A white 996 Turbo is the most boomer of all Porsches.

Kind of Blue. Session #2 of 2 recorded on this day in 1959. "A defining moment of twentieth century music" #MilesDavis #jazz

In about 2010 I bought a $100 Microsoft/Nokia smartphone that had a faster processor, more pixels in the screen, more storage space and more RAM than the computer I used in 2000 when writing my comp-sci Honours thesis. And it was a better digital camera than the Kodak DC3400 I had then, too.

Tampa, FL

Just 1 example of the kind of thing unis are getting for their massive spend on consultants. ANU spent $6k on a "non-significant meeting" with a reputation management firm at which apparently no one took a note. That's more than a tutor gets for a semester's work thepoint.com.au/opinions/260...

I am 180+ days overdue on this terrible AI-voice over bad PowerPoint compulsory internal training. It’s also full of impenetrable HR jargon.

Right wing tech bros: we love Star Trek but it's too woke nowadays. Too preachy. Kirk's show wasn't like this. Average TOS episode: AI is bad and should never be allowed to run a society. Also, make peace because nationalism kills and every life form must be respected equally.

Repeat for as long as they’ll go with you to the library….

Snow Crash is absolutely biting satire. It’s not aiming to be aspirational. Teach critical literacy to technology students!

Your mobile phone exists because of software I wrote in the 90s (seriously). That hardware exists because of another trans woman. The book on how to do microelectronics was written by a trans woman. Loads of the internet is kept running by trans women. Rachel, THINK FOR ONE SECOND

If you like that ⬇️ may I introduce you to Genevieve Bell’s 2006 paper “No more SMS from Jesus” www.dhi.ac.uk/san/waysofbe...

Project managers: “I have added people to this project that is late, as recommended in Fred Brooks’ classic ‘adding people to a late project makes it later’”

Project managers: “I am following the waterfall software development model from Winston Royce’s 1970 paper ‘Do not follow a waterfall model for developing software’”

Spectacular thread. The maddening thing about this all is that Winston Royce wrote about this in 1970.

Vibe coding broke people's brains because they had a bad understanding of the software design process. The pop culture model goes something like this: start out with a sketch and then render that same idea in progressively finer detail. So when tools could "skip" to high detail, people went WOW.

What coders lose by relying on AI. From our event with the University of Washington Office of Public Lectures. (with @emilymbender.bsky.social)

I keep trying to write clever blog entries with Deep Realizations about government tech, while failing to document the simple, fundamental truths that guide my work. So here's one of those fundamental truths: government simply has to hire people who understand how technology works.

Why learn to code when you can use an LLM and pay a subscription fee for the rest of your life.

I wrote a few words last night. nvie.com/posts/15-yea...

Got pitched yesterday on a “research platform” that has a lot of AI in it, to the level of “it can do synthesis”. Me: I don’t trust that. LLMs only do form, not meaning Salesperson: for normal LLMs I agree that’s true, but ours is specially trained for qualitative research Me: yeah, ok

Put your hand up if you received the ELIZA vaccine at a young age and are now immune to chatbot spiraling

“The Trump administration “is telling American manufacturers, ‘You guys go build gasoline cars again,’” he said. “The Chinese government is telling its manufacturers, ‘You go build the advanced vehicles that are going take over the world.’”

Mazda - just coming in to the peak of their bubble-era power. FC RX-7 and HC Cosmo/Luce. Capella/626/MX-6 turbo with 4WS. Familia/323 (GT-X!) *and* MX-5!. I'd argue a more complete and interesting lineup than 80s BMW.

Context:

It’s always a good day to be reminded to always be punching nazis.

brass solidarity band performing “stand by me” in the streets of whittier next to alex pretti’s memorial. the crowd started chanting “the people united will never be defeated” so they incorporated it into the song. i love minneapolis

AS A: Employee I WANT TO: Not use this software but I have to SO THAT: I don't get fired ---------------- The enterprise SaaS user story

Because Australia, I just had to age-verify myself for (checks notes) Substack (?!).

I was gonna say don’t let the fascists claim Tolkien, they’re wrong, but then you see something like this and realize, no, they do understand it, they get that they’re the baddies

Naming your startup Sauron has real “are we the baddies” energy.

Just tilt your fruit buns 45°. They’re Scot Cross Buns now and you can eat them all year.

And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, lived in the interstice, yes, in both the city and the city.

And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his dreams, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void...

Extra special shout out to the organising team for a workshop in early March (which we are doing for free) who emailed today asking for slides by the end of the first working week in January and a review meeting at mid Jan. I will be declining. By scheduled send for 11 minutes before COB tomorrow.

I don't believe in technological determinism but I do believe that affordances, marketing, and propaganda are powerfully real.

Introduce yourself with 5 cars you’ve owned 1969 MGB roadster 1982 Mazda RX-7 1994 Peugeot 405 mi16 1967 Mazda 1500 1976 Renault 16TS

If you have been sharing that Malwarebytes article on the Gmail thing, you should note the giant correction up top. www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...

It occurs to me that the gmail “turn off AI” thing is worse than you think, because if you turn it off and your correspondent hasn’t, then Google gets access anyway.

Here's a rule of thumb: If "AI" seems like a good solution, you are probably both misjudging what the "AI" can do and misframing the problem. >>

Take it from me: super weird is where it’s at.

D is objectively the correct answer.

I keep saying that "improving productivity in front of a bottleneck cannot increase output, although it may decrease it". A hard won insight from manufacturing which people for some reason resist applying to service and administrative jobs.

Almost every time I teach interview data analysis, someone asks if they can use software to automate it. The point is to understand the data, not to produce a report. Learning takes time and messiness.

So the LLM synthesizes a result from various sources (that may be made up or misquoted) and then you "double-check" the sources? Sounds like the LLM is using you as research assistant.

I'll just read these open tabs and that way I will have less tabs open, he said. Oh, no.

programming computers is socio-anthropology actually

Alternatively, we could spend a lot more time with 80-yr-olds of to see what their lives are like. Empathy is a humanity problem, not a tech problem. You don't have to simulate what you can ask, especially when the challenges a demographic faces are varied and complicated by lived experience.

“A billion dollars… are not necessary for [a] lavish lifestyle. The only thing that that amount of wealth is necessary for is the domination of others. [At] a certain point, wealth shifts from being smthg that enables freedom to smthg that can only be used to take freedom away from the public.”

I don't get how people don't realize that a technology that replaces junior and entry level positions in a field destroys that field. There's no skipping steps. You have to be a junior before you can be a senior, and if you don't have senior people, you don't have a field.