Sam's L33t Journal

I've been thinking about AI a lot this week, in particular this hilarious take on OpenAI's approach to AI development, "If OpenAI Made Black Holes" and the AI 2027 scenario (including this very good video summary).

Still trying to make more of AI coding tools in my job. Those can be a real boost to productivity. These models aren't the best software engineers, a bit stumble-y, but they're very, very versatile, and they can write fast. It's impressive, and unsettling. As Cory Doctorow notes, It's not about whether AI can do your job per se.

Work's been chaotic, I'm moving on to fifth manager since 2022 since ours is changing teams. This was my first time reporting to someone less senior than myself in terms of span on company, team, and career, but two of my previous three managers have been less senior in some of those metrics. I'm a little fish in a big pond, struggling, even thinking this means I'm not cut out for it.

I've started playing Patrick's Parabox a mind-bending block-pushing puzzle game. Great so far. Reminds me of Baba is You, in that it's a block-pushing puzzle game with a twist: In Baba is You the rules of the game are also blocks, in Patrick's Parabox the rooms of the puzzle are blocks.

I went to PyCon in Pittsburgh last weekend, once again traveling on my own dime and time, per the new way of things at Google. At least they comped me one of their sponsor passes for reg.

Cory Doctorow did the opening keynote, on his theory of the current malaise in the tech industry. Which was quite an opening to the conference: We'd like to thank our sponsors and now here's Cory Doctorow to rip them a new one. I'm a big fan of Doctorow, and think he has a lot of insight. I really do think tech companies have gotten themselves to a point in consolidation-friendly and competition-unfriendly political environment where not only are things getting shittier for users and other stakeholders, the companies have also really painted themselves into a corner and are suffering from stagnation (even in an environment where there's some really amazing development in technical capabilities). Doctorow highlights Jay Saurik's phrase about how the DMCA (and similar laws promulgated by treaty agreements and free-trade deals) prohibiting the circumvention of digital locks makes a de facto crime of "Felony Contempt of Business Model". Doctorow's suggestion that countries should retaliate against tariffs with IP liberalization instead of retaliatory tariffs (i.e. making it possible for their entrepreneurs and firms to compete with US big tech instead of just revenge-taxing their own consumers) is certainly an intriguing possibility!

I think the world Doctorow envisions would be so much better for a lot of people, including software engineers specifically. For those at startups, sure, you could actually get your "compete with the big players" start-up funded, for one thing. But also for those at big companies, which could actually compete with their rivals, instead of just carving out separate fiefdoms and taking occasional all-in/all-out-double-time shots at someone else's crown.

I got to spend a lot of time with my colleagues, especially meeting members of the new Python Team and catching up with members of the former one, many of whom seem to have settled into some really cool Python work at Meta (working on Instagram's high-performance CPython fork or the Rust implementation of their Python type-checker). It's so heartening to see people who enjoyed working with you and are happy to see you and would enjoy to work with you again. (Not that I don't get that on my current team, it's just very reduced.) And I ran into Itamar, a colleague back from my ITA days, and Allen Downey, my CS professor from Olin. Spent most of my time at the convention center, but got to take in a bit of local color. Ate some big sandwiches at Primanti's anyways.

I spent Friday morning in conversation with Cory Doctorow at the PSF lounge in the expo hall, wandered the expo floor, caught talks on new Python features that I hadn't read up on before (e.g. template strings, the effort to escape once and for all from the Global Interpreter Lock), heard about people's fascinating projects. All the talks will be posted to their YouTube channel over the next week or two. The Python community really is a pointedly liberal and activist one, too, there's a real insistence on "Python is for everyone". Python really did carve out a unique niche in its balance of usability and "batteries included" power.

After getting back: This week has been pretty busy with a lot of city and school events. This evening was Somerville's Slice of the City pizza-party get-together for our neighborhood. Tomorrow morning, Erica's class is participating in the Argenziano Wax Museum, an event where the third graders portray people from history (this year focusing on figures from the American Revolution). Tomorrow evening is Argenziano Heritage Night, a big cultural festival at the school that Erica looks forward to every year.

