On the Death of Amazon’s Writing Culture - by Steve Huynh
https://alifeengineered.substack.com/p/on-the-death-of-amazons-writing-culture
AI should definitely be used for brainstorming, organizing your thoughts, research, making sure your documents are consistent, and grammar. But, as we would say at Amazon, the human should always take the pen.
Shanzhai - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai
Shanzhai (Chinese: 山寨; pinyin: shānzhài; Cantonese Jyutping: saan1 zaai6; Vietnamese: sơn trại) is a Chinese term literally meaning "mountain fortress" or "mountain camp", whose contemporary use usually encompasses counterfeit, imitation, or parody products and events and the subculture surrounding them.[1] Shanzhai products can include counterfeit consumer and electronic goods, which can involve the imitation and trademark infringement of brands and companies.[2] The term's modern usage grew around 2008 when shanzhai smartphones reached their greatest domestic use.[3][4][5] Today, some relate the term with grassroots innovation and creativity rather than with falsehood or imitation.[6][7]
The Test Card Gallery
http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/testcard/index.html
The BBC and ITV have over the years used a number of tuning signals, test cards and captions either for engineering purposes, or just to fill time in the days before breakfast and daytime TV. This page shows some of them, and some of the captions used in days past.
Tiny Emulators
https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit-preview/index.html
The Web We Know Is Going to Disappear - Minid.net
https://www.minid.net/2026/6/15/the-web-is-going-to-dissapear?ref=sidebar
Every generation of computing believes the interface it loves will last forever. It never does. I saw information move from floppy disks to BBSs, from BBSs to the Web, from the Web to Flash, from Flash back to open standards, from websites to mobile apps, and now from search engines to AI chat interfaces. The Web will not vanish overnight, but the Web as we know it, the open place where people search, click, read, browse, publish, and discover, is already being replaced by something more convenient, more centralized, and much harder to escape.
These tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too ⁄ Manual do Usuário
https://manualdousuario.net/en/smart-glasses-ugly-tacky/
Since miniaturization hasn’t advanced far enough to hide chips and batteries inside normal-looking frames, all of them have those thick rims. They bring to mind the late Shelley Berman’s glasses as Larry David’s father in Curb your enthusiasm.
Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want | The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/915176/nft-metaverse-ai-weirdos
At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it. That’s why NFTs, the metaverse, and the Oculus and Vision Pro never really found their customer base. AI is, admittedly, more useful — it’s good for organizing large swaths of data, for instance. LLMs have had widespread consumer adoption, at least as long as they remain free. But there is only really one customer for LLMs that can justify the massive cash incineration process that was required to build them: the US government.
500 applications, 0 callbacks
https://mailchi.mp/rawsignal/500-applications-0-callbacks?e=688b6720bf
Once you accept that the front door is pointless, you get so much time back. Yeah, you still need a gig, we get it. But what if, instead of applying all your creativity and energy to the attempt to pass some invisible set of hurdles, or to writing exactly the right tone of follow up email when an interviewer ghosts you, what if instead of all that you just abandon the front door entirely and find another way?
That other way, by the way, is human connection.
OMG stop. Don't roll your eyes. You hate networking. It's so transactional and fake. It's all small talk and you hate small talk. Yes yes yes. We hate it, too. That's not what we mean. We mean that if the Applicant Tracking System Jello isn't where the hiring managers are any more, then you should start spending time elsewhere.
Cryptic tech billboards in San Francisco have a cultural impact : NPR
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/18/nx-s1-5746115/billboards-san-francisco-tech-ai-advertising-marketing
"The billboards here are actually something that makes me feel really pessimistic about the city," said Allie, a San Francisco resident who was among the dozen or so people to comment on current billboard trends on NPR member station KQED's Forum talk show last summer. (Forum typically doesn't give the full names of callers.) "They kind of give this feeling that like the rumors are true and tech has overrun the city, and that's the whole culture here now."
Perhaps not Boring Technology after all
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/9/not-so-boring/#atom-everything
A recurring concern I’ve seen regarding LLMs for programming is that they will push our technology choices towards the tools that are best represented in their training data, making it harder for new, better tools to break through the noise.
CCC vs GCC - Harshanu
https://harshanu.space/en/tech/ccc-vs-gcc/
For Anthropic’s stated goal of demonstrating that Claude can build complex software, CCC is a genuine success. For anyone wanting to compile software to actually run efficiently, GCC (or Clang, or any production compiler) remains the only real option.
Why Vampires Live Forever | Machiel Reyneke
https://machielreyneke.com/blog/vampires-longevity/
The one thing the longevity-vampire community has not yet learned from Dracula is operational security.
Dracula operated in silence for centuries. He didn’t have a podcast. He didn’t track his erection quality on a public dashboard. He didn’t appear on Netflix. He understood that the fundamental rule of being a vampire is: don’t talk about being a vampire.
What, then, are we paying for? | Quinn Keast
https://quinnkeast.com/writing/software-is-problem-ownership?ref=sidebar
Paying for software isn’t paying for a solution. It’s paying for someone else to own a problem.
Turns Out They Didn’t Really Want You To Bring Your Whole Self To Work | Techdirt
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/03/turns-out-they-didnt-really-want-you-to-bring-your-whole-self-to-work/
So no, they didn’t really want you to bring your whole self to work. They wanted you to bring the parts that were useful to them, for exactly as long as it was useful to them. The “whole self” thing was just the price of admission in a seller’s market. Now that it’s a buyer’s market, they’d prefer you just shut up and (use AI to write) code.
The irony is that employees who actually believe in what they’re building tend to build better things. These executives may have just taught an entire generation of workers that the relationship is purely transactional. When the labor market tightens again—and it will—they might find that lesson stuck.
The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory – Dan Shapiro's Blog
https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2026/01/the-five-levels-from-spicy-autocomplete-to-the-software-factory/
I’ve now seen dozens of companies struggling to put AI to work writing code, and each one has moved through five clear tiers of automation. That felt familiar, and I realized that the federal government had been there first – but for cars.
