Programming is Forgetting

This excellent transcription of a talk by Allison Parrish came across my radar again thanks to its mention in my friend and game jam collaborator Phil’s search manifesto, which gets at something I’ve been thinking about a lot in my work, which is that the act of modeling is something that inherently involves navigating biases:

You can see here the Unicode standard wants to say that all of these characters are the same. But you can see that actually as they’re used by speakers of these different languages, they’re not the same at all.

This is something inherent in how our brains work, in our need to organize, classify, and model. We love creating maps and then treating those as the territory.

I Am Not Okay. Are You Okay?

I don’t fit neatly into job descriptions. I never have. I am brilliant, resourceful, and intuitive. I write. I teach. I connect the dots others don’t see. I can talk to anyone. But none of that fits into a hiring algorithm.

This piece by Carrie Bickner about the current job market and the relationship of PTSD to tech work is great. I personally identify greatly with I don’t fit neatly into job descriptions – I’ve been described by colleagues as “a hypercube trying to fit into a children’s shape board” and this tracks.

DOGE as a National Cyberattack

As Bruce Schneier says, this is not normal:

This is beyond politics—this is a matter of national security. Foreign national intelligence organizations will be quick to take advantage of both the chaos and the new insecurities to steal US data and install backdoors to allow for future access.

Find Your People

if you do not already have your colleague’s mobile numbers, if you haven’t already set up secure backchannels to talk safely to each other—do so now

Having been through a variety of less-than-optimal endgames for employers, this is sage advice.