David Thompson

@dhwthompson
226 Followers
89 Following
521 Posts
Great big nerd. Originally 🇬🇧, now also 🇺🇸, living out west in Washington.
LocationRedmond, WA, USA
Websitehttps://dhwthompson.com
Twitterhttps://twitter.com/dhwthompson
Pronounshe/they
David ThompsonMar 10
Show threadEugen RochkoMar 10
From what I've observed, people who claim that LLMs can replace artists don't understand art, people who claim that they can replace musicians don't understand music, people who claim that they can replace writers don't understand literature, and people who claim they can replace translators don't rely on translations. If I had a button that would erase LLMs from the world but it would take machine translations away (which is a false dichotomy anyway), I would absolutely still press it.
David ThompsonMar 10
Show threadMike Prior-JonesMar 7
@robpumphrey it should be A series paper. A4 is a family lasagne. A6 is a one person ready meal.
David ThompsonFeb 4
richardjpopeFeb 4
So much work is doomed from the start because of the assumption you can successfully chop up it up into discrete parts in advance, then try and create coherence through governance retrospectively. ‘Workstreams’. ‘Pillars’, all that nonsense, is, more often than not, based on a flawed assumption.
David ThompsonJan 14
Adrianna TanJan 14

Yarnspinner has a pretty good take

https://yarnspinner.dev/blog/why-we-dont-use-ai/

Why We Don't Use AI | Yarn Spinner

We get asked about AI a lot. Whether we’re going to add it to Yarn Spinner, whether we use it ourselves, what we think about it. Fair questions. Time to write it all down. Yarn Spinner doesn’t use the technology that’s currently being called AI. We don’t have generative AI features in the product, and we don’t use code generation tools to build it, and we don’t accept contributions we know contain generated material. Let’s talk about why.

David ThompsonJan 6
Anil DashJan 5
The number one thing I've been hearing from people in tech lately is, basically, "How the hell am I supposed to work in this industry anymore?" Though most folks are kind of afraid to say it out loud. So I wrote about how to think about it: https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/05/a-tech-career-in-2026/
How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Anil Dash
David ThompsonJan 1
sjvnDec 31
Happy New Year!
David ThompsonNov 10
ScarletNov 10
I've probably said this before but it remains so magical that I can type a bunch of numbers into a computer, click print, and a couple of hours later open a door to a physical plastic object I can take out and use.
David ThompsonAug 8, 2025
SophieAug 8, 2025

My website is for humans, and I don't want Google's AI ramen

https://localghost.dev/blog/this-website-is-for-humans/

This website is for humans - localghost

I don't want Google's shitty AI-generated ramen

localghost
David ThompsonJun 17, 2025
GlyphJun 17, 2025
after 25 years of a career of trying and mostly failing to make the world a better place with software it is truly soul-wrenchingly exhausting to watch a substantial plurality of the entire software industry decide that actually, it is more lucrative and easier to make the world worse instead
David ThompsonApr 19, 2025
Adrian HowardApr 19, 2025
I swear there used to be a time when my reaction to new software features wasn't a resigned sigh followed by figuring out how to switch it off.