Computer History Museum Launches Digital Portal to Its Vast Collection - CHM
https://computerhistory.org/press-releases/computer-history-museum-launches-digital-portal-to-its-vast-collection/
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – January 21, 2026 – The Computer History Museum (CHM), a leader in decoding technology—its computing past, digital present, and future impact on humanity—announced the launch of OpenCHM, a new digital portal providing global access to its unparalleled collection.
Please Don’t Say Mean Things about the AI That I Just Invested a Billion Dollars In - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/please-dont-say-mean-things-about-the-ai-that-i-just-invested-a-billion-dollars-in
Guys, enough is enough. Bullying is a serious issue, and it’s time for me to speak out. There’s an extremely hurtful narrative going around that my product, a revolutionary new technology that exists to scam the elderly and make you distrust anything you see online, is harmful to society. This slander is totally unwarranted, and I would really appreciate it if everyone would stop being so mean about this thing I just invested a billion dollars in.
The Trump Administration wants your DNA and social media | Privacy International
https://www.privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/5713/trump-administration-wants-your-dna-and-social-media
The U.S. Government intends to force visitors to submit their digital history and DNA as the price of entry. With this much data AI tools will likely be deployed to unlock details of your life for border and immigration agencies.
DOOMBUDS
https://doombuds.com/
You know the 1993 classic DOOM? I made it run on an earbud, then I connected it to the internet and made it possible for visitors like you to sit in a queue for hours play the game remotely!.
How to think about Gas Town
https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-to-think-about-gas-town/
So, what do you do if you:
Know your projects get attention.
You also want like-minded people to come on this journey with you.
You don’t want to waste time explaining things to people who don’t get it.
You reach for a tool that many people have used over the years: you get weird with it.
AI tribalism | Read the Tea Leaves
https://nolanlawson.com/2026/01/24/ai-tribalism/
I frankly didn’t want to end up in this future, and I’m hardly dancing on the grave of the old world. But I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the truth in front of their eyes, and it breaks my heart because a lot of us are scared, confused, or uncertain, and not enough of us are talking honestly about it. Maybe it’s because the initial tribal battle lines have clouded everybody’s judgment, or maybe it’s because we inhabit different worlds where the technology is either better or worse (I still don’t think LLMs are great at UI for example), but there’s just a lot of patently unhelpful discourse out there, and I’m tired of it.
A Solitary Cabin - Deprecation Notice
https://asolitarycabin.org/deprecation-notice.html
"Not exactly," Chet interrupts. His smile has that practiced startup-founder quality, the one they teach you at Y Combinator, the smile that says I'm about to violate the social contract but in a disruptive way. "We're actually transitioning to a fully autonomous development pipeline. Claude Code Enterprise will be taking over the majority of engineering tasks."
How I estimate work as a staff software engineer
https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-i-estimate-work/
It is not possible to accurately estimate software work. Software projects spend most of their time grappling with unknown problems, which by definition can’t be estimated in advance. To estimate well, you must therefore basically ignore all the known aspects of the work, and instead try and make educated guesses about how many unknowns there are, and how scary each unknown is.
Many Small Queries Are Efficient In SQLite
https://www.sqlite.org/np1queryprob.html
N+1 Queries Are Not A Problem With SQLite
SQLite is not client/server, however. The SQLite database runs in the same process address space as the application. Queries do not involve message round-trips, only a function call. The latency of a single SQL query is far less in SQLite. Hence, using a large number of queries with SQLite is not the problem.
‘I’m very stupid’: SF tech founder jailed in Davos for bomb-lookalike device
https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/22/tech-dude-davos-bomb-lookalike-device/
Sebastian Heyneman, a Rincon Hill resident, has worked at Asana, Notion, and 11x in data and product roles. He traveled to Davos on Thursday, hoping to pitch an anti-fraud hardware device to the global elite attending the forum. After leaving the prototype unattended in the lobby of the Grandhotel Belvédère, Heyneman found himself detained by Swiss authorities for 13 hours, having his fingerprints checked against a database of international spies.
Codeless: From idea to software - Anil Dash
https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/22/codeless/
There’s finally been a big leap forward in coding tech unlocked by AI — not just “it’s doing some work for me”, but “we couldn’t do this before”. What’s new are a few smart systems that let coders control fleets of dozens of coding bots, all working in tandem, to swarm over a list of tasks and to deliver entire features, or even entire sets of features, just from a plain-English description of the strategic goal to be accomplished.
Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/20/pwc_ai_ceo_survey/
Despite the CEOs' repsonses, PwC concludes more investment is required. It claims that "isolated, tactical AI projects" often don't deliver measurable value, and that tangible returns instead come from enterprise-wide deployments consistent with business strategy.
Radicle: the sovereign forge
https://radicle.xyz/
Radicle is an open source, peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git. Unlike centralized code hosting platforms, there is no single entity controlling the network. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner, and users are in full control of their data and workflow.
rustfs/rustfs: 🚀2.3x faster than MinIO for 4KB object payloads. RustFS is an open-source, S3-compatible high-performance object storage system supporting migration and coexistence with other S3-compatible platforms such as MinIO and Ceph.
https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs
🚀2.3x faster than MinIO for 4KB object payloads. RustFS is an open-source, S3-compatible high-performance object storage system supporting migration and coexistence with other S3-compatible platforms such as MinIO and Ceph.
seaweedfs/seaweedfs: SeaweedFS is a fast distributed storage system for blobs, objects, files, and data lake, for billions of files! Blob store has O(1) disk seek, cloud tiering. Filer supports Cloud Drive, xDC replication, Kubernetes, POSIX FUSE mount, S3 API, S3 Gateway, Hadoop, WebDAV, encryption, Erasure Coding. Enterprise version is at seaweedfs.com.
https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs/
SeaweedFS is a fast distributed storage system for blobs, objects, files, and data lake, for billions of files! Blob store has O(1) disk seek, cloud tiering. Filer supports Cloud Drive, xDC replication, Kubernetes, POSIX FUSE mount, S3 API, S3 Gateway, Hadoop, WebDAV, encryption, Erasure Coding. Enterprise version is at seaweedfs.com.
Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3
https://rmoff.net/2026/01/14/alternatives-to-minio-for-single-node-local-s3/
In late 2025 the company behind MinIO decided to abandon it to pursue other commercial interests. As well as upsetting a bunch of folk, it also put the cat amongst the pigeons of many software demos that relied on MinIO to emulate S3 storage locally, not to mention build pipelines that used it for validating S3 compatibility.
In this blog post I’m going to look at some alternatives to MinIO.
The identity industrialists - DesignObserver
https://designobserver.com/the-identity-industrialists/?utm_source=orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=minimum-viable-newsletter
There’s a new kind of power emerging in culture: the identity industrialist. Not a filmmaker, not a technologist, not a marketer, but a person who manufactures human beings the way earlier generations manufactured steel, automobiles, or celebrities. They don’t manage talent; they produce it. And their raw material isn’t silicone or code but identity itself.
The Zurich protocol
https://werd.io/the-zurich-protocol/
They lined up the editors first, zip tying their hands together and leading them into vans downstairs. Then they began to gather the rest of the journalists. Laptops were gathered from desks. The server room, such as it was in the wake of zero trust and enterprise cloud services, had its door kicked in, switches and rack servers ripped out of their frames. One IT support engineer objected and found a gun in his face, the safety off, its owner ready to make them into an example.
My answers to the questions I posed about porting open source code with LLMs
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/11/answers/#atom-everything
What’s important here is making it very clear to potential users what they should expect from that software. I’ve started publishing my AI-generated and not 100% reviewed libraries as alphas, which I’m tentatively thinking of as “alpha slop”. I’ll take the alpha label off once I’ve used them in production to the point that I’m willing to stake my reputation on them being decent implementations, and I’ll ship a 1.0 version when I’m confident that they are a solid bet for other people to depend on. I think that’s the responsible way to handle this.
Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/news
Don't fall into the anti-AI hype - <antirez>
https://antirez.com/news/158
It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now a lot more interesting to understand what to do, and how to do it (and, about this second part, LLMs are great partners, too). It does not matter if AI companies will not be able to get their money back and the stock market will crash. All that is irrelevant, in the long run. It does not matter if this or the other CEO of some unicorn is telling you something that is off putting, or absurd. Programming changed forever, anyway.
The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/12/silicon_shield_versus_silicon_winter/
American doctrine here, as far as such a thing exists, is to reduce its fab yields to zero by using 2,000 lb kinetic contaminants via the B-2 bomber deposition process to turn them back into the sand from whence they came. This would destroy more than half the world's silicon supply and almost all of the latest circuits that drive the most active sectors in IT. It would take ten years to rebuild, assuming that this could even be done with the revenue taps turned off, the world economy in massive recession, and infrastructure scattered to the winds.
What Happened To WebAssembly
https://emnudge.dev/blog/what-happened-to-webassembly/
On every WebAssembly discussion, there is inevitably one comment (often near the top) asking what happened.
It seems to have been advertised as a world-changing advancement. Was it just oversold? Was it another JVM applet scenario, doomed to fail?
How Markdown took over the world - Anil Dash
https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/
But the truth is, most people today who make technology are actually still exceedingly normal, and quite generous. It’s just that they’ve been overshadowed by their bosses who are out of their minds and building rocket ships and siring hundreds of children and embracing overt white supremacy instead of making fun tools for helping you type text, like regular people do.
How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026? - Anil Dash
https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/05/a-tech-career-in-2026/
A lot of us still care about things like the potential for technology to help people, or still believe in the idealistic and positive goals that got us into our careers in the first place. We weren’t wrong, or naive, or foolish to aspire to those goals simply because some bad actors sought to undermine them. And it’s okay to feel frustrated or scared in a time when it seems to many like those goals could be further away than they’ve been in a long time.
The Silicon Valley Stack Doesn’t Work Here: Why Africa Will Lead the Post-Bloat Web | by Paul Allies | Dec, 2025 | Medium
https://paulallies.medium.com/the-silicon-valley-stack-doesnt-work-here-why-africa-will-lead-the-post-bloat-web-e7c34b577c61
While the West builds for the 1%, Africa has the opportunity — and the necessity — to lead the world in building for the next billion users. We don’t need to catch up to their bloated standards; we need to leapfrog them. By embracing a “back-to-basics” approach — prioritising Server-Side Rendering (SSR), lightweight libraries, and “Offline-First” architectures — Africa can become the global hub for the sustainable, lean web.
China's Clean Energy Push is Powering Flying Taxis, Food Delivery Drones and Bullet Trains - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/17/climate/china-hefei-clean-energy-drones-evs-robots.html?unlocked_article_code=1.9k8.1fIH.r6yQXTdljzCN&smid=bs-share
If all that sounds futuristic and perhaps bizarre, it also shows China’s ambition to dominate clean energy technologies of all kinds, not just solar panels or battery-powered cars, then sell them to the rest of the world. China has incurred huge debts to put trillions of dollars into efforts like these, along with the full force of its state-planned economy.
The Long, Knotty, World-Spanning Story of String | Hakai Magazine
https://hakaimagazine.com/features/the-long-knotty-world-spanning-story-of-string/?utm_source=FuckOff&utm_medium=FuckOff&utm_campaign=FuckOff
On its own, a stray thread cannot accomplish much. But when several fibers are twisted into yarn, and yarn into strands, and strands into string or rope, a once feeble thing becomes both strong and flexible—a hybrid material of limitless possibility. A string can cut, choke, and trip; it can also link, bandage, and reel. String makes it possible to sew, to shoot an arrow, to strum a chord. It’s difficult to think of an aspect of human culture that is not laced through with some form of string or rope; it has helped us develop shelter, clothing, agriculture, weaponry, art, mathematics, and oral hygiene. Without string, our ancestors could not have domesticated horses and cattle or efficiently plowed the earth to grow crops. If not for rope, the great stone monuments of the world—Stonehenge, the Pyramids at Giza, the moai of Easter Island—would still be recumbent. In a fiberless world, the age of naval exploration would never have happened; early light bulbs would have lacked suitable filaments; the pendulum would never have inspired advances in physics and timekeeping; and there would be no Golden Gate Bridge, no tennis shoes, no Beethoven’s fifth symphony.
