Tootfinder

Day 28: Samira Ahmed
As foreshadowed, we're back to YA land, which represents a lot of what I've been enjoying from the library lately.
I've read "Hollow Fires", "This Book Won't Burn", and "Love, Hate, and other Filters" by Ahmed, along with "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know" which is quite different. All four are teen ~romances with interesting things to say about racism & growing up as a South Asian Muslim, but whereas the first three are set in small-town Indiana, the third is set in France and includes a historical fiction angle involving Dumas and a hypothetical Muslim woman who was (in this telling) the inspiration for several Lord Byron poems.
Ahmed's novels all include a strong and overt theme of social justice, and it's refreshing to see an author not try to wade around the topic or ignore it. Her romances are complex, with imperfect protagonists and endings that aren't always "happily ever after" although they're satisfying and believable.
My library has a plethora of similar authors I've been enjoying, including Adiba Jaigirdar (who appeared earlier in this list), Sabaa Tahir ("All my Rage" is fantastic but I'm less of a fan of her fantasy stuff), Sabina Khan ("The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali"), and Randa Abdel-Fattah ("Does My Head Look Big In This?"; from an earlier era). Ahmed gets the spot here because I really like her politics and the way she works them into her writing. Her characters are unapologetic advocates against things like book bans, and Ahmed doesn't second-guess them or try to make things more palatable for those who want to ban books (or whatever). Her historical fiction in "Mad..." is also really cool in terms of "huh that could actually totally be true" and grappling with literary sexism from ages past.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Day 26: Emily Short
If you know who Short is, you know exactly why she's on this list. If you don't, you're probably in the majority. She's an absolutely legendary author within the interactive fiction (IF) community, which gets somewhat pigeonholed by stuff like Zork when there's actually a huge range of stuff in the medium some of which isn't even puzzle-focused, and Short has been writing & coding on the bleeding edge of things for decades.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Short's work in graduate school, where we played "Galatea" as part of an interactive fiction class. Short uses a lot of clever parser tricks to make your conversation with a statue feel very fluid and conversational, giving to contemporary audiences a great example of how vibrant interaction with a well-designed agent can be in contrast to an LLM, if you're willing to put in some work on bespoke parsing & responses (although the user does need to know basic IF conventions). While I didn't explore the full range of Galatea's many possible outcomes, it left a strong impression on me as a vision for what IF could be besides dorky puzzles, and I think that "visionary" is a great term to describe Short.
If you'd like you get a feel for her (very early) work, you can play Galatea here: #30AuthorsNoMen

"Technical communities provide software businesses with an audience, a test bed, and eventually, a customer pool for their products and services, but this only works if the products are good enough to begin with. This insight was clearly defined by Guy Kawasaki, arguably the person who invented the field of Developer Relations, during his tenure as Chief Evangelist at Apple from 1983 to 1987."

Guy Kawasaki
There is a website out there providing an answer to the question "What is Developer Relations?," a question that this author, whose job title is precisely that one, gets a lot. According to this resource, Developer Relations is an umbrella term encompassing three major areas of activity: "Community," "Content," and "Product;" a perfect description of a job role, at least as far as this author is concerned.

Day 18: Mark Oshiro
Having just learned that Oshiro is nonbinary, they're an instant include on this list. In veering extremely heavily towards YA, and losing a spot that would have gone to an absolutely legendary mangaka, anime writer, or feminist philosopher, but "Anger is A Gift" and "Each of us a Desert" are just that good, and I'm trying to steer a bit towards towards lesser-known authors I respect.
I already mentioned "Anger is a Gift" above, but to recap, it's a painful, vivid, and beautifully honest story of queer love, loss, and protest against an oppressive system. CW for racist police murder, intergenerational trauma, and police brutality against highschool students. It's a book a lot of Americans could benefit from reading right now, and while it's fiction, it's not fantasy or sci-fi. Besides the themes and politics, the writing is just really solid, with delicate characterization and tight-plotted developments that are beautifully paced.
To me "Each of us a Desert" is maybe even more beautiful, and Oshiro leaps into a magnificent fantasy world that's richly original in its desolation, dark history, lonely characters, and mythical magic. Particularly the clearly-not-just-superscription but ambiguously-important/powerful magical elements of Oshiro's worldbuilding are a rare contrast to the usual magic-is-real-here's-how-it-works fare, and pulling that off a all as they do is a testament to their craft. The prose is wonderful, probably especially so if you speak Spanish, but I enjoyed it immensely despite only knowing a few words here and there. The rich interiority of the characters, their conflicts both with each other and within themselves, and the juxtaposition of all that against origins in cult-like ignorance allows for the delivery of a lot of wisdom and complex truths.
Between these two books, so different and yet each so powerful, Oshiro has demonstrated incredible craft and also a wide range of styles, so I'm definitely excited to read more of their work and to recommend them to others.
I'm also glad to have finally put a nonbinary author on this list; the others I had in mind won't make it at this point because there's too much genre overlap, although I'll include them in my didn't-make-it list at the end. I've now got just 2 slots left and have counted up 14 more authors that absolutely need to be mentioned, so we'll see what happens.
#20AuthorsNoMen

Avalanche Studios NYC Retrospective – An Ambitious Company Ruined by Bad Development Practices
Enjoyable read that dives deep in 7 years of successes, trials, and tribulations at a game studio. Have me lots to think about how my studio is run and what similar pitfalls we may have.

