University of Minnesota Nursing School has begun a scholarship to honor Alex Pretti, read and/or donate here:

https://crowdfund.umn.edu/campaigns/AlexPretti

If you don’t have the resources to write and understand the code yourself, you don’t have the resources to maintain it either.

Any monkey with a keyboard can write code. Writing code has never been hard. People were churning out crappy code en masse way before generative AI and LLMs. I know because I’ve seen it, I’ve had to work with it, and I no doubt wrote (and continue to write) my share of it.

What’s never been easy, and what remains difficult, is figuring out the right problem to solve, solving it elegantly, and doing so in a way that’s maintainable and sustainable given your means.

Code is not an artefact, code is a machine. Code is either a living thing or it is dead and decaying. You don’t just write code and you’re done. It’s a perpetual first draft that you constantly iterate on, and, depending on what it does and how much of that has to do with meeting the evolving needs of the people it serves, it may never be done. With occasional exceptions (perhaps? maybe?) for well-defined and narrowly-scoped tools, done code is dead code.

So much of what we call “writing” code is actually changing, iterating on, investigating issues with, fixing, and improving code. And to do that you must not only understand the problem you’re solving but also how you’re solving it (or how you thought you were solving it) through the code you’ve already written and the code you still have to write.

So it should come as no surprise that one of the hardest things in development is understanding someone else’s code, let alone fixing it when something doesn’t work as it should. Because it’s not about knowing this programming language or that (learning a programming language is the easiest part of coding), or this framework or that, or even knowing this design pattern or that (although all of these are important prerequisites for comprehension) but understanding what was going on in someone else’s head when they wrote the code the way they wrote it to solve a particular problem.

It frankly boggles my mind that some people are advocating for automating the easy part (writing code) by exponentially scaling the difficult part (understanding how exactly someone else – in this case, a junior dev who knows all the hows of things but none of the whys – decided to solve the problem). It is, to borrow a technical term, ass-backwards.

They might as well call vibe coding duct-tape-driven development or technical debt as a service.

🤷‍♂️

#AI #LLMs #vibeCoding #softwareDevelopment #design #craft

RE: https://mastodon.thenewoil.org/@thenewoil/116340778960304908

Turns out the loudest voices demanding you scan your ID to use AI are funded by… OpenAI. And Sam Altman just happens to own an age-verification company. Funny how that works. Reject state-mandated digital papers. #NoAgeVerification #PrivacyOverControl #NoKosa

Trump administration no longer has enough lawyers left to do its dirty work.

Whoever hasn’t been purged for not being loyal enough or exited ahead of the purges has been asked to clean up a mess with extremely limited amounts of resources and manpower.

To make things worse, Trump’s handpicked prosecutors keep being kicked out of court because Trump bypassed the appointment process essential to them remaining employed.

Then there’s the self-inflicted reputational damage Trump’s DOJ has done.
The government, for the most part, is no longer granted the presumption of good faith.

Courts across the land are not only aware this government isn’t acting in good faith, but they’rerefusing to pretend it is,
no matter how much copy-pasted boilerplate appears in DOJ filings.

Hundreds of adverse rulings have already been handed down.
Hundreds more are on the horizon,
especially now that the DOJ has admitted pretty much every arrest that took place in an immigration court was illegal.

It all adds up to the long tail of “flooding the zone.”
If you can’t bail water fast enough, you’re going to drown.
Here’s how this is working out for the DOJ now
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/20/ice-detention-cases-doj-judges-00837850

Sen. Susan Collins became the 50th senator to support the voter suppressive SAVE America Act.

Always "concerned," but almost ALWAYS VOTES WITH TRUMP.

Come on, Maine?!? Vote this corrupt, lying piece of shit out of office!

#SusanCollins #Maine #ChooseSomeoneElse #GOPTraitor #USPol