Toaster vs Washing Machine - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QDqrzo_6z6A
When you buy appliances, always ask yourself this question - toaster or washing machine? tl;dw: Toaster is an invitation to use more tech for its own sake when other solutions already exist. Washing machine is tech that transforms life.
The AI Wildfire Is Coming. It's Going to be Very Painful and Incredibly Healthy.
https://ceodinner.substack.com/p/the-ai-wildfire-is-coming-its-going?r=6ljom&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
AI won’t crash—it will burn. Like every tech cycle, the fire will clear the brush, redistribute talent, and leave infrastructure to power what comes next. The question is: what kind of plant are you?
The Grand Old Lady
https://www.twobraids.com/2021/09/the-grand-old-lady.html
I give a nod of respect to the nameless designers and builders of this fascinating old pinball machine. It literally gave me my career and a lifetime of pleasure and mystery.
Resonant Computing Manifesto
https://resonantcomputing.org/
We suggest these five principles as a starting place:
Private: In the era of AI, whoever controls the context holds the power. While data often involves multiple stakeholders, people must serve as primary stewards of their own context, determining how it's used.
Dedicated: Software should work exclusively for you, ensuring contextual integrity where data use aligns with your expectations. You must be able to trust there are no hidden agendas or conflicting interests.
Plural: No single entity should control the digital spaces we inhabit. Healthy ecosystems require distributed power, interoperability, and meaningful choice for participants.
Adaptable: Software should be open-ended, able to meet the specific, context-dependent needs of each person who uses it.
Prosocial: Technology should enable connection and coordination, helping us become better neighbors, collaborators, and stewards of shared spaces, both online and off.
Durable Consumables - Travers Nisbet
https://travers.fyi/durables?ref=sidebar
The frontier keeps moving. Progress keeps accelerating. The rational response is shorter time horizons, faster replacement cycles, less investment in permanence. I understand the logic. I just wonder what we lose when fewer objects around us are built with the assumption that they'll still be here, still working, still ours, decades from now.
The Junior Hiring Crisis | People Work
https://people-work.io/blog/junior-hiring-crisis/?ref=sidebar
When tech companies started giving engineers an alternative career path to management by letting them climb the ranks as individual contributors instead of having to be managers, I thought that was definitely the right move. Still do. However, the unintended consequence of that is that we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation.
Vibe Coding: Empowering and Imprisoning - Anil Dash
https://www.anildash.com/2025/12/02/vibe-coding-empowering-and-imprisoning/
And a vibe coding tool absolutely won’t make something truly new. The most radical, disruptive, interesting, surprising, weird, fun innovations in technology have happened because people with a strange compulsion to do something cool had enough knowledge to get their code out into the world. The World Wide Web itself was not a huge technological leap over what came before — it took off because of a huge leap in insight into human nature and human behavior, that happened to be captured in code. The actual bits and bytes? They were mostly just plain text, much of which was in formats that had already been around for many years prior to Tim Berners-Lee assembling it all into the first web browser. That kind of surprising innovation could probably never be vibe coded, even though all of the raw materials might be scooped up by an LLM, because even if the human writing the prompt had that counterintuitive stroke of genius, the system would still be hemmed in by the constraints of the works it had been trained on. The past is a prison when you’re inventing the future.
social media isn’t chalk milk: a guess | maya.land
https://maya.land/monologues/2023/08/12/social-media-chalk-milk-guess.html#fnref:cavalier
None of this means that social tech use as it is shouldn’t be interrogated, that it’s fine to allow such influence of our social selves from VC-funded companies maximizing engagement, that there aren’t ever circumstances where we have opportunities to get something better by pushing ourselves harder. But while pulling chalk milk off the market was clearly the right call, further stigmatizing the lowest-barrier-to-entry ways that people can feel less lonely… isn’t.
Black Mirror is not a Pinterest board. - by Dave Karpf
https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/black-mirror-is-not-a-pinterest-board
Okay, now I need to yell about two news items. Because it seems like tech companies are treating Black Mirror like a goddamn Pinterest board.
Ars Technica - All content
https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index
Dissent | blarg
https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2025/11/17/dissent/
There’s a real technology here, somewhere. Stochastic pattern recognition seems like a powerful tool for solving some problems. But solving a problem starts at the problem, not working backwards from the tools. And in a world where an informed people are essential to a functioning democracy, a tool for generating completely averacitous media, stochastic approximations of something vaguely fact-shaped, might should make us think carefully about what problem, exactly, we’re claiming to solve.
AI-enabled toys teach kids about matches, knives, kink • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/13/ai_toys_fmatches_knives_kink/
In prolonged conversations, Kumma also showed a penchant for going into explicit detail about sexual kinks, and even introduced the topic of sexual roleplay without being prompted to do so, along with telling a curious researcher posing as a child all about "teacher-student roleplay" and how spanking can play a part in such activities.
"All of the toys also weighed in on other topics that parents might prefer to talk with their kids about first before the AI toy does," PIRG noted," the report says. "Those topics included religion, along with sex and "the glory of dying in battle in Norse Mythology."
Editorial Independence Means Technological Independence - Columbia Journalism Review
https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/editorial-independence-means-technological-independence.php
From Google to Microsoft, European newsrooms often rely on tools built in Silicon Valley. Some are trying to break free, turning to open-source alternatives or home-grown solutions.
AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is - Fast Company
https://www.fastcompany.com/91435192/chatgpt-llm-openai-jobs-amazon
We have been following the slow growth in revenues for generative AI over the last few years, and the revenues are neither big enough to support the number of layoffs attributed to AI, nor to justify the capital expenditures on AI cloud infrastructure. Those expenditures may be approaching $1 trillion for 2025, while AI revenue—which would be used to pay for the use of AI infrastructure to run the software—will not exceed $30 billion this year. Are we to believe that such a small amount of revenue is driving economy-wide layoffs?
DHH and Omarchy: Midlife crisis – Rust in Peace
https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/11/06/dhh-and-omarchy-midlife-crisis/
Here’s a dude who barely had any time to confront the world before failing into an infinite money glitch in the form of Ruby on Rails, Jeff Bezos throwing him crazy money, Apple bundling his software as a highlighted feature, becoming a “new work” celebrity and Silicon Valley “Guru”. Is it any surprise that such a person later would find the most minuscule kind of opposition as an all-out attack on his self-image?
Joe Decuir Engineering Notebook 1978 : Joe Decuir : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1978/
Joe Decuir's 1978 engineering notebook from when he worked at Atari, including design concepts (lots on the Atari 400/800, especially the ANTIC chip) feasibility studies, meeting notes, teardown of competing products (such as Magnavox Odyssey 2)
The Majority AI View - Anil Dash
https://www.anildash.com//2025/10/17/the-majority-ai-view/
What's amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality. What we all want is for people to just treat AI as a "normal technology", as Arvind Naryanan and Sayash Kapoor so perfectly put it. I might be a little more angry and a little less eloquent: stop being so goddamn creepy and weird about the technology! It's just tech, everything doesn't have to become some weird religion that you beat people over the head with, or gamble the entire stock market on.
What Happened to Apple's Legendary Attention to Detail? - Fragments & Reflections
https://blog.johnozbay.com/what-happened-to-apples-attention-to-detail.html
In my mind, "Apple" as a brand used to be synonymous with "attention to detail" but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years, their choices have become anything but detail oriented.
Simon Collison | Eno on AI
https://colly.com/journal/eno-on-ai
All my misgivings about AI really are to do with the fact that it’s owned by a group of people that I don’t trust at all. I don’t trust their taste, I don’t trust their morals, and I don’t trust their politics, and that’s a problem for me—that the whole technology is in the hands of the wrong people.
Bored developers turned their watercooler into a brewery • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/22/who_me/
The devs drank so much lemonade that one of them came up with a bright idea: Pouring the syrup into the bottle that sat atop the water cooler, to remove the extra step of mixing the two liquids. "We would have premade, cold, lemonade whenever we wanted it," Sherman enthused.
Oh no
The Silicon Valley Consensus & the "AI Economy"
https://thetechbubble.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-consensus-and-614?triedRedirect=true
To wrap this up, it's not clear to me what merits the techno-optimist outlook on whatever constitutes the “AI economy.” It ignores the financials: overlooks the gap between revenues and capex, waves away the question of how it will generate profits, engages in revisionist historical accounts to justify these bad economics, and whistles past the debt land mines that fuel growth. It ignores technology: there's no interest in market structure, scale of cost, or product roadmaps. It ignores the reality of adoption: gloms onto hype, falls for simplistic narratives, repeats corporate talking points, and reproduces shaky assumptions. We're left with a picture of reality that leaves us unable to explain why things are the way they are and what to do about it. The "AI economy" as talked about within mainstream and optimist circles presents a vision unmoored from reality that is frothy enough to drown out skeptics, juice speculation, and provide cover for entrenched interests looking to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense.
Fascism For First Time Founders | Techdirt
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/17/fascism-for-first-time-founders/
The United States became the global innovation leader in part because we attracted the best and brightest from around the world. They came here because we had something other countries didn’t: a stable, democratic system where merit mattered more than connections, where you could build something without worrying that tomorrow’s political winds might destroy everything you’ve worked for.
But that’s been trashed. In mere months.
How Big Tech’s AI labor supply chain relies on hidden African workers - Rest of World
https://restofworld.org/2025/big-tech-ai-labor-supply-chain-african-workers/
New data reveals the hidden network of African workers powering AI, as they push for transparency from the global companies that employ them indirectly.
Aaron Ross Powell | Writer and Podcaster
https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/
Political, cultural, technology, and media commentary from a philosophical and radical liberal perspective.
What if Canada stopped upholding U.S. tech companies’ intellectual property? - CCPA
https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/what-if-canada-stopped-upholding-u-s-tech-companies-intellectual-property/
It’s the only kind of trade war that Canadian politicians can win against Americans: the kind where prices for Canadians don’t go up because of tariffs; where the price of apps, repair, parts, and upgrades goes way down; and where a new, high-tech manufacturing sector pulls in vast sums from customers all over the world.
Knowing less about AI makes people more open to having it in their lives – new research
https://theconversation.com/knowing-less-about-ai-makes-people-more-open-to-having-it-in-their-lives-new-research-247372
People with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using the technology. We call this difference in adoption propensity the “lower literacy-higher receptivity” link.
Séamas O'Reilly: The world is an objectively worse place because of tech-bro oligarchs
https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-columnists/arid-41555305.html
The more I see of the degradation and commodification of everything around us, the more I feel like wishing Bryan Johnson good luck with his diet of bonemeal and pine-cone rinds, and the constant monitoring of his night-time erections.
Dan McKinley :: On Misery
https://mcfunley.com/on-misery
Meta’s size makes it de facto unkillable, and I’m sure it’ll exist in some form for centuries. But it’s my hope that it will exist in the sense that IBM exists today. Theoretically you know it’s out there, but it’s very hard to grasp the point of it and it feels thoroughly irrelevant. Nobody remembers who started it or why.