#WritersCoffeeClub
4. What's a sure sign an author is a master of their craft?
5. Have you ever included real-world disproven science in a work?
6. What size casts do you tend towards? Why?
---
4. When the author's work looks and works exactly as intended.
5. I don't think so, no. Some of my characters used magic but this flavour has never been IRL s…

"If George Boole is the 19th century’s AI scientist, then his contemporary machine learning engineers were Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. The Difference Engine, which would be frequently cited as the first example of a (mechanical) programmable digital computer if it had been built at the time, was explicitly designed to _replace_ rather than _augment_ human thought. Just as modern software engineering managers use Jira to avoid thinking about process engineering."

Douglas Hofstadter
You may be worried that I am going to talk about an author of books that are not about programming, and you are correct and incorrect. Correct, in that Hofstadter's books are not about programming (the intellectually hollow like to claim that they are not about anything at all, or that if you think you know what they are about then you did not understand them; this is untrue). Incorrect, in that Hofstadter's books and computer programs themselves are about the same thing.

What academics say and what they mean
Various sources - I forgot the name and author of that one paper
A promising area for an initial study - I have to do this to get funding
An extensive literature review - A quick Google search
Is impossible to summarise simply - I still don’t understand
Approaching the traditional threshold for statistical significance - Not significant
More research is required - I need funding
Academia Obscura

I've filed a report about a minor problem with a #Python package, namely that the source distribution contained some trailing junk that breaks GNU #tar. On one hand, I'm happy that upstream took the issue seriously. On the other hand, I'm terrified of how much #AI slop was involved in the response.
I mean, my short bug report yielded a few walls of text of #LLM analysis of what the cause of the problem might be, of suggested solutions… and praise of the author's fix. These are interspersed with short comments from the author, all pasted under their own personal account. And the linked pull request is also huge, with "verification code" that's quite sloppy (bits that don't do anything, conditions that will never be true… but at least it seems to do what it was supposed to do).
Honestly, I don't know what to do. Not that I ever planned using this package, but at this point I will definitely stay away from it. It's in #Gentoo, and I'll have to continue maintaining it for the sake of reverse dependencies, but I feel like it's unfair to expose our users to packages that have clearly proven to accept AI slop without reviewing it properly. Or rather, AI slop that's being reviewed… by AI. How can anyone think this a good idea?!
There were multiple times in my life when I've considered retiring from Gentoo, for variety of reasons. There were also multiple times when I wanted to get away from computers altogether. Unfortunately, we're living in a truly fucked up world, and there is no escape. The best you can do is put an ever increasing effort to keep fixing all that crap that will just keep piling on faster and faster.
#FreeSoftware #OpenSource

Day 11: Bee Johnson
As promised, back to printed books, and since I hadn't yet done any authors of picture or board books, here's one. It looks like Johnson is primarily an illustrator and has only written a single kids' book, but it's a magnificent one: "What Can A Mess Make?"
Naturally, the illustrations are rich and evocative, but it's also got one of my favorite formats (just a few lines per page, with consistent meter and rhymes throughout) and has the incredibly charming theme of two sisters who are constantly making messes, except it highlights the fun (and other emotions) they get out of their messy play, reminding parents cleaning up messes that there's a benefit to letting your kids make the mess in the first place, which is an idea that's stuck with me as I clean up my own kids' messes. This book checks *all* of my boxes for a good picture book (which is kinda hard).
#20AuthorsNoMen
P.S. at this point, I think I've exhausted the range of "author" definitions I wanted to include in my list, and I've now got the unenviable task of balancing between genres and trying to hit some of my favorite authors before we get to 20. We'll see how that goes...

"Did Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (1915-1990) read “An Experiment in Time”? Could it be that he had a series of dreams between 1960 and 1968, and that he quickly wrote them down in his diary before breakfast? We can only speculate. But we do know for a fact that those dreams begat a nothing short of extraordinary sequence of writings."

J. C. R. Licklider & M. Mitchell Waldrop
The writings of Jorge Luis Borges twist our perception of time and space. In between articles about Shaw, Chesterton, Wilde, and Coleridge, his 1952 book "Otras Inquisiciones" included an unexpected gem: a short story called "El Tiempo y J. W. Dunne". The question is, who was this John William Dunne and what does he have to do with time? Well, his name might be forgotten by contemporary audiences, but Dunne was the author of one of the biggest bestsellers of the first half of the twentieth cent…