As we wrap up Biden’s tenure, I can’t help but be utterly disappointed that he had powerful tools at his disposal, and used almost none of it to prevent the ascent of Fascism.

He allowed the Supreme Court to remain full of Fascist agents, even after they decided that a president was immune from prosecution, a patently absurd idea.

He did effectively nothing as Netanyahu destroyed Gaza and its residents.

He did not put pressure on Jack Smith to quickly bring charges against Trump despite a four year window, essentially running out the clock and allowing an insurrectionist to get on the ballot.

He did absolutely nothing that matters to help Harris win the election.

Could Biden have pulled any of this off given the divided Congress? Maybe not, but he could have tried. And he certainly could have used his bully pulpit to drive national conversation and build grassroot support.

Instead, we got an Absent President, who silently made life great for shareholders.

Was Biden a bad president? In any other era, no. He was an exemplary administrator. He got the economy restarted after Trump Episode One put it in the shitter. He appointed Lina Khan to the FTC, a great fighter for the interests of the people against corporate hegemony. He likely did a thousand good works we didn’t even hear about, keeping this nation rolling, and mostly doing right by us. And of course, compared to his predecessor, he’s an absolute saint and superstar.

But as a president installed in the aftermath of a failed insurrection, during a global resurgence of Fascism, overseeing a nation awash in a storm of disinformation financed by our enemies, with the people crying out for justice and accountability, he was an abject failure. Fascist agents made steady progress while he worked his desk job. He did the opposite of rising to the occasion: he pretended it didn’t happen.

• #opinion
• #politics

Ed Zitron’s piece The Rot Economy should be mandatory reading for anyone curious about the environment in which tech companies exist today.

Venture pumps millions or billions of dollars into ideas that might sell a product or a service, but ultimately resemble things that can be sold to other companies or put on the public market for a profit higher than what was paid on a per-share basis. I once suggested that Silicon Valley conflated “making great ideas work” with “making ideas I like work,” but on consideration, many of these companies aren’t even things venture capitalists like - they are things that resemble things that they can sell. Do I genuinely believe that everyone who invested into the Web3 grift was a strident believer in the brave new decentralized economy? Hell no. They just went where the winds blew — or where they seemed to be blowing.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/

The Rot Economy

At the center of everything I’ve written for the last few months (if not the last few years), sits a cancerous problem with the fabric of how capital is deployed in modern business. Public and private investors, along with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the concept of what “good” business truly is, focusing on one metric — one

www.wheresyoured.at

This opinion piece rings true to me. I have acquaintances who are “pure investors”—they will buy anything from crypto to Gamestop to copper billets as long as they think they can double their money in short order, and they are eternally searching for the next tech IPO to buy into. They do not care what these companies even do, nor whether they are sustainable, nor their net effect on employees, society, or the environment. There is a single axis on which they place all possible investments: money go up—yes/no.

Read more…

• #technology
• #opinion

As a software engineer, it’s basically impossible to survive poor work-volume management. You can try cutting corners, making extreme tactical decisions, triaging your issues, whatever…but the burn-down chart does not lie. A strategic decision by management (or worse, executives) to ignore burn-down rates is basically irrecoverable.

As a manager, be honest to your executives and your reports. Given enough people in your team, there is no tactical decision that will make your engineers work faster. Your only real option is to admit early that your deadline is untenable, and replan by reducing features, or extending deadlines. Whipping your engineers to work harder has never worked, and will ruin their trust in you forever.

As an executive, allow your teams to honestly report their estimates, and respect their pace of work. Pressuring your managers to give you better numbers is lying to yourself, unless you’re willing to talk about what features you’re willing to cut.

• #FridayDevAdvice

One phrase that has been coming to my mind lately is or else what. We need to think hard about which institutions and characters we count on to enforce the laws, rules, and norms that we have agreed to as a society when someone breaks them, because in the past decade it’s evident that in many, many cases involving some particular classes of people, there isn’t anyone there.

Laws, rules, and norms only mean something when there are people who enforce consequences for breaking them. If you can be an insurrectionist, convicted felon yet to serve time, an “adjudicated rapist”, a habitual liar, and still get to be president, do laws really exist at all?

Any time someone intends to knowingly break a law, rule, or norm, the inevitable question of or else what runs through their mind. When the evidence of their observation leads them to believe the answer is “nothing”, then there’s every reason for them to proceed.

Honestly, the answer to or else what has always depended on one’s wealth, class, family tree, or other privileged attribute. But the grand progress of civil rights and human enlightenment has been in the struggle to continually narrow that gap, to levy the same just and equitable consequence on anyone who broke the law. Within this process, it’s inevitable that people in privilege be made to surrender their special status under force (sometimes a great deal of force—ask Louis XVI). People look for such events to know that the system is working well.

In order for a society to have trust in their government, they must see this grand struggle play out within the institutions: they must see concrete examples of how today has brought forth more justice than yesterday. When there is a lack of evidence of progress, people will eventually give up on their institutions and begin to look for justice elsewhere—or begin hatching schemes to exploit the flaw in the system for their own gain at the expense of others.

• #opinion
• #politics

For artists, authors, and students, I think it’s only a matter of time until someone accuses you of using AI in your art or essay, and you’d have to prove original authorship or else get disqualified or penalized. I think the best current defense against this sort of accusation is building evidence of the process of your work.

If you write, enable version history in your word processor, and remember to save periodically. If you draw or paint digitally, make sure history is saved (some programs do this by default). If you code, ensure you have version control enabled, with meaningful comments about each commit.

When an accusation comes because someone uses some overeager “AI detector” program, show them a playback of your process. AI is (at least for now) unable to recreate the creative journey that gets to the end result, and probably never will, because there’s no money to be made doing that.

Version history is your best defense today. Consider enabling it, especially when your grade or income depends on it.

• #opinion
• #AI