tries to undermine it all saying this app is temporary, shouldn't replace Twitter, won't support a large user base, etc.