If there are spelling mistakes in your codebase, that’s a huge smell

Welp, I don’t think they are a very serious national security issue, but I was saddened when my neighbour, who was a very nice and diligent PhD student, didn’t feel free to criticise the Chinese government when we brought it up quite innocently. It was kind of a shock as he was erudite and even-handed in every other way. And I was clearly not a party apparatchik. Very odd.

So cancel the project.

Lensed ass bullshit

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C2_HCptj6wU

This is what happens when you have a team that does not give one mote of a shit about their craft, or their customers. Mostly the former.

Having lived in a few places, I wonder how much of this is how communities are structured physically. Fiefdoms are common in suburbia. But city folk also seem a little isolated, at least in big cities in the USA, which I attribute to parents having no time because of cost of living pressure and culture.

He’s not going to do it this time, and there’s not a goddamn thing they can do about it.

However, the statute of limitations could be pushed

America is truly a shithole. You don’t hear of such things in other developed countries

Apple now: “We are giving trump $25,000,000 to fund construction of his ballroom, which will eclipse the White House.”

I like Jon Stewart. I even went to a show of his. I followed him from 2000 to circa 2015. He’s been on point for all that time plus his vociferous advocacy of the 9/11 responders health fund.

I like Jon Stewart now. However. A lot of schtick.

Same. AI has fallen down repeatedly trying to analyse both of my repos. And they were written by a bad human originally. The problems are all the same, except AI will get you spaghetti faster.

Don’t make me tap the sign

Yours is a good point. I know that the guy who solo-created Redis uses AI effectively to write tests - he gives it a lot of handwritten tests and a lot of context, and then asks it to match the style and pattern, which it does well.

I’ve got something like half a million to a million lines, a crazy level of cyclomatic complexity, and a team that doesn’t see a problem with it. That’s the tough part - socialising the changes. We tend to arbitrarily rename vars/methods and not keep things in the same place, so there is a lot of drift.

I think AI might be able to unpack some of that, but there is a sort of irreducible accidental complexity that would require a human to make decisions about what some things mean. In some cases, you could get a gaggle of devs in the same room and they would not be able to arrive at a decision about what the code is doing or even what it should be doing.

The document says:

1. Popular policies wouldn’t allow us to maintain a fundraising edge
2. We lost enthusiasm because of our vigorous defence of Israel
3. Biden should have dropped out earlier, and there were people aware of the risk of a bad performance in the debate
4. Harris didn’t do enough to differentiate herself from Biden and the opposition in (yet another) anti-establishment election

One of the biggest unforced failures of the Biden administration is the reported complaint of Joe Biden that people weren’t acknowledging the economic turnaround.

Biden did a lot of good for the economy! Massive stimulus via the infrastructure bill, a sensible approach to recovery from Covid, acknowledging that recovery from an inflationary period would be necessarily painful, etc. He was a steady hand at a time when America needed one.

But what sends me into apoplexy, what really grinds my gears, is that this motherfucker was so out of touch to believe that this was a messaging problem. He felt that Americans had not yet heard of his accomplishments in turning around the tide of economic misfortune, how badly the republicans would have bungled it, and how the next four years would have been a period of huge growth based on the previous four.

All of these points were absolutely true.

But there is no housing supply. The economic pressures are so hard on young people that their biological impulses are changing.

Young empiricists have taken a look at the climate and have correctly deduced that their future is full of pain in the absence of truly radical action.

And Kamala’s strategy for relieving pressure on the housing market was a $25,000 credit for first time home buyers? In an environment where housing prices have doubled and tripled in fifteen years?

I am one of the very few members of the public that attended Feinstein’s funeral at San Francisco City Hall. And the only one there that day wearing sneakers. I attended her lying in state, paid my respects to a committed civil servant, and in the book, cautioned Pelosi against a similar, “ignominious” end. Then I hear that Pelosi has filed to run again in 2026. As an 86 year old.

At some point the Democratic leadership looks less out of touch and more actively malicious considering the serious and existential crises of the young and near-young in the United States.

The country is in decline because of its extreme individualism, its lack of compassion, and its ruthless “politics is the art of the possible” approach by leaders who could not possibly inspire with bold leadership.

The party is chasing local maxima.