link.dump.04.24.2026
speeding, ice, consumption, and Luddites
I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.
You are what you consume is an interesting meditation from Noah Smith on one way of defining identity outside of what you produce. Very thought-provoking for me.
Interesting reasons why so many people are Right-Handed.
“We are moving from a world where features were bound by the constraint of how fast engineers could type to one where we are bound on human creativity, management of agentic systems, and how fast the product surface can absorb the output.” I think this is a little hippie-dippie overall but the sentiments make some sense to me.
Really interesting write-up on Tim Cook from Stratechery as he steps away from the CEO role. Learned quite a bit about Apple.
I love Cloudflare’s communication styles and the way they approach engineering problems. This write up about their internal AI engineering stack was an amazing read and taught me a bunch.
I keep meaning to write-up more about all the AI datacenter bullshit but for now I thought this was an interesting historical perspective on the Luddites from Sean Goedecke.
Meta gonna start Big Brothering to an interesting level and watching all their employees actions on their computer so they can use it to train AI. Well then.
If America’s So Rich, How’d It Get So Sad? by Derek Thompson. A good read and a great question.
I really like this wildly pessimistic take on the past fifty years by Freddie DeBoer: We Are (Still) Living in the Long Boring. I don’t necessarily agree with it, I naturally put more weight on the information age and the AI age but his points are solid -- we aren’t seeing a world that’s fundamentally changed that much from 50 years ago. Still circling the parking lot at Target, as he says. Of course, that’s assuming you didn’t have someone drop off your package. Many things have changed and many things, just, have not. So an interesting thing to noodle.
So now there’s a thing called “tokenmaxxing” that’s all about how many AI tokens you can burn at your job and…I just…wow. Anyways I do remember back in the mainframe days we used to get ranked by how much we made the mainframe crunch under our userid so this is essentially the same thing. An interesting badge of “honor” in this day and age. Here’s a related paywalled article too about JPMorgan measuring this stuff.
It’s an interesting framing that coding is a “meta-task” - meaning it’s a task that’s really about another task. It’s just problem-solving. So the better AI gets at coding the better it gets at general problem solving. I think I agree with this quite a bit.
Software Engineering my no longer be a lifetime career. I think I agree with this also. I don’t consider myself a “coder” though so I am hopeful I’ll be alright…at least until the AI can fully solve problems and completely do the “meta-task” which…I think we’re a long way from that right now.
An NYPD cop is coming up on 200 speeding tickets issued by cameras but, you know, since he’s a cop he doesn’t actually have to worry about them. Thus the eternal question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?