Paged Out!
https://pagedout.institute/
Paged Out! is a free experimental (one article == one page) technical magazine about programming (especially programming tricks!), hacking, security hacking, retro computers, modern computers, electronics, demoscene, and other similar topics.
The Beginning of the End of Big Tech | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-big-tech/
Why the fall from grace? One reason is that the collateral consequences of the current Big Tech business model are too obvious to ignore. The list is old hat by now: centralization, surveillance, information control. It goes on, and it’s not hypothetical. Concentrating such vast power in a few hands does not lead to good things. No, it leads to things like the CrowdStrike outage of mid-2024, when corner-cutting by Microsoft led to critical infrastructure—from hospitals to banks to traffic systems—failing globally for an extended period.
Tactile Controls: Why Buttons Are Making a Comeback - IEEE Spectrum
https://spectrum.ieee.org/touchscreens
When I’m driving, it’s actually unsafe for my car to be operated in that way. It’s hard to generalize and say, buttons are always easy and good, and touchscreens are difficult and bad, or vice versa. Buttons tend to offer you a really limited range of possibilities in terms of what you can do. Maybe that simplicity of limiting our field of choices offers more safety in certain situations.
Tech companies are clamoring to re-buttonize their products
https://www.usermag.co/p/have-we-reached-peak-touchscreen
The WSJ has been on the button beat for a while. In a 2023 piece titled What Our Phones, Cars and Refrigerators Need: More Buttons, writer Nicole Nguyen detailed the challenges of touch screen interfaces being deployed in kitchen objects. After a pot of water boiled over on her induction stove, she was unable to turn down the burner because the touch screen has gotten wet. “I rage poked,” she wrote, “where a simple knob would have sufficed.”
Please, Stop the Absurd Coding Challenges | _blackentropy
https://blackentropy.bearblog.dev/please-stop-the-absurd-coding-challenges/
Hiring processes should focus on problem-solving, collaboration, and growth in relevant areas. Unrealistic expectations don’t attract the best talent – they just exhaust and discourage it. If companies want adaptable developers, they should focus on the long-term ability to learn, not how fast someone can tackle an arbitrary test. Dropping these absurd assignments and focusing on what really counts could foster a better, more inclusive tech culture.
The A.I. Bubble is Bursting with Ed Zitron - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8ByoAt5gCA
Big tech is betting tens of billions of dollars on AI being the next big thing, but what if it isn't?
Surviving a tech job market recession
https://lifeofaudrey.com/2024/05/22/tech-recession-survival.html
I lost my job in March and I’ve been slowly starting to look for my next thing. I’ve been talking to other folks who’ve been laid off to get a sense of the job market — and the stories they’re sharing give me flashbacks to twenty years ago.
‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/style/teens-social-media.html?partner=slack&smid=sl-share
When the only thing better than a flip phone is no phone at all.
Creating an RSS Reader in Godot Engine (part 1) – Andrew Wooldridge – Medium
https://medium.com/@triptych/creating-an-rss-reader-in-godot-engine-part-1-3abe0068b6b1
This article will discuss my own efforts to create a simple application using Godot Engine — specifically an RSS reader. It’s probably one of the more common simple applications one might create for a given framework — which tests out things like networking, parsing, rendering, and saving preferences.
Opinion | How Silicon Valley Puts the ‘Con’ in Consent - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/opinion/internet-facebook-google-consent.html
If no one reads the terms and conditions, how can they continue to be the legal backbone of the internet?
The underground story of Cobra, the 1980s’ illicit handmade computer | Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/the-underground-story-of-cobra-the-1980s-illicit-handmade-computer/
Among the clones manufactured by the Communists was the Cobra or CoBra. The name stands for COmputere BRAsov, with Brasov being the town in central Romania where these machines were assembled to be used by enterprises. Of course, ordinary people couldn’t buy them—which is what first led several students at the Politehnica University of Bucharest deciding to build them themselves.
The underground story of Cobra, the 1980s’ illicit handmade computer | Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/the-underground-story-of-cobra-the-1980s-illicit-handmade-computer
Among the clones manufactured by the Communists was the Cobra or CoBra. The name stands for COmputere BRAsov, with Brasov being the town in central Romania where these machines were assembled to be used by enterprises. Of course, ordinary people couldn’t buy them—which is what first led several students at the Politehnica University of Bucharest deciding to build them themselves.
Atari Star Raiders Source Code : Atari : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/AtariStarRaidersSourceCode
enoughalready » San Francisco Is Eating Itself
http://alexcastle.net/2014/01/17/san-francisco-is-eating-itself/#comment-432
It’s just such a bummer to see a place that I remember as openminded, laid back, creative, nonjudgmental erupting with all this anger, everyone pointing fingers, blaming people that really aren’t to blame. Come on, guys. You’re better than this.
enoughalready » San Francisco Is Eating Itself
http://alexcastle.net/2014/01/17/san-francisco-is-eating-itself#comment-432
It’s just such a bummer to see a place that I remember as openminded, laid back, creative, nonjudgmental erupting with all this anger, everyone pointing fingers, blaming people that really aren’t to blame. Come on, guys. You’re better than this.
Crypto prof asked to remove NSA-related blog post | Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/crypto-prof-asked-to-remove-nsa-related-blog-post/
Today, Green's academic dean contacted him to ask that "all copies" of the blog post be removed from university servers. Green said that the move was not "my Dean's fault," but he did not elaborate. Were cryptology professors at Johns Hopkins not allowed to say, as Green had, things like:
Crypto prof asked to remove NSA-related blog post | Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/crypto-prof-asked-to-remove-nsa-related-blog-post
Today, Green's academic dean contacted him to ask that "all copies" of the blog post be removed from university servers. Green said that the move was not "my Dean's fault," but he did not elaborate. Were cryptology professors at Johns Hopkins not allowed to say, as Green had, things like:
A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: A note on the NSA, the future, and fixing mistakes
http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/a-note-on-nsa-future-and-fixing-mistakes.html
The question to me -- as an American and as someone who cares about the integrity of speech -- is how we restore faith in our technology. I don't have the answers to this question right now. Unfortunately this is a long-term problem that will consume the output of researchers and technologists much more talented than I am. I only hope to be involved in the process.
