Weeknote #55 (20251005-20251011)

meta

Sometimes, when you leave a gig, your last week is a hectic mess of trying to hand things off, convey important information, and make sure your transition goes as smoothly as you can arrange. And then there’s times when you realize the two weeks notice you gave was maybe 6 or 7 days too many…

did

read

  • The always excellent Dan Sinker writes about the Federal invasion of Chicago, in “The Fog of War”:

    This is how we live now: our ordinary places become something else, in an instant, subject to the whims of some bastard out to inflict cruelty or having a bad day or just following orders or a combination of it all.

  • You may have heard about this bullshit with RubyCentral over the last week or two; this is a good summary: “The RubyGems takeover from the perspective of an open source developer”:

    If you don’t agree with the direction of an open source project, you essentially have two options:

    You can negotiate with the maintainers and try to convince them to change course. You can give examples and use-cases, present prototypes, use reasoning and persuasion.

    Alternatively, you can fork the project and take the source-code in a new direction with your own modifications. And you can decide whether to keep this fork private for your own use or publish it and try to attract wider community support.

    What you can’t do is find your way onto the maintainers team on the original project and then unilaterally kick all the other maintainers out.

    It doesn’t matter how bad the other maintainers ideas were, or how “mean” or “lazy” you think they are. This is just not something you can do.

  • “Half Right”

    What did GenAI prove about the software development world as it sits right now? That it’s an enormous mess and that a large percentage of the population would rather sweep that under the rug rather than fix the issues at the roots.

    That’s the danger of being half right.

  • “Trump Labor Department Says His Immigration Raids Are Causing a Food Crisis”

    Department of Labor announces flock of chickens inbound to roosting area…

    The Department of Labor’s new rule cutting farmworker wages bluntly states that souped-up immigration enforcement has devastated the agricultural workforce and created a significant “risk of supply shock-induced food shortages,” according to a document filed in the Federal Register last week. The document also indicates that American workers are simply not interested in and do not have the skills to perform agricultural jobs, at odds with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’s claim that the farm workforce will soon be 100 percent American.

  • I’m going to just quote Matthew Lyon’s toot in full, because this hit:

    As my burnout sabbatical from tech work goes on, I’ve been reaching out to more and more people I’ve thought of as friendly colleagues, and the conversations invariably, by the other party, turn to LLM coding agents, and I’m hearing a constant refrain

    their belief comes down to: If you value ethics more than productivity, you do not belong in tech

    we’re halfway through the decade of “hold my beer” and the past year has been particularly disillusioning, but this in particular, especially coming from people who’ve mentored me or whom I’ve particularly gelled with, has felt like an ongoing gut-punch

watched

  • We finished S5 of Criminal Minds and moved into S6
  • This incredible live video of Fishbone performing “Racist Piece of Shit” on KEXP

cooked

  • Sunday: steaks and taters, both done on the grill
  • Monday: crunchy tacos
  • Thursday: mozzarella chicken
  • Saturday: chili

photo

Mozzarella chicken

This is one of the first dishes I got good at when I first started cooking. I tooted a story about the recipe coming down from my MIL, but I found from talking to my wife that isn’t correct — it was originally from a benefit cookbook for an Iowa City charity that she’d volunteered with, back when we were in college.

looking forward to

FUNEMPLOYMENT!