Is it time to start burning down datacenters?
Some people think so. An Indianapolis city council member had his house recently shot up for supporting datacenters, and Sam Altman’s home was firebombed (and then shot) shortly afterwards. People from all sides of the argument a...
Most anti-AI rhetoric is left-wing coded. Popular criticisms of AI describe it as a tool of techno-fascism, or appeal to predominantly left-wing concerns like carbon emissions, democracy, or police brutality. Anti-AI sentiment is surprisingly bipartisan, but the big anti-AI ...
Back in 1985, computer scientist Peter Naur wrote “Programming as Theory Building”. According to Naur — and I agree with him — the core output of software engineers is not the program itself, but the theory of how the program works. In other words, the knowledge inside the e...
I’ve worked on a lot of unpopular products.
At Zendesk I built large parts of an app marketplace that was too useful to get rid of but never polished enough to be loved. Now I work on GitHub Copilot, which many people think is crap1. In between, I had some brief periods wher...
It’s a popular joke among software engineers that writing overcomplicated, unmaintainable code is a pathway to job security. After all, if you’re the only person who can work on a system, they can’t fire you. There’s a related take that “nobody gets promoted for simplicity”:...
It’s a common position among software engineers that big egos have no place in tech1. This is understandable — we’ve all worked with some insufferably overconfident engineers who needed their egos checked — but I don’t think it’s correct. In fact, I don’t know if it’s possib...
