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Reginald

raganwald@social.bau-ha.us

<p>It says &quot;Reginald Scott Braithwaite-Lee&quot; on my 🇨🇦 passport. You may know me from a book like &quot;JavaScript Allongé,&quot; a talk like “Optimism,” or from my work at companies like PagerDuty, Sitraka, and GitHub.</p><p>Shipping software feeds my family; creating “wow!” feeds my soul. Social media is ephemeral, like or boost to keep my toots around.</p><p><a href="https://social.bau-ha.us/tags/Ultracrepidarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>Ultracrepidarian</span></a> <a href="https://social.bau-ha.us/tags/Canada" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>Canada</span></a> <a href="https://social.bau-ha.us/tags/Ontario" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>Ontario</span></a> <a href="https://social.bau-ha.us/tags/Ajax" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>Aja

Posts

  • Post #4359196

    Polish Tophat Dandy and Polish Tophat Punk. 🎩🐔 @sundogplanets@mastodon.social

  • Post #4172484

    The Agile Manifesto: We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: - Individuals and interactions over processes and tools - Working software over comprehensive documentation - Customer collaboration over contract negotiation - Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. https://agilemanifesto.org (1 of 2)

  • Post #4168902

    Bard Mehldau met JS Bach. And it was good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-6Ts64lm9g

  • Post #4141074

    Blackmailing into silence those who point out dangers to patient safety is a *totally normal* way to handle the rollout of a system that you sincerely believe is a radical improvement in medical care. https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/mayo-clinic-whistleblower-says-staff-015900709.html https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/07/09/lawsuit-alleges-mayo-clinic-cut-corners-with-ai 🎩 @whiskeysailor@reefahoy.boats

  • Post #4119097

    Coming soon: Defunding public education in favour of vouchers that redirect tax dollars to consumption pricing from tech companies. It is highly significant that Mr. Miklas’s pitch implies that giving money to AI vendors is better than kids sitting in classrooms being taught by humans. Just another step towards dismantling everything that actually made America great in favour of restoring the Gilded Age. https://xcancel.com/ycombinator/status/2079963722253214112#m

  • Post #4047563

    “What could be more disrespectful to the Homeric works Musk claims to love than stripping them of humanism that has made them immortal. Musk&#39;s ideal Odyssey is one rendered entirely in the hallucination of a computer that, like him, is unable to comprehend the very story it is telling, without the intimacy of human art and labor… As far as art is concerned, it&#39;s worth less than the water a data center polluted to make it.” Rolling Stone’s Nikki McCann Ramirez is taking no prisoners.

  • Post #3990433

    “You people are never happy. You asked for us to be inclusive, and here we are including Nazis, a reviled and persecuted group! Also, who the hell is this Karl Popper you keep mumbling about?&quot; —The Firefix Media Team #mozilla #firefox #twitter

  • Post #3990089

    &quot;We took a little time away from the Nazi Bar, but we noticed there&#39;s less pushback now for partying with the fash. So, back inside we go. Something-something, aren&#39;t-we-virtuous.&quot; #firefox #twitter #mozilla

  • Post #3890887

    “I no longer think freedom and democracy are compatible.” —Peter Thiel, Fascist Translation to English: “In order for the .01% to do whatever the fuck we want, we must strip the 99.99% of their rights, their freedoms, and especially, their ability to form governments that place any limitations on our power, whatsoever.”

  • Post #3889524

    RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116935681120949448 &gt; comments that say &quot;this is bad to do&quot; and then doing it right away. AI may not actually think, but it writes and comments code exactly like a human—to be more specific, a human trapped in a feature factory where good code and sustainable architecture is always “something we’ll fix later,” in a calendar that doesn’t have a month named “Later.” 🧵

  • Post #3863067

    “I never assumed that some huge clanking monster would stride down Fifth Avenue, devouring New York; I always feared that my own TV set or iron or toaster would, in the privacy of my apartment, when no one else was around to help me, announce to me that they had taken over, and here was a list of rules I was to obey. I never like the idea of doing what a machine says. I hate having to salute something built in a factory.” —Philip K. Dick discussing “Service Call” https://theworlddickmade.com/s...

