Mindblown: culture, urbanism, leadership, technology.
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The problem with APIs
The problem with APIs is that they are dead — they just sit there like an Easter egg waiting to be discovered, and once found, waiting to be asked a question, and then (maybe) they respond with an answer. This dead-ness then permeates all the things we try to do with APIs, from building applications…
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Taylorism and Software Manufacturing
When we make software like it is a commodity that is manufactured, and that can be managed like a manufactured product, we are bringing in all the baggage of Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s ideas that dehumanize the labor force in service of an efficiency-centric view of labor productivity. The first problem with that is that creative…
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Thoughts on the inevitable attempts by organizations to control the use of LLMs by their members
This is a quick run-down of the major concerns I’ve heard voiced by organizations — mostly corporations and schools — about Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, and to a lessor extent about generative neural networks (gNNs) like Midjourney. It is admittedly cynical in the sense that taken together it sounds somewhat defeatist, but also…
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Organic systems have three states
Systems exist in one of three conditions, they are healthy, they are unhealthy because they are growing out of control, or they are unhealthy because they are self-destructive. Unbounded growth. Autonomous actors grow unbounded and overwhelm the system (a.k.a., cancer). Stable. Autonomous actors go about their business, generally getting along, generally preserving or advancing the…
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An Internet that fits my notion of what the Internet is
We are all reflections of the world that raised us, shimmering and twisting and deforming as ripples distort our surface, and so it is that our notions of what should be and of what ought be and of what could be are each derivative of this reflection. The Internet is a technology, and like any…
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1600 hours
It might be the case that the greatest change in American society we could make is to fix Federal Officer pay schedule as a multiple of 1600 hours of the Federal Minimum wage and to tax corporations based on how much greater that multiple is between their lowest paid worker and their highest. Currently the…
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Against the tide
Why is it that in a world where things are getting smaller, faster, lighter. denser, and cheaper we have political, economic, and cultural systems _designed_ to favor bigger as the dominant form of their class? Why is “hyperscale” glorified at the expense of “humanscale”? In the immediate sense — i.e., tech products & pickup trucks…
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Re-thinking Genre
Thinking that we’re at that place where franchises are each their own genre – MCU, Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. are well-built worlds in which you can tell any story. And that’s what I want, stories that aren’t MCU stories but just regular stories told in-universe. Imagining stories and characters like Fargo, The Devil Wears…
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big+fast reduces to anti-human
Choosing between big+fast and small+slow is just a facade on choosing between the few and the many; everything that is human scale is small+slow.
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Feckless Engineering
Chaos engineering is when you intentionally introduce random failures to build the resilience of a large system. Feckless engineering is when you intentionally introduce random failures because you don’t care about the stability of a large system.