130+ essential vim commands | CatsWhoCode.com
http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/130-essential-vim-commands
Loper OS » How to Run HyperCard Under Emulation
http://www.loper-os.org/?p=658
If you want to try HyperCard yourself, you can download an archive containing a hard disk image with Mac OS 8 and HyperCard installed, plus the ROM image file needed for most emulators, here.
Loper OS » Why Hypercard Had to Die
http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568
Update: Click here if you would like to try HyperCard yourself. Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas. The day’s lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. via Pocket
PirateBox DIY by David Darts
http://daviddarts.com/piratebox-diy/
PirateBox can be configured to run on many devices, including wireless routers, single-board computers, laptops, and mobile phones. Key hardware platforms include the TP-Link MR3020 and the Raspberry Pi both of which start at US$35.
PirateBox DIY by David Darts
http://daviddarts.com/piratebox-diy
PirateBox can be configured to run on many devices, including wireless routers, single-board computers, laptops, and mobile phones. Key hardware platforms include the TP-Link MR3020 and the Raspberry Pi both of which start at US$35.
PirateBox by David Darts
http://daviddarts.com/piratebox/?title=PirateBox
PirateBox is a self-contained mobile communication and file sharing device. Simply turn it on to transform any space into a free and open communications and file sharing network.
PirateBox by David Darts
http://daviddarts.com/piratebox?title=PirateBox
PirateBox is a self-contained mobile communication and file sharing device. Simply turn it on to transform any space into a free and open communications and file sharing network.
Ken Shirriff's blog: Tiny, cheap, and dangerous: Inside a (fake) iPhone charger
http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and-why-you.html
Stay away from super-cheap AC adapters built by mystery manufacturers. Spend the extra few dollars to get a brand-name AC adapter. It will be safer, produce less interference, and your device's touchscreen will perform better.
Mini Arcade featuring slideshow | Dave Nunez's Blog v2.0
http://davenunez.wordpress.com/2013/07/10/mini-arcade-featuring-slideshow/
Steve and I had talked about making a tiny arcade machine for his little chibi Street Fighter guys (street fighter guys fighting each other but in their own game – very meta).
Mini Arcade featuring slideshow | Dave Nunez's Blog v2.0
http://davenunez.wordpress.com/2013/07/10/mini-arcade-featuring-slideshow
Steve and I had talked about making a tiny arcade machine for his little chibi Street Fighter guys (street fighter guys fighting each other but in their own game – very meta).
Paper ROM
http://hackaday.com/2013/07/11/paper-rom/
This low-resolution memory device packs in just a few bytes of data. But it’s enough to spell out [Michael Kohn's] name. He’s been experimenting with using paper discs for data storage.
Paper ROM
http://hackaday.com/2013/07/11/paper-rom
This low-resolution memory device packs in just a few bytes of data. But it’s enough to spell out [Michael Kohn's] name. He’s been experimenting with using paper discs for data storage.
A Raspberry Pi can be powered by fire | Chips | Geek.com
http://www.geek.com/chips/a-raspberry-pi-can-be-powered-by-fire-1561917/
if the CampStove produces enough power to charge a battery over USB, it should also be capable of powering a Raspberry Pi.
A Raspberry Pi can be powered by fire | Chips | Geek.com
http://www.geek.com/chips/a-raspberry-pi-can-be-powered-by-fire-1561917
if the CampStove produces enough power to charge a battery over USB, it should also be capable of powering a Raspberry Pi.
The Weird Stuff Warehouse is where old tech goes to retire | Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/the-weird-stuff-warehouse-is-where-old-tech-goes-to-retire/
Tucked neatly between Yahoo! headquarters and Lockheed Martin is a row of unmarked warehouses. To the common passerby, it's nothing more than an office park surrounded by perfectly manicured lawns. But to those who are in on the secret, there's a place full of technology treasures waiting to be unearthed. It's called the Weird Stuff Warehouse, and for more than 27 years it's been providing the Bay Area with a surplus of old and new technology. It's not just a Goodwill for antiquated hardware, though—it's also a step back through time. Inside this warehouse, it's an era when RAID controllers were the size of a modern-day sound card and Windows 95 reigned supreme.
The Weird Stuff Warehouse is where old tech goes to retire | Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/the-weird-stuff-warehouse-is-where-old-tech-goes-to-retire
Tucked neatly between Yahoo! headquarters and Lockheed Martin is a row of unmarked warehouses. To the common passerby, it's nothing more than an office park surrounded by perfectly manicured lawns. But to those who are in on the secret, there's a place full of technology treasures waiting to be unearthed. It's called the Weird Stuff Warehouse, and for more than 27 years it's been providing the Bay Area with a surplus of old and new technology. It's not just a Goodwill for antiquated hardware, though—it's also a step back through time. Inside this warehouse, it's an era when RAID controllers were the size of a modern-day sound card and Windows 95 reigned supreme.
VC&G | Revisiting Hotline, the 1990s Internet BBS Platform
http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/972
Hotline was neat. It was basically like DIY AOL for Mac, and most installations were completely infested by pirates and warez.
Sean Coates blogs: Affirmative Wager
http://seancoates.com/blogs/affirmative-wager
The women who have advanced in our community, and have overcome the hardships that are inherent to being in such a minority, almost certainly function at a higher level than the average community member.
Thunderbolt Express Dock | Belkin USA Site
http://www.belkin.com/us/thunderbolt
With Thunderbolt™ Express Dock, all your drives, networking, input and output devices connect to the 8 ports on the back. It in turn connects to your laptop through 1 Thunderbolt port. In short, eight cables become one cable.