Julie was in NYC this weekend for a bike ride event with her dad and Kristin and Emilia. I had a beautiful weekend at home with Erica. I belatedly realized that it was the weekend of Somerville Open Studios, and we wound up exploring several art galleries tucked into the Milk Row neighborhood on our way back from climbing on Saturday. On Sunday, we went to see the open house at the Friend Museum (i.e the home of Martha Friend; the exterior alone is a notable Somerville landmark). We caught a few more gallery and outdoor showings on our way back. Other highlights of our weekend included the art of Lexi Havlin, Kelly Ann Clark McCormack, and Akira Fujita. The scale of the event is really impressive, with over 120 places in the city participating.

The city is so beautiful in the spring. The moment that stands out most in my memory was standing under some overhanging wisteria that a whole crew of carpenter bees was busily foraging with an audible buzz.

There was some scattered rain this weekend, but the bits between were beautiful. We mostly managed to avoid getting caught out in it.

We did a lot of art activities at home, too: The big project was egg-decorating, from the Easter basket Mary got for Erica. Erica made a cord bracelet, and built some Lego.

After finishing Death's Door, I've started playing Spiritfarer . Which I guess takes a completely different take (in terms of game mechanics and whole general vibe) on exactly the same topic.

Last week was a stressful week, and it was capped off by layoffs hitting my immediate area of the Goog. The layoffs were maximum chaos style, insta-cutoff, no transitions, total surprise for us but also several levels up the management chain. I'm still employed, but my team, which had gone from twelve active engineers at the start of last year to six by the end (not due to layoffs, just attrition, but organizational factors were in play), is now further down to four (with three active because one is on leave). I'd already thought things were pretty reduced, but now they're downright osseous (as in "cut to the ____" or worse, "we're _____"). I don't have a foot out the door, but at this point I feel like I ought to have both eyes out the window. I updated my resume, which I hadn't done for a long time.

This weekend was a pretty good break, at least. Did some cooking. I took Erica to see the latest special exhibit at the MFA ("Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits"). I've been enjoying playing Death's Door, a humorously spooky indie adventure game which in aesthetic seems somewhere between the newer 2D Zelda games, Persona, and Dark Souls.

Solo-parenting tonight and tomorrow because Julie is making a day-trip to the land of finance. Busy busy.

Some of my extended team was in town this week, so there were some team social things. Went to Flight Club in the Seaport, a darts place with bowling-alley-style computerized scoring. I'm probably better at darts than bowling, but pretty terrible at both. Still was fun, the food was quite good there, too.

The weather has been a little more overcast and foggy and cool, but reasonably nice.

This weekend, I did a bit of cooking on Saturday afternoon. Made homemade refried beans and seasoned beef and tortillas for tacos. The tortillas turned out as good as I wanted this time, I got the consistency right and prepared the pan right and didn't forget to add a little salt.

We decided to have a family movie outing, so we went to see Paddington in Peru at the Assembly AMC this afternoon. And we watched the previous installment in the series at home yesterday, which I paid half attention to while I cooked. Those movies are not at the top of my recommendation list, but they're okay.

It seems the Republican plan to crash the economy intentionally is underway for real now. But of course the GOP has really become the party of economic heterodoxy: Cut taxes to lower deficits, cut interest rates to lower inflation, increase unemployment to raise wages, tariffs on our closest trading partners to boost manufacturing. Great ideas lads, what else you got?

Meanwhile, Europe seems on the verge of a broader war. JD Vance and Trump blew up negotiations with Ukraine, allegedly this is Zelensky's fault for insufficient pandering, as usual everyone has moral agency except Republicans.

In more trivial but possibly related matters, Boston Organics closed last week. It was bought by GrubMarket in 2022. Their prices went up pretty substantially this year. Between that and continued competition (HelloFresh was somewhat surprisingly promoting their business by canvassing door-to-door the other week), I guess they didn't retain enough of a customer base to keep going.

Any good news? Well, if you need a distraction, Frieren is on Netflix now. It's an incredibly good show (it jumped all the way to the top of the highest rated shows on MyAnimeList, which is no small feat; it's definitely one of my all-time favorites, I discussed it here before). If you like the fantasy genre at all and haven't caught it yet, maybe now's the opportunity to give it a try.

This week is Erica's school break, and I took Erica to Cleveland to visit my parents while Julie gets a focus week back at home. Had the Monday holiday off, but the rest of the week was "working from elsewhere" for me.

