David Edgar's website

I said, "I'm not your manager, we're peers, so I do feel a little uncomfortable telling you how to do your job" after I suggested a thing we could be doing together and they replyied it was kind of their role.

They said "Sure, but I do appreciate your greater gravitas" and I was suddenly unsure who they were talking to, that it was the first time I've ever been accused of having gravitas, and that it seemed I had the reverse problem of all those GSVs.

So anyway, I immediately displayed my immense and formidable gravitas by editing my profile in the company Slack.

"Hey, your feed is not right, recent posts are missing."

"huh, no, they are there in the curl output. And yeah, there in the feed reader, but out of order. I guess a publish date would help."

/me adds what he thinks is the publish date

"Ok, nope, still out of order. And apparently all published right this second."

/me fixes it properly

"Ok, yep. But feed reader is weird because of those posts 'published' five minutes ago. But real engineers test in production, right? 🫤"

I nearly got into an argument right before Xmas with work colleagues about Gen AI. I had made some snarky comment and got some pushback that they didn’t understand why I wouldn’t use it because it generates good code if you use it right. I ended up just ignoring the pushback and then the break helped the whole thing go away.

That meant I could avoid getting into the awkward conversation about my reasoning. Because my response would have been that whether or not it is an effective generator of good code is irrelevant to me. My distaste for LLMS are in moral and ethical grounds. The ethics of using a tool built on theft. The morality of using a tool that requires so much waste of water and power in the beginning stages of an existential crisis triggered by climate change.

There’s axiomatically no way to live a moral life in capitalism. So I don’t like to get into that with work colleagues. I’ll tease my friends about their moral failings like working for AWS, but it’s closer to sanctimonious to push that kind of position with people I only know because we have the same employer.

To some extent though I am finding myself the last couple of days wondering how, or if, Deepsink and its apparently significantly reduced impacts in training phase alter the equation for me.

Today Sussan Ley - and really I should know better because she's nothing but a public funded performance artist/troll at this point - compared "the First Fleet to Elon Musk’s Space X seeking to reach Mars". I recall there was another allegory regarding the colonists coming to Australia. That one also involved Mars, but that one had travel going the other direction and was perhaps a little closer to the mark.

NGL I'm a little conflicted about the lack of local microbes during the actual events.

But also, gee, could you be more obsequious to the Nazi?

What is the statute of limitations on referring to one side of your house as "So and so's side", the family who were there when you first moved in, even if they have moved out?

I try to use NATO phonetics when reading out codes to the drive through at McDonald’s. Tonight I started with ‘Bravo’, but realised I couldn’t remember what the next letter was so paused and then very sheepishly said ‘potato’.

I think I heard a giggle.

Today Paul Graham issued a plea to the MAGA party to recognise his obsequiousness in the form of an essay on how it is possible to be too anti-racist. I won’t link to it; it’s easy enough to find if you respect yourself so little. But I warn you, an extremely white man is going to tell you racism is bad but nearly as bad as anti-racists say it is.

It’s kind of astonishing both how desperate these clowns are to be allowed into the club and how they clearly believe it will last forever and their words won’t be held against them forever. And yes, and how profoundly cringe they are: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/16/i-knew-one-day-id-have-to-watch-powerful-men-burn-the-world-down-i-just-didnt-expect-them-to-be-such-losers

Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, three times a pattern.

On our 5th anniversary D promised me "50 to go." clearly foreshadowing her intent to have me killed in 2063.

And now on our 17th she is telling me I need a will to make sure everything I have goes to the right place.

Chilling escalation.

Anyway, happy anniversary, D.

I'm trying to offload some shelves. I purchased them a decade ago when we first moved into my house because they were cheap and effective. We've subsequently replaced them with something sturdier and neater.

However I can assure you, they could soon do the work of midlevel engineers in any company, not just Meta.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai-replace-engineers-coders-joe-rogan-podcast-2025-1

what is a modern corporation but a legal spell for turning reasoning beings into temporarily vacant machines?

Just one of a dozen clarifying lines. Masnick's Impossibility Theorem gets trotted out a lot, disingenuously I think by a lot of people who aren't Mike Masnick. Kissing is essentially saying "Yes, but" in this piece. Both should be read together.

• corporate
• politics
• social
• society
• web

I was just reading a blog post an hour ago about how no, your phone is not spying on you. And then...

Today everyone is all het up because famous bullshit artist Donald Trump responded to a press conference question saying that he could not rule out using military force to annex the Panama Canal. From Panama. Which you would have to imagine would be something easily militarily defended and not all all prone to insurgent action, but anyways.

The fact that a journalist even asked the question is a real "paper bag labeled 'Dead Dove'" moment. Aside from the court case (https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-companies-accused-tax-evasion-panama) I'm curious what else Trump might have going on that he'd see this as useful leverage.

If only we had some sort of self-mythologising group of people with access to a kind of broad medium of communication who could question motivations and so forth and shine a light on them.

• media
• uspol

An ebook length screed from Joan Westenberg (not a blog post, SBF would be so disappointed but fuck him) basically calling for radically rethinking of what it means to be responsible for something. Not a full blown "Take the means of production" call to action, but definitely pushing for the devolution of ownership and responsibility to workers and away from middle managers.

As a middle manager I cannot help but fist pump and mutter "fuck yeah!"

I'd propose a framework: * The stakes must be high (in this case, literal life and death) * The intervention must be low-cost and low-risk * The evidence must be clear and immediately observable * The delay caused by seeking permission would result in significant harm

I appreciate how often Joan lays out where she thinks the guardrails on something like this should be. Also:

But - and this is crucial - they did this within carefully designed constraints. Workers can't make changes that would affect other processes without coordination. They can't violate safety protocols. They have to document their changes. But within these constraints, they don't need permission to optimize (sic) their own work.

• culture
• joan-westenberg
• organisation
• ownership
• radicalism
• teams
• work

Kris created an Apple shortcuts flow for posting images to her Wordpress blog. I had something similar at one stage but grew unresaobly angry that Shortcuts couldn't access the secure Passwords app so I had to hardcode the bearer token into the shortcut. Like a barbarian! You know, maybe I could just..you know...do that anyway.

• blogging
• indieweb
• kris_howard
• meta
• shortcuts

The Slow Zones from Vernor Vinge’s books stuck very firmly in my brain. Striking how similar in concept to this Timescape Cosmology.

(Also happens to me favourite answer to the Fermi Paradox)

via Kellan Elliot-McCrea

• cosmology
• science
• theory