techno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.
Nationwide "Hands Off!" 50501 protests against Trump continues for second weekend
https://eu.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/nation/2025/04/19/protest-resist-trump-rally-photos/83173515007/
…
"On Sunday, July 20th, 1969, at precisely 20:14:19 UTC, just a mere three minutes before touchdown, the voice of Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. confirmed the “Go for landing” order received from Mission Control together with a phrase nobody wanted to hear at that moment: “Program alarm – 1201.”"
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/margaret-hamilton/
Absolut geniale Grafik! Artikel- Illustration von #theatlantic
#trump :
"Americas Mad King"
David Brooks: "What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal"
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It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power."
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"It is fair to say that Microsoft spent at least the first five years of its history in relative obscurity. The first appearance of the name “Microsoft” on the pages of Byte was a short mention of their BASIC interpreter in an advertising on page 47 of the May 1977 issue. In contrast, page 34 of the same issue included an article about the Apple II by Steve Wozniak. The Woz and Gary Kildall were the biggest stars of the microcomputer industry at the end of the 1970s."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/where-does-microsoft-want-to-go-today/
YEZZ! Lead by the #IndianaUniversity in the #usa #universities bond together to fight the #trumpcoup
"Where will the von Neumanns, the Einsteins, and the Gödels of our age migrate after the SCOTUS overrules democracy in 2024 and Gödel’s Loophole is proven to exist? (…) Maybe this is the chance of a lifetime for the European continent; if not for all, at least for some countries therein: Portugal, Scandinavia, The Netherlands, and Switzerland, for example."
https://www.404media.co/nasa-yale-and-stanford-scientists-consider-scientific-exile-french-university-says/
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/william-aspray/