Last Sunday, our travel day, was very snowy overnight and rain and heavy clouds all day in Boston. Bad weather in Cleveland, too. As a result, our 10AM flight became a 4PM flight. Erica had bought a matching sweater-and-sweatpants set with her allowance at Target on Sunday which she wanted especially for the trip, she definitely got the most use out of her airport loungewear. Still, overall it was a reasonably pleasant travel day. And it was in a way lucky that we had to wear boots in the morning to wade to our airport ride, and thus had to have our boots and couldn't neglect to pack them. It's been snowy all week here, so we've been wading through snow all week.

There was another brief delay in our flight as the plane had to do an abrupt go-around before landing on the second attempt. It was a pretty dramatic maneuver, and someone a few rows back form us was overcome by motion sickness and lost their lunch. But of course it could've been worse.

On Monday, we got to catch up with Dan and Anne and Isaac and baby Naomi, who has doubled in size since I last saw her and become extremely engaged and vocal. I also got to catch up with Markos Monday evening, played a bit of kitchen table Magic. Took me back, though I kept embarrassingly misreading the cards.

On Tuesday evening, we went to a concert at CIM featuring Olga and Daniel Kaler with Michelle Bushkova. Was really great. Had to duck out at intermission because of kid bedtime (but had thought that might be the case).

On Wednesday evening, we saw a "Picasso and Paper" special exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

On Thursday evening, we went out to dinner at Tita Flora's, a Filipino restaurant which was really good.

Friday evening, had a nice Shabbat dinner at home and my Uncle Jonathan came over.

And of course Erica has been up to all sorts of activities with my parents during my workdays.

For lunch, I made excursions to a bunch of places nearby, mostly on Larchmere. I did get to Michael's Diner in Shaker Square, which I love (it's a wonderful, classic train-station diner). But Shaker Square does seem, as always, a bit cursed. A new cafe will be opening in the again-vacant cafe spot soon, at least. Brandon Chrostowski's restaurants Edwins Restaurant and Edwins Too closed on Monday, relocating to the former Nighttown jazz club space. Didn't get to go there again, but fancy for a random weekday, but at least I did get to go a few times. Lovely memories. I'm sure they will make the most of the Nighttown space, too, it's a great space. I did go to the other Edwins restaurant in the area, their bakery and deli venture, which as far as I know is staying put. Had an excellent pastrami on rye. The restaurants are all run by Chrostowski's nonprofit, which has a mission of helping former prisoners with reentry support and job training in the hospitality industry.

Hopefully tomorrow's return trip will go smoothly. Weather will be better this time at least.

One sad note from last week was news of the death of Donald Shoup, a titan of urban planning. I discussed his book, The High Cost of Free Parking, on my other blog many years ago. Shoup's studies centered around the thesis that suburban city-planning practices amount to a staggeringly high subsidy paid to drivers, especially as those spread back into urban areas. That subsidy is hidden because it doesn't come as cash transfers but via land use, either through direct allocation of public land, or through regulation of private land use (in particular parking minimums).

This car-centered design for some not great land-use choices in suburban areas, too: In terms of beauty and utility, no one enjoys a parking desert. But when you carry those practices back to urban areas, the subsidy becomes insane. Think of the costs of storing a car, for example, and you get the idea of the kind of value drivers are getting from space dedicated to roads and, especially, free-to-use parking.

This subsidy is high enough to leave the usual market tradeoffs between different transportation alternatives totally deranged, and the ones that are no out-of-pocket cost to drivers get a little further distorted by the "psychology of free". For example, the book describes how an alarming percentage of traffic in some areas is not transit between destinations but rather "cruising" in search of a free street parking spot. In some cases, this car subsidy distorts the market enough that alternatives aren't available. Or alternatives are outright prohibited, for example when someone who would prefer to buy an apartment without parking is unable to do so.

Shoup's central policy proposal was to increase the price of parking until it's only mostly full, similar with related goods. Public funds raised this way can be spent on a variety of things, effectively redirecting the subsidy, presumably to better uses than "more circling the block" or "more sitting in traffic".

