Mastodawn

One of my clients has someone in charge of AI initiatives, and they've developed a framework that works very hard to distinguish between what makes humans special and what machines do well. Also,

* They are being very conscious about not cutting people, rather, letting humans focus more on the things that they do well. (it's helpful that they come from a strong Continuous Improvement culture that already had to bake in this approach.)

* They are very conscious of avoiding accountability sinks and reverse centaurs (machines are there for when the human wants help, not when the human serves or is accountable for/to the machine)

I wish every corp that had one these initiatives would at least take this attitude.

Jon Mar 10

Use ai tools! Generate thousands of lines of code! You have to now review and sign off on those lines of code and if you fuck up it’s your ass! The ai is blameless. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/03/after-outages-amazon-to-make-senior-engineers-sign-off-on-ai-assisted-changes/

Tech workers need unions now more than ever. Don’t be a human crumple zone.

After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

AWS has suffered at least two incidents linked to the use of AI coding assistants.

Ars Technica

Jon Mar 4

I'm not 100% current with what's been happening in "Kurdistan" but I can't imagine this ending well if the Kurds participate in an Iranian civil war at the behest of the CIA.

Jon Mar 3

Threw some data at an LLM to answer a question.

Mostly because I'm tired of being on the ideologic end of libs punching left.

Even if *EVERY* third party voter in 2024 had voted for Harris... she still would have lost the election because electoral college. She would narrowly edged out the popular vote, but on a state by state basis it only narrows her electoral college loss.

Feel free to smash this into the eyes of ye old shit libs crying about protest votes.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rpHh0VrlmtYXP2btQOYDclICZEfbjMWb6xUDZ1rR_iM/edit?usp=sharing

Election Recalculation: Harris Gains Popular Vote

Based on the data provided by the American Presidency Project for the 2024 election, here is the recalculation of the results if 100% of the "OTHERS" votes were allocated to Kamala Harris. Summary of the Recalculated Results Even if Kamala Harris had received every single third-party and write-in...

Google Docs

Jon Feb 23

Write and then delete a post today. (I did it three times before this one)

Jon Feb 23

Steve DeGroof 📚🛸Feb 23

BREAKING: Sam Altman points out that putting out fires in orphanages also uses a lot of water.

Jon Feb 20

David Gerard Feb 20

lol, AWS vibe coded itself an outage

https://www.ft.com/content/00c282de-ed14-4acd-a948-bc8d6bdb339d

Jon Feb 20

Just finished the book Murderlands after hearing an interview with the author on 99% Invisible. It's a memoir that overlays a period of horrible environmental destruction and devastation with the serial killer epidemic from the 1960s through the 1980s.

The amount of toxic waste that was pumped into the air (lead, arsenic, etc etc) around these smelter compounds is mind blowing. Measured in tons per day. A lot of the North American smelters have been shut down. Where have we moved these negative externalities?

P.S. I'd skip the book because the author chose to spend a good deal of time graphically describing the crimes of Bundy, Rader, Ridgeway, Ramirez, et al and I really didn't need that in my brain.

Jon Feb 19

Tech folks - this is an interesting bit of broad organizing around the recent layoffs - https://wwwrise.org/ (h/t @pluralistic )

Mass Call: Laid-Off Tech Workers & Allies

Jon Feb 18

having spent the past 4 hours "vibe coding" with gemini and opus 4.6 trying to install a fucking font in Debian bookworm, good luck junior devs. These things are just liars.

Location	Indianapolis, IN
Alignment	Chaotic Good
Blood Type	B-