  • Post #3852935

    “I recently read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It was oddly sad to read. The enthusiasm and optimistic view of open source and the future of software and craftsmanship. Looking at it in 2026… incredibly sad. “Forget the bazaar. Back to the cathedral.” —bitbasher on Hacker News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar 1/2

  • Post #3788601

    Recently, I was asked to attend a two-day course in “spec-driven development with agentic AI”. If you’ve not heard of it, spec-driven development is the idea that waterfall software development is good, actually, as long as you do it fast enough. —@samir@mastodon.functional.computer https://functional.computer/blog/llms-cant-program

  • Post #3554197

    Back in the 🍁 Day: 2015-07-01

  • Post #3554196

    WAY back in the day: Expo 67 in Montréal. That experience planted a seed that grew into the idea that one can be proud of one’s country and culture while welcoming and admiring other countries and their cultures. Happy Canada Day, and wherever you are… I hope you feel the same way about your place in the rich, varied tapestry that is humanity.

  • Post #3554195

    “For my fellow citizens, the law. For our oppressors, everything.”

  • Post #3455126

    Just because it’s old enough to vote doesn’t mean it’s wrong:

  • Post #3452000

    “The US is also a one-party state. But with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.” —Dr. Julius Nyerere, first President of Tanzania

  • Post #3428749

    RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116821892237077177 To paraphrase the late Marjane Satrapi: &quot;The difference between Buffalo Springfield and America is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between Gil Scott-Heron and America is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our Americas are very much the same.&quot;

  • Post #3158858

    And just like that—surprise!—one AI company bails out another AI company&#39;s grift. Google agreeing to rent compute from xAI (cough, &quot;SpaceX&quot;) magically makes them eligible for inclusion in the S&amp;P500. Americans, they are looting your life savings, the ones you earned through labour that they are gleefully replacing. Your descendants will never have the chance you had. https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/05/google-will-pay-spacex-920m-per-month-for-compute/

  • Post #2761480

    A joke I used to tell every coöp student and early-career person I interviewed: “We only hire senior developers. The trick is, we hire them earlier in their careers.” The same thing, without trying to be hip: “Senior engineers are what you get when you hire a junior, give them interesting problems, surround them with people who know more than they do, and wait. That&#39;s it.” https://andrewmurphy.io/blog/ai-didnt-kill-your-junior-pipeline-you-did 👇🏽

  • Post #2572455

    AI is the great regression to the mean. AI works best with English that looks like other English. It works best with code in languages where it has read the most code and the most words about code. AI leverages its training set. More training material is better. So it creates local optima where everything looks the same. It&amp;#39;s ideal for organizations that value fungibility. That&amp;#39;s not surprising, it appeals to those who want to eliminate the idiosyncrasies and unique gifts.

  • Post #2572452

    How do ya like them apples? 🧢 @jd

  • Post #2572176

    What AI has taught me is how poorly equipped most leadership teams are to assess, manage, and lead disruptive transformation. It&amp;#39;s not just that some companies are trapped, unable to adopt the change. It&amp;#39;s also that some companies are trapped into bungling the adoption in catastrophic ways.

  • Post #2570680

    RE: https://mas.to/@carnage4life/116579065965977226 If everyone else is reporting 85% success, and since surely we&#39;re doing as well as our peers, we can get away with reporting success based on the people&#39;s subjective assessments. We certainly wouldn&#39;t expect that saying we&#39;re betting the company on AI and firing the naysayers to distort the incentive to be truthful.

  • Post #2498218

    The Bullshitosphere is not new. Nicholas Negroponte built the Media Lab on its border. Wired Magazine was its State Medium for a decade. TED built a media empire within it. AI is not &amp;quot;the same old same old,&amp;quot; it&amp;#39;s different. https://www.todayintabs.com/p/it-s-lamer-than-you-think But what everything within the Bullshitosphere has in common is pandering to a culture hungry for cheat codes and the feeling that we found a crack in the universe that lets the light in. What...

  • Post #2497602

    The shrill whistles that Americans use to alert their neighbourhoods of invasions by brownshirts should inspire us to find collective ways to alert the public when someone is wearing RayBan/Meta glasses in public spaces. It&amp;#39;s upskirt photography all over again.

  • Post #2086608

    If you want to understand why a place called &amp;quot;Hacker News&amp;quot; is actually all about building bigger and more powerful digital oligarchies and not about resisting the status quo, I suggest you read Animal Farm, not 1984.

  • Post #1737863

    “If this tech can turn a 40-hour dev week into a 10-hour dev week, I might actually get to play catch with my kids in the afternoon instead of debugging state management issues”—a reddit account cheering for SpaceX(!) to acquire Cursor for B$60 I have questions about employees capturing a 300% productivity surplus that are easily answered by looking for ten hour work-weeks generated by the productivity gains of the last forty years. #SpaceX #Cursor #generativeAI

  • Post #1724069

    Terry Gilliam was right about everything. The incompetence. The banality of administrative evil. The fascism. And most notably, Mar-a-Lago Face and the lengths Republican Barbies will go to maintain it.