This sort of stuff has been in the news lately with NYC's adoption of congestion pricing, which had some immediate, fairly dramatic benefits for drivers and non-drivers alike. Something that another, worse Donald is trying to crush. (Bike lanes, too, for good measure.) In the view of this sort of "conservatism", there is no concern for the effectiveness of markets or the rationality of policy tradeoffs, there is no subsidy too high for the favored mainstream. Despite this continuous opposition, the struggle for sound urban policy and real renewal has come a long way. I hope Donald Shoup's influence on the future of American cities far outlives Donald Trump's.

Snowy morning this morning. So much not to write about this week.

At work, my manager abruptly left the company due to [reason redacted by management; as near as I can tell he wasn't technically laid off but maybe something of the sort]. So that's three changes of manager since I changed teams only three years ago, in addition to the engineering headcount dropping by half in the past year.

In the news, the US executive department seems to be trying to do reorg-by-Elon-Musk, specifically having Musk do the equivalent of cutting the power to whatever he doesn't like at first glance. I want to emphasize that Musk is inevitably going to find a bunch of stuff conservatives find dumb / expensive, specially since they take both "helping people" and "raising the reputation of American democracy" as non-goals. So don't get caught up in an eternal Gish gallop about whether this or that program is a good idea, on the premise that it's reasonable to judge that from a title and headline amount.

Musk is a guy who believes he is able to acquire at-a-glance expertise at basically anything, but he's also a dum-dum who uncritically takes up stupid right-wing conspiracy theories. He's become very conspiracy minded, and seems to see smoking-gun evidence of massive fraud in observations adequately explained by "old computer systems are old".

Having the (advisor to the) President line-item manage the whole government regardless of whatever Congress says is also not how our Constitutional system is supposed to work, but all Republicans in Congress seem fully in support of this approach, and that's unlikely to change until they manage to really obviously break something.

Let's see, what else... maybe a little media talk:

I finished playing The Outer Wilds. As I said earlier, I really recommend you check it out spoiler-free. It's a really remarkable example of knowledge-as-progression in a game. As is often the case in such games, key bits of information are eventually obtainable in some explicit form (e.g. writing or diagrams, something that is diegetically explaining the thing). But in this game there are so many instances where you can figure out those key insights just through careful observation and deduction, which is really rewarding

I also finished the second season of Megalobox, which was really very well done. I think the remarkable thing about that is how different it manages to be than the first season, which is a pretty typical sports story, an underdog-to-champion arc. The second season jumps ahead to start in media res a story about being a former champion, struggling with the

Finally, I've returned to playing Dicey Dungeons. Still a very fun and funny game, but some of the challenges are quite tricky.

Mystery Hunt was this weekend, run by my team this time. I helped a minimal amount, but I did work hard through the actual run, mostly answering a run of hint requests. The hunt had a noir mystery theme, and the team did a phenomenal job and wrote some great puzzles.

In other news, the Biden administration wrapped up with an bizarre, implausible declaration that the ERA had actually been ratified years ago. (I mean props to Virginia, but that was in January of 2020, so why didn't Biden say anything about that before now. And it would require courts to decide that Congress can't place a deadline on ratification and states can't rescind their decision to ratify before an amendment is approved, it's doubtful they'd agree with either.) And also blanket preemptive pardons for his siblings and siblings-in-law, Mark Milley, and the Jan 6th Committee. I can see the perspective that the people in question have a patriotic duty to defend in court against any baseless, vindictive prosecutions Trump decides to bring. But also can see the perspective that you shouldn't just stand by and let people be put through that, when Trump has given some very strong indication that he intends to bring vindictive prosecutions for nonexistent crimes, without regard to whether he has anything that could reasonably prove a case to a jury. Gruesome stuff.

Trump spent the days before his inauguration launching two separate cryptocurrency scams. He kicked off his administration by withdrawing from the WTO and Paris Climate agreements, pardoning the rioters who attacked police officers as a small component of his plan to illegally toss entire states' 2020 elections, setting up legal efforts to trash the Constitutional guarantees of citizenship, and preparing for mass deportations. Elon Musk gave the Nazi salute twice in a row at his inauguration speeches. He's such a damned edgelord, the "how could you think I would do something like [thing I just obviously did]" gaslighting is the whole point to these people. Well, half the point. (To clarify, there are lots of gestures where you end up with a straight arm and hand angled down at some point in the gesture which don't look like that, this is video. And that is not how a my heart goes out gesture is generally done.)

The speech that most comes to my mind today is this one.