Links, May 23rd, 2025

It’s been a while with these! I was busy the past few weeks with vacation and the Spring Lisp Game Jam, for which my friend Phil and I created a space trading game centered around smuggling. I’ve been accumulating these for a while, and trimmed it down to the half I considered the good stuff.

§Apple Turnover

John Siracusa gets real about it:

In every healthy entity, whether it’s an organization, an institution, or an organism, the old is replaced by the new: CEOs, sovereigns, or cells. It’s time for new leadership at Apple. The road we’re on now does not lead anywhere good for Apple or its customers.

§Afterimages: Martha Wells on Only Murders in the Building

I am generally not one for podcasts, but between my love of both The Murderbot Diaries and its newly-released TV adaptation (it’s good!) and the comedy/mystery show Only Murders in the Building, I had to give a listen to this interview with Murderbot author Martha Wells about her favorite TV show. If you like Murderbot or you like OMitB, check it out.

A short and to-the-point cheer for what makes the “World Wide Web” a web:

This ability to create and disseminate links is almost radical against the backdrop of today’s platforms.

§You Could Just Choose Optimism

It’s easy to get caught in the trap of sarcasm, cynicism, and complaints. It’s addicting. Complaining becomes a habit. Life can temporarily feel better when you put yourself in a position to criticize everything and to create excuses.

I have something I want to write on this topic at some point; after figuring out my own Dysthimia, I’ve realized many of these things – sarcasm, cynicism – are the symptoms of something deeper. Treating the cause is a mindset shift.

§Beer Goggles

An evisceration of Material Design 3

Imagine painting your bedroom and realizing you have a lot of left over paint. So you decide to repaint all of the walls. They didn’t need to be repainted, you just did it because you were already motivated for that task. Meanwhile, the toilet is still in the kitchen.

Either you understand that design is how it works, or you’re wondering why paint jobs don’t fix the door handles.

§jj init

Google is on the other hand good at technical design, sometimes✴︎, and I’ve been watching the jujutsu project skeptically but with interest. I finally took the plunge, and I will admit to being rather impressed so far.

One of the really interesting bits about picking up Jujutsu is realizing just how weirdly Git has wired your brain, and re-learning how to think about how a version control system can work. It is one thing to believe  that Git’s UI design is deeply janky; it is something else to experience how much better a VCS UI can be.

If you liked the octopus merge, you’ll probably really like jj. If you’ve ever contemplated doing a git reset --hard in the middle of sorting out a nasty merge conflict, you should check out jj.

I’ve been using git for nearly 20 years and as horrible as its interface is, version control is not something I particularly want to nerd out about. I’ve avoided mercurial largely because most of the tooling I use both local (magit, gitu) and collaborative are centered on git. jj avoids that by using git as a possible backing store, allowing you to git push wherever you’d normally be able to do that. There’s some momentum in tooling as well, with two textual interface programs.

§We need to talk about your Github addiction

On the topic of version control tooling:

a feed full of random projects and people I don’t care about, notifications to get me to “discover” new projects and “follow” new persons. They don’t even try to pretend to be a professional platform anymore. It’s a pure attention-grabbing personal data extorting social networks.

No I’m not going to shut up about your plaigarism bullshit machine

§Sorry, You Don’t Get to Die on That “Vibe Coding” Hill

A wonderful rebuttal to LLM apologist Simon Willison’s rant about vibe coding:

The actual moderate position on this topic is that today’s genAI tools are dangerous and unethical and should be actively avoided.

This is very much worth a read.

§On “Vibe Coding”

Now I understand the – on first sight – measured argument: “We don’t do vibe coding for real software, we just use it for quick one-offs and prototypes. Software where quality etc. do not matter much.” That sounds like a reasonable approach right? Low stakes environment, what could be the harm? Well, reality might like a word.

Nothing sticks around as long as a quick prototype.

Lies, damned lies, and prototypes. This piece makes a lot of great arguments and is also very much worth a read.

§I’d rather read the prompt

 I believe that the main reason a human should write is to communicate original thoughts. To be clear, I don’t believe that these thoughts need to be special or academic. …these thoughts should be yours: there’s no point in wasting ink to communicate someone else’s thoughts.   In that sense, using a language model to write is worse than plagiarism.

Writing is a form of clarifying your thinking, yes, but also in a way creating. Outsourcing that process is… dangerous. One more:

 Every time one generates code by prompt, they create a new stillborn program; vibe coding is the art of stitching together their corpses into Frankenstein’s monster.

§”AI-first” is the new Return To Office

Anil Dash is about as diplomatic as one can be on the topic:

There’s an orthodoxy in tech tycoon circles that’s increasingly referred to, ironically, as “tech optimism”. I say “ironically”, because there’s nothing optimistic about it. The culture is one of deep insecurity, reacting defensively, or even lashing out aggressively, when faced with any critical conversation about new technology.

§Judge admits nearly being persuaded by AI hallucinations in court filing

“I didn’t discover that Plaintiff’s lawyers used AI—and re-submitted the brief with considerably more made-up citations and quotations beyond the two initial errors—until I issued a later OSC [order to show cause] soliciting a more detailed explanation. The lawyers’ sworn statements and subsequent submission of the actual AI-generated ‘outline’ made clear the series of events that led to the false filings. The declarations also included profuse apologies and honest admissions of fault.”

Folks, I don’t know how else to say this, but a lot of how law works is based on precedent, and I’m afraid sometime soon we’re going to discover what happens when Model Collapse infects the law.

§The AI jobs crisis is here, now

The AI jobs crisis does not, as I’ve written before, look like sentient programs arising all around us, inexorably replacing human jobs en masse. It’s a series of management decisions being made by executives seeking to cut labor costs and consolidate control in their organizations. The AI jobs crisis is not any sort of SkyNet-esque robot jobs apocalypse—it’s DOGE firing tens of thousands of federal employees while waving the banner of “an AI-first strategy.”

“It’s just a tool” people say, to which you should ask, are companies that make buildings “hammer first”?

§Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI

I was presented with a question about what my concerns with AI are.

What I found most interesting is that the multiple choice options included a lot of “I found the Terminator movies scary”, “I read too much Ray Kurzweil”, and/or “I am or was a SF Bay Area rationalist” undertones, but actual ethical objections were strangely absent.

Of course, talking about ethics is probably preaching to the choir by this point.

Also and especially:

But there is a feedback loop: If you change the incentive structures, people’s behaviors will certainly change, but subsequently so, too, will those incentive structures.

§My new hobby: watching AI slowly drive Microsoft employees insane

from r/ExperiencedDevs, this is mostly a link to a collection of Microsoft’s Github Pull Requests created by Microsoft’s GitHub CoPilot against Microsoft’s dotnet runtime, frustrating Microsoft developers. I read through a few, and find them both darkly hilarious and somewhat disturbing. The comment thread in the reddit post is worth skimming:

I just looked at that first PR and I don’t know how you could trust any of it at some point. No real understanding of what it’s doing, it’s just guessing. So many errors, over and over again.