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37 minutes agoIf you liked Brooks, you might give Gerald Weinberg a try. A bit more folksy / less corporate.
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023
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I associate Clausewitz (and especially John Boyd) references more with a Palantir / Stratfor / Booz / LE-MIC-consulting class compared to your typical bay area YC techbro in the US, and a very different crowd over in AU / NZ where grognards probably outnumber the actual military. LWers never bring up Clausewitz either but love Sun Tzu. But as far as software strategy posts go, I’d much rather read a Clausewitz tie-in than, say, Mythical Man Month or Agile anything.
Pam Samuelson (UC Berkeley) has a nice explainer on AI copyright - https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/does-using-in-copyright-works-as-training-data-infringe/
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/michigan/miedce/4:2025cv11168/384571/176/
Consistent with Magistrate Judge Patti’s warning that each AI citation might incur a cost of $200 per citation, the court adopts that amount and imposes a fine of $300 per Plaintiff (a total of $600) for three misrepresented, AI-generated citations.
lol
He came by campus last spring and did a reading, very solid and surprisingly well-attended talk.
Bubble or Nothing | Center for Public Enterprise h/t The Syllabus, dry but good.
Data centers are, first and foremost, a real estate asset
They specifically note that after the 2-5 year mini-perm the developers are planning on dumping the debt into commercial mortgage backed securities. Echoes of 2008.
However, project finance lawyers have mentioned that many data center project finance loans are backed not just by the value of the real estate but by tenants’ cash flows on “booked-but-not-billing” terms — meaning that the promised cash flow need not have materialized.
Echoes of Enron.
Best part is the footnote:
About 20 years ago, some spammers came up with a bright idea for circumventing spam filters: they took a bootleg copy of my book Cryptonomicon and chopped it up into paragraph-length fragments, then randomly appended one such fragment to the end of each spam email they sent out. As you can imagine, this was surreal and disorienting for me when pitches for herbal Viagra and the like started landing in my Inbox with chunks of my own literary output stuck onto the ends. Come to think of it, most of those fragments actually did stop in mid-sentence, so I guess if today’s LLMs trained on old email archives it would explain why they “think” I write that way.
He somehow did an ad read in the middle of a substack post. Sign of the times.
Corey Quinn wrote a spite-driven-dev cli for it - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_im-humbled-to-announce-that-after-launching-activity-7397400805458395137-73Ua
time for me to learn something else, then; what do people use these days for microservices instead of flask? fastapi?
EDIT:
oh come the fuck on google AIO
The generic abyss of artificial intelligence | John R. Gallagher
All this business talk from CEOs about AI automating work comes down to them not valuing the input of workers. You can hear the jubilant ejaculative rhetoric about robots because robots represent firing all the workers. CEOs see their workers as interchangeable laborers who fit inside of templates. They want workers who pull the levers of templates. They’ve always wanted this since the individual revolution. But now the templates are no longer physical commodities but instead our stories, our genres.
Call it template capitalism. Social media companies are already operating under this logic through the templates they force on users. As the car companies have done by forcing drivers into templates. Or shoe companies have accomplished with standard sizes. There’s nothing stopping the knowledge sectors of the economy from extending that logic to workers. Knowledge workers are being deskilled by making them obey the generic templates of LLMs.
Template capitalism hollows out the judgment of individual knowledge workers by replacing slowly accreted genre experiences with the summed average of all genres. Under this system, knowledge workers merely ensure the machines don’t make errors (or what the AI companies have just relabeled “hallucinations”). The nuance of situated knowledge evaporates, leaving behind procedural obedience. The erosion of individual judgment is the point. Workers who diverge from the ordained path of LLMs are expendable. If you challenge the templates, you get fired.
They’ve always wanted this, indeed. There’s some comfort to me in the reminder that this year’s layoffs are no different than the last cycle, except maybe the excuses are thinner.
For me, I started noticing Taulia spam via a clients SAP last Jan, and Bill.com started doing similar a few months after. I think the new part is that these are now integrated into the platforms, like how Klarna bnpl is directly integrated into the ecom storefronts.
My clients’ billing systems now send me invoice factoring spam every month, which is basically the same trade as a payday loan or bnpl. I worry how many other freelancers are clicking that button and how this has become so normalized, it’s bad enough out there already, without paying 2.5% per month.
New singularity dropped and I’d missed it: https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/economics-transformative-ai/coasean-singularity-demand-supply-and-market-design-ai-agents
I don’t really see AI getting rid of ticketmaster or other transaction costs in the real world, so this is just some econ theory crafting.
Going to see him at the Belasco on Thur.
“I think the AI slop is great. I think culturally, it’s a good thing that it happened, because one of the things that drove people to start really caring about artists again in 2024 was the AI slop. I think everything happens for a reason,” she said in a recent interview with Time. “Most of the album is sort of about me being a bit of a Diogenes about the ills of modernity while still celebrating them.”
https://www.salon.com/2025/11/07/grimes-ushers-in-a-new-era-of-internet-infestation/
JFC what world does she live in
Sounds exactly like what happened at iNaturalist.
I tried making one a few years back, maybe time to update it.
https://nfultz.github.io/murderboard/wpc-murderboard.htm
(arrow keys to scroll)
It’s the McMindfulness guy, nice to see that he is still kicking around.
lol ofc he does