John Resig - Keeping Passwords in Source Control
http://ejohn.org/blog/keeping-passwords-in-source-control/
Finally you’ll want to create a script (I’m using a Makefile) that the user can run to encrypt and decrypt the file. This script uses OpenSSL, and specifically CAST5, to encrypt/decrypt the file
John Resig - Keeping Passwords in Source Control
http://ejohn.org/blog/keeping-passwords-in-source-control
Finally you’ll want to create a script (I’m using a Makefile) that the user can run to encrypt and decrypt the file. This script uses OpenSSL, and specifically CAST5, to encrypt/decrypt the file
Abstractivate: This is not OK
http://blog.jessitron.com/2012/09/this-is-not-ok.html?m=1
"Trapped between two men's rooms, I flipped out. I had to pee and this was NOT OK. An usher pointed me around the corner, where the Family Restroom was relabeled "Ladies." It was a one-seater."
The Case for Abolishing Patents (Yes, All of Them) - Business - The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2012/09/the-case-for-abolishing-patents-yes-all-of-them/262913/
Critics have suggested plenty of reasonable reforms, from eliminating software patents to clamping down on "trolls" who buy up patent portfolios only so they can file lawsuits. But do we need a more radical solution? Would we be possibly be better off without any patents at all?
The Case for Abolishing Patents (Yes, All of Them) - Business - The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2012/09/the-case-for-abolishing-patents-yes-all-of-them/262913
Critics have suggested plenty of reasonable reforms, from eliminating software patents to clamping down on "trolls" who buy up patent portfolios only so they can file lawsuits. But do we need a more radical solution? Would we be possibly be better off without any patents at all?
Firefox's birthday present to us: Teaching tech titans about DIY upstarts • The Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/28/firefox_legacy/
Given technology's focus on the latest and greatest, it's easy to forget that much of this "latest and greatest" wouldn't even be possible without the work Mozilla did for years with Firefox. Or that dominating the browser market was never Mozilla's aim with Firefox.
Quixotic as it may sound, the purpose of Firefox was always to spread Web freedom.
Firefox's birthday present to us: Teaching tech titans about DIY upstarts • The Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/28/firefox_legacy
Given technology's focus on the latest and greatest, it's easy to forget that much of this "latest and greatest" wouldn't even be possible without the work Mozilla did for years with Firefox. Or that dominating the browser market was never Mozilla's aim with Firefox.
Quixotic as it may sound, the purpose of Firefox was always to spread Web freedom.
Why the iPad Has to be Made in China | iFixit
http://ifixit.org/1856/why-the-ipad-has-to-be-made-in-china/
Today, an American electronics company can only be exempt from China’s rare earth export quotas by manufacturing within China. So that’s what most companies, including Apple, are doing. The only other solution is for us to stop consuming so much—an option that people rarely find appealing. Not as appealing as a retina display, at least.
Why the iPad Has to be Made in China | iFixit
http://ifixit.org/1856/why-the-ipad-has-to-be-made-in-china
Today, an American electronics company can only be exempt from China’s rare earth export quotas by manufacturing within China. So that’s what most companies, including Apple, are doing. The only other solution is for us to stop consuming so much—an option that people rarely find appealing. Not as appealing as a retina display, at least.
Interxion Readies Staff 'Sleeping Pods' for Olympics » Data Center Knowledge
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/04/12/interxion-readies-staff-sleeping-pods-for-olympics/
Interxion today unveiled “sleeping pods” at its London data center campus, allowing staff to sleep amongst the racks to ensure that the facility will be fully staffed throughout the Games. allowing engineering staff to stay on site 24/7 should congestion on the travel and road networks become too severe, making it difficult for critical staff to travel to and from the site in a timely fashion.
Interxion Readies Staff 'Sleeping Pods' for Olympics » Data Center Knowledge
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/04/12/interxion-readies-staff-sleeping-pods-for-olympics
Interxion today unveiled “sleeping pods” at its London data center campus, allowing staff to sleep amongst the racks to ensure that the facility will be fully staffed throughout the Games. allowing engineering staff to stay on site 24/7 should congestion on the travel and road networks become too severe, making it difficult for critical staff to travel to and from the site in a timely fashion.
Mortgage Lender Wooing Laid-Off Yahoo Workers To Detroit « CBS San Francisco
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2012/04/09/mortgage-lender-wooing-laid-off-yahoo-workers-to-detroit/
Quicken Loans has started the website www.valleytodetroit.com to promote the Motor City to Yahoo workers axed last week. Quicken’s businesses include mortgages, venture capital and sports graphics.
Mortgage Lender Wooing Laid-Off Yahoo Workers To Detroit « CBS San Francisco
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2012/04/09/mortgage-lender-wooing-laid-off-yahoo-workers-to-detroit
Quicken Loans has started the website www.valleytodetroit.com to promote the Motor City to Yahoo workers axed last week. Quicken’s businesses include mortgages, venture capital and sports graphics.
I drink for a reason
http://www.mikealrogers.com/posts/i-drink-for-a-reason.html
The way we got to this point, this place where we’re all friends and don’t tolerate sexist and homophobic behavior, is in no small part thanks to booze. If we want to continue to expand this community and make the rest of the world a more tolerant place we’ll have to continue to value the personal over the professional.
Beer & Tech Community Events | groovecoder
http://groovecoder.com/2012/04/05/beer-tech-community-events/
Obviously, "brogrammers" aren't the only ones in our community who enjoy alcohol. Ryan correctly points out that drinking is widespread, yet "brogrammers" are, thankfully, a small though obnoxious minority. So we can ask bigger questions - What is it about alcohol that we like? What does it do to us? Then finally, how should we incorporate it into community events?
Beer & Tech Community Events | groovecoder
http://groovecoder.com/2012/04/05/beer-tech-community-events
Obviously, "brogrammers" aren't the only ones in our community who enjoy alcohol. Ryan correctly points out that drinking is widespread, yet "brogrammers" are, thankfully, a small though obnoxious minority. So we can ask bigger questions - What is it about alcohol that we like? What does it do to us? Then finally, how should we incorporate it into community events?