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  “Burnout is surging, and optimism is fading. Significant burnout rose from 44.7% to 55.7% of respondents, while career optimism fell from 54.8% to 48.7%. Those who feel destabilized by AI are feeling the least optimistic and the most burned out. A worrisome trend.” https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-are-feeling-in-2026

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  I read ‘People who show instead of describe. AI made prototyping cheap. The conversation should start at "try this," not "imagine this."’ in a post about what a hiring manager is lookin for in a product manager … and… We’re going to relearn some lessons the hard way, aren’t we??? What is my problem with that? Ok, it’s hard to guess what’s in my head… So. What problem do you see with that?

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  Brooklyn! Arlington! Philly! Queens! Copeland James and Grace Leckey are coming to play for you!

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  Worth a watch I think: Dave Farley and The Real Threat of AI "help guide [..] is part of our duty of care as software professionals" "you just need three things: capability, autonomy, and our own carelessness" "whether the software understands what it is doing is a philosophy seminar question. Whether it can do damage is an engineering question" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRF99to28sA

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  Darren Raven on Theory and Design source (and more at): https://www.instagram.com/p/DUlgYGbDO8q/

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@RuthMalan/116381283686926955 folk unfollow me quite a lot (and who knows how many more have simply muted me lol)… …probably because i mention my work and workshops… so anyway,

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  a pencil is such a great tool for getting ideas out of my head! where i can see them and interact with them and raise doubts, to push myself to think further and harder and that sort of thing

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  I read this Brandolini post and got to “But increased accountability with lowered confidence isn't sustainable.” And then skipped to and misread the last sentence as “What’s the plan?” …and I like that better… source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brando_owning-a-codebase-is-a-balance-of-confidence-activity-7481654033947107328-g1F2

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  Is systems understanding, system design and architecture more valued in Europe? I get several invites a year to talk and even keynote there, but not the US.

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@RuthMalan/116998186296305414 Darren Raven: Theory does not explain work, it changes it. If nothing shifts, theory has not been used. Read: bell hooks

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  117F in Phoenix on Friday (that’s 47C)!!!

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  A great summer/winter read? In good part because it pulls on various threads, that open up various rabbit holes to explore, in that Alice sense?? Oh alright, here you go: https://www.ruthmalan.com/systems/2025SystemDesignOverview.pdf Hehe. but seriously, it’s regrounding to remind ourselves that we’re developing and evolving these theories: theory of (our role in) the ecosystem(s) we impact/are impacted by theory of value (“the problem”) theory of “the solution” and how these interact. (p146)...

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  “We see documentation as unnecessary, because "talk is cheap, show me the code", but certain forms of knowledge can never be in the code. Knowledge like alternatives considered and rejected, paths explored and then backtracked, features that would be hard to add or trivial and why.” — @Felienne@mastodon.social https://www.felienne.nl/csoc-s01-e01/

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@fesshole/116980344826700036 We can become more compassionate people just by reading*, but ideas on things to *do* are great too * caveats (and nuance and..) needed, i know

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@RuthMalan/116907030769114502 Join us in two weeks to discuss Meadows’ “Leverage Points”? ‘“This is a HUGE NEW SYSTEM people are inventing!” I said to myself. “They haven’t the SLIGHTEST IDEA how this complex structure will behave,” myself said back to me. “It’s almost certainly an example of cranking the system in the wrong direction”’

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  “I am a bit allergic to the idea that we can disregard industry resilience while pushing the individual to cover for this lack of resilience through their own means. I argue that accessibility is one of the characteristics of any critical national infrastructure providing essential services to the population.” — Andra Sonea Source: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/activity:7484557470317608961

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  “People may overestimate their understanding of how objects work because they do not realize how reliant they are on extracting perceptual information directly from the world rather than from memory” https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/bf03195929 (via @yvonnezlam@mastodon.social )

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  RE: https://stefanbohacek.online/@roots/116319577584236790 A good account to follow if you want our ideas about “root cause” to be less over-simplified :) (i don’t actually follow it, but every time i see posts boosted into my stream it is such a pleasure!)

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  Next in our #PapersInSystems discussions: Donella Meadows' "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System." Discussion will be led by @AlexPtakhin@hachyderm.io When: Monday, August 3, 2026, 1PM - 2PM Eastern Time (US/Canada) (19:00 CEST). The Zoom room will remain open until 2:30PM Eastern Time for informal discussion. The reading to support the discussion is at: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ More info/sign up (free, of...

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  my brain rn

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  “McDermott (McDermott 1976) famously complained about ML researchers’ and programmers’ use of wishful mnemonics (e.g., terms like understand or learn referred to ML), which he considered to be misleading both for researchers and for the public (Salles et al. 2020).” — Naser, M.Z. (2025). On the Philosophical Naivety of Engineers in the Age of Machine Learning. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-025-10304-2 (via @olivia@scholar.social via https://www.linkedin.com/posts/monettd...

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  “So you get bored of it. You go from reading and code-reviewing everything to just skimming it. Soon you barely even do that. LLM code generation breeds laziness, because managing its output is a fucking boring task.” — Elissa Black, in https://goodnameforablog.com/posts/very-average-prototypes/ via @dahukanna@mastodon.social

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  RE: https://vis.social/@ieeevis/116836615881690668 Sigh. We don’t *collaborate* with AI. The evolving role of *human* scientists? We need to qualify scientists now? We need to be careful with language here.

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  And while we can do some of this prompting into view with genai, there’s something we might value and appreciate in the human interaction (in design and other settings). And notice too, when we give up too much of our own attention, when responsibility is handed off… Tools change the worlds around them. Good to be somewhat intentional and heads up about what we lose, too… Image: a page of Unflattening, by Nick Sousanis

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  A source of images (drawn by a human) to use *with attribution* Dave Gray’s Connected Company sketches: https://www.flickr.com/photos/davegray/albums/72157626546771488/

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  For the Monday, June 1 #PapersInSystems discussion, we will visit some of the systems-supporting practices that folk in our community have used or developed to support the socio-technical systems work we do. We will discuss: - Container Differences Exchanges Model, which @donaldegray has used with organizations and Don will lead the discussion - Decision KP Maps, created by @roundcrisis and discussion will be led by Andrea Info/Enroll: https://ti.to/bredemeyer/scaffoldingconversations

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@RuthMalan/116449825863681338 The next #PapersInSystems discussion is June 1. It’s a chance to showcase and discuss collaboration support tools (in the sense of models, canvases, and other scaffolding to support sociotechnical system design work) that folk in our community find useful. @roundcrisis will be joining us from NZ and @donaldegray from the US And you? We’ll discuss the CDE model and Decision KP maps, then open to discuss other canvases and models you b...

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  “How Do AI Agents Spend Your Money? Analyzing and Predicting Token Consumption in Agentic Coding Tasks” https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22750

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  The cost of being opinionated (forming and stating positions forcefully) is that you’ll tend to be wrong a lot. Because situations are messy. And the cost of being wrong, in credibility terms, is borne disparately, because the tolerances we afford, differ. (This is part of the “undertow” experienced by some groups.) So we navigate different forcefields. With more of an onus to nuance, and context sensitive clarity, on some. Both styles have organizational contributions to make.

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  RE: https://social.vivaldi.net/@RosaCtrl/116534921882348649 great use of the f-word!