Weeknote #85 (20260510-20260516)

meta

I sat down and counted, towards the end of Thursday — I had 29 meetings this week. Given that I took a sickie for most of Monday and managed to hold the line on “no meeting Friday”, that’s about 9 meetings a day on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Y’all, that’s a lot, so it’s not too surprising I’m a little brain-fried, I guess.

did

  • Sat down Sunday afternoon and filled out my ballot for the May 19th election here — probably none of my votes would be at all surprising if you know me; my standard “don’t vote for people running unopposed if you’d have to research their positions” rule got a pretty heavy workout this time around. Also, what the hell is up with the dozen people running for the Democratic primary for governor who couldn’t be bothered to supply a candidate statement? Like, I’m not super thrilled with Kotek but at least I know where she stands on things, because she put a candidate statement into the info book, geez
  • Ended up taking a sickie on Monday — at least 50% mental health day, but I had slept poorly, felt a little off, and a couple other folks on the team were also out. I still did some time-critical work and attended a couple meetings that would have been painful to reschedule, but mostly took a break
  • Bit more garden work Monday evening, putting in a half-dozen additional pepper plants, and trying to start some tomatillo from seed — it’s probably still a bit too cool for that, but we’ll see if anything sprouts; if not, I’ll try again around the beginning of June
  • Rest of the week was kind of a blur, for reasons that are probably clear if you read the intro bit
  • Saturday morning, we got up and TheWife drove me up to PDX for a flight to JFK; I headed out both to see Mx19 and to help them move into their summer dorm next week. Completely uneventful flight (despite the excecptional (derogatory) lounge experience that preceeded it) with some awesome tailwinds that would have gotten us into JFK almost a full hour early — except we got kinda screwed by ATC, first having to circle almost the entire airport before landing, and then having the longest taxi I’ve ever experienced at JFK. Met up with Mx19, got to the hotel, bounced back out for some dinner, and then had a hard time falling asleep

read

  • current bookmark count: 195 (yay!)

  • “Fuck Vibe Coding” – via @xan

    This damn field used to have a bare-minimum common sense requirement called “learning to code”. It self-selected grifters out because you had to use your brain to think, have fundamental understanding and dedicate time to get started.

  • “A website to destroy all websites.”

    How to win the war for the soul of the internet and build the Web We Want

    Just read it, eh

  • “An AI Haters Guide to Code with LLMs (Philosophy & Personal Politics)”

    I believe that purist approaches to mitigating things are rarely useful. They are purely trying to return to a past that has already gone, or never existed in the first place. Our world is an ecology of ideas and actions and interconnected systems, and they can’t be spun backward to get to some more pure, earlier state. The real world is non-linear, full of feedback loops and pitfalls. Applying the brake as hard as you can won’t stop you when there’s a heavy engine and a million hands pushing you toward a cliff. You have to steer. And if things are really bad, you have to choose where to crash, because going off the cliff is the worst option.

  • “AI as a Fascist Artifact”

    “AI” is a political project – I have also sometimes called it a narrative – whose purpose is the shifting of power and agency away from people and organizations towards centralized power structures. These centralized power structures are currently mostly a handful of big tech corporations and the “AI Labs” they keep shoveling money into.

  • “The operational debt your expertise is hiding”

    When the same person is handling production alerts and support requests, everything starts to blur. It all comes through the same channels, to the same people, at the same priority.

    It becomes very hard to distinguish what truly cannot wait from what would be fine as a ticket to handle within 24 to 48 hours. As we are wired to empathize with whoever is in front of us, we end up reacting to whoever shouts the loudest.

    You fix their problem in the moment, but usually nothing changes to prevent it from happening again.

  • “The high cost of fake urgency in the workplace”

    Urgency can be a potent leadership lever to pull. Urgency creates activity and can bring people and teams together. The problem, per usual, is nuance and context. When everything starts to feel urgent, the insidious effects of hurrying sprout up: teams stop thinking, stop prioritizing effectively, and eventually will lose trust in whoever or whatever is sending out the urgency signal.

  • “Nearly a third of workers admit to sabotaging their company’s AI strategy”

    The report details many forms of resistance. In some cases, employees said they have ignored guidelines, opted out of AI training, or flat-out refused to use AI tools. In more extreme situations, some admit to having fed sensitive company information to public, unapproved AI tools and even to tampering with performance metrics to make the tech seem less effective.

  • “Programming Still Sucks.”

    They have a nephew who builds Shopify stores, they don’t understand half the words he uses but he’s in real trouble and says everybody in tech is. Is his nephew gonna have to learn a “trade”? Are we all?

    Enough drinks in and I’ll answer proper, because I don’t care anymore whether others think what I’m saying is interesting or true. But usually I’ll sigh and say “Sure, yeah a little. Most of us are. Would be stupid not to be, right?” to which they nod before moving on to a lighter topic, like whether we’re going to nuke Iran or not.

    The truth is, working in tech always sucked, and never really was what they thought it was.

watched

  • The first half of the Timbers/Montreal match — Timbers had a solid opening 20 minutes but then started playing more like themselves (derogatory)