wpietri

A while back, a client called me in to look at a system whose author has left years ago. It was a mess. And for no good reason, it used Docker extensively, and would only work with a specific pre-release version. I searched and discovered that the guy had stayed just long enough to do a talk on this then-hot new technology before getting a better job elsewhere.

It was the clearest example of Resume Driven Development I'd ever seen, but no means the only one.

AGI has been prominent in pop culture since at least 1968 with 2001: A Space Odyssey. There is a place in our heads for it. And really I think that's just the modern version of anthropomorphic spirits: angels, devils, gods, etc. It gives AGI a feeling of inevitablility.

Of course, things like jetpacks and flying cars also have had that feeling. As well as Stephenson's metaverse.

There are a surprising number of people who think the only fair game is "heads I win, tails you lose".

Agreed. And I'd add that some managers/execs think abuse is fun, or at least necessary. They're always looking to pick up a new stick to beat people with. Their peers and superiors frequently mistake it for competence and toughness.

It's still useful for the portion of the audience that doesn't realize the depth of the fraud.

That analysis seems pretty confused to me. Freedom without accountability for harm to others is nonsensical.

As is dramatizing license plates as "overwhelming vulnerability". Just look at the US's 40k traffic deaths per year, with countless lesser injuries and accidents. Balanced against which specific harms of license plates?

The problem with Flock, etc, is their massive, unaccountable, for profit surveillance, which uses much more than license plates, and is working hard to move beyond them.

Yes, that's part of what I'm saying. The notion is absurd. The main point of a car for most people is inescapably social.

People who claim they want privacy while acting in society instead want something else, usually a lack of accountability.

It's only required on public roads. You can drive on your own property all you like without plates.

I'm all for privacy for things that are truly private. But wanting to secretly consume public resources and remain unaccountable for harm to others is what I think is truly absurd. Although it's an increasingly popular one recently.

You said that people could do a thing. I'm asking why they would.

Academic fraud is done to boost the reputation of the academic. There isn't a lot of point in academic fraud with one paper on each of 50 fake names.

What's the motivation to do that? Academic fraud is about building up a name.

Chicago is pretty great, bub. This year I opened a pinball museum here, so I can testify that it's a fine place to run a business. Some friends just came from the Bay Area for a week and had a lovely time. If only for your mental health, you should step out of your media bubble now and again

Pretty well, honestly. Somebody with both technical knowledge and familiarity with a particular subculture can get access to entertainment videos with some work. But they've managed to keep piracy economically negligible. Basically everybody uses streaming services, 90% of US households pay for at least 1, and the average household pays for 4. [1]

Brand was wrong. Information doesn't want to be free, just cheap.

[1] https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/how-much-us-households-spen...

The biggest barrier for people with knowledge, understanding, expertise, and the willingness to work hard was certainly time. But there were a lot of people with plenty of time that never got anything done.

In the beforetimes there were a lot of would-be founders running around looking for people who actually knew things and could do things (that is, technical cofounders). Will some of those people use Claude Code to make successful products on their own? A few, I'm sure. But I expect a lot of them will stay ignorant fools who have prompted their way to a pile of garbage.

I can be confident of that because there were plenty of founders with FFF money who could suddenly hire "capable coworkers" that produced garbage. "AI" is certainly removing barriers. But as I deal with a big increase in polished but idiotic email and PRs, I have to think that barriers were helpful both to the world at large (by keeping fools at bay) and to the promising but incompetent (by giving them a chance to build character and wisdom).

I don't understand why that matters. We can't act in 1970. We can act today. So we should be looking at biggest current problems and the highest-ROI fixes.

Exactly. It's a pretty small number of people who are this terrible. Thinking of it in evolutionary terms creates a sense of fatalism. If you look globally since the invention of agriculture, it's very clear that a) humans are extremely flexible, and b) culture matters hugely to how societies turn out.

Culture is something we inherit, but it's something we can change. If we want things to be less fucked up for the next generation, we can do that. As many before us have.

That, alas, would violate Wilhoit's law.

I was one of Twitter's first 500 users. Later, I worked at Twitter on anti-abuse. I was a big fan. But I quit using it after Musk's takeover because I didn't want to be supporting somebody who's awful in a half-dozen ways that have only become more obvious. [1] And X reflects that.

I'm not the OP, but anybody honestly wanting to know why people think good humans should not use Twitter does not have far to look.

1. E.g., https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/24/musk-on... or his Economist interview.

Do you measure anything about complexity or brevity? I'm currently working on importing some LLM code and it's 5-10x bigger than it should be for the actual needs.

One of my open questions is how much that increases over time. It could be that is a constant. But it also could be that, say, coding agents will infer false needs from the excess code/docs and elaborate further.

I thoroughly disagree. Did Facebook take advantage of existing issues? Yes. Did they magnify those issues while creating new ones? Absolutely yes.

Your theory is that Facebook not only had no impact on that but could have done nothing to improve things?

That seems implausible to me. I think at best you could claim that cause and effect are quite tangled here.

Society depends upon having generation after generation of healthy members. That has never been a time when individual parents were sufficient to solve all the problems there. And even that were possible, directing all the attention on them acts to absolve Meta of all responsibility for their own actions.

If we're going to promote a policy of personal responsibility, let's at least look at all the persons involved.

I'm ok with generic people struggling with that. But anybody covering tech or business should be able to work effectively with the numbers at hand. Anything less is journalistic malpractice.

You started out saying it was simple, but now you have a definition where you need to somehow slice trades down the middle, so I think you're starting to see my point.

Having worked for market makers, I find it weird to get lectured on what they really are. That never goes down well, but especially not when the lecture is wrong. https://xkcd.com/793/

I started using DuckDB last year and I loved it. Small, focused, crackling with competence, no bullshit. I think what I liked about it had a lot to do with it being made by a small group of technical people who weren't interested in "maximizing share holder value" (that is, maximizing executive promotions and bonuses).

Maybe this will be the rare case where founders survive corporate shenanigans and keep on doing their thing. But I'm bummed, as I've heard that optimism many more times than I've seen it happen.

I believe he's using it metaphorically here, and thus so am I.

Natural selection is demonstrably not working. It only takes one look at a newspaper to see that thoughtlessness and stupidity are doing better than ever.

I think the internet is pretty great, but it's a major factor in that rise in at least 3 ways:

* Previously, an important check on fools was social consequences. Now they have an endless supply of people to bother. Spammers were the first to exploit that, but now it's endemic.

* Algorithmic weighting toward the reaction-generating (versus, say thoughtful, measured, responsible, accurate, helpful, kind) has rewarded idiocy and awfulness with attention and money. We're all now living in a reality TV show.

* As those behaviors become a major percentage of what people, especially young people, see, they become normalized. Otherwise people think being a thoughtless jackass is just how to get by in the world.

We are strongly in need of firm politeness, of militant decency. Without it, things will get "naturally" worse.

It's a land grab. Right now none of them have a dominant position. Much better to get mind share and market share now. They can always squeeze the value chain later. And whoever wins surely will.

I do think it breaks down in practice for the goal of deciding which given trade/bet is gambling.

I worked for market makers. Their theoretical job is to provide liquidity. They are required to always give a price. So if the theoretical cereal maker wanted to buy a wheat future to reduce risk, the market maker has to offer to sell them one. Then the theoretical farmer comes along later and the market maker buys a matching future and they're back to even.

That by your definition is not gambling. But the fraction of trades that can be justified as actually helping hedge a real risk is very small. Some people trading are pure speculators, pure gamblers. But some of the non-gambler participants will trade in ways that are effectively gambling as well.

I think it's effectively impossible to always tell on a trade by trade basis which ones are gambling. We could say it's all related to hedging, as the law does, but I think that's in practice ridiculous. It's a business filled with degenerate gamblers.

So I return to my point that even though there's no bright line, it's still worth muddling though and finding some practical guidelines.

I think a more effective definition involves socially productive activity. If support the creation of value to others in hopes of getting paid back over time through getting a fraction of the value created, that's investing. If I put money into something volatile in hope that I get more money out, that's gambling.

Alternately, you could frame it in terms of positive sum vs zero/negative sum systems. The former is investing, the latter gambling.

Those are all questions with a variety of answers historical and current. You could have looked them up. But I take it that you mean them rhetorically, with a point something like, "since I, a smart guy on the Internet can't think of a clear answer in two minutes, there's no point in anybody looking at anything that harms people I don't care about."

But again, I say that shouldn't stop us from grappling with harms. A good example is food safety regulation. Are there clear, perfect answers? No. But we muddle through anyhow, doing our best to balance many factors. And we should.