‮Jeff Eaton

Geneva 9pt, with the dedicated Italics version that shipped with System 7, ftw

jeff goals

Filing this under “when domain language goes whoops”

As someone who lived through the rise of XP and Agile and then Enterprise Agile and so on, I am grimly anticipating a future where someone has all their agents conducting standups

Reminds me of how much time my (religious) middle school science book spent harping on Larmack and Lysenko.g

Note that I’m not making a qualitative judgement about the utility of the output artifact; I’m describing the difference between artifact production and acts of communication that produce artifacts.

The thing that keeps getting blasted past with ai-versus-artist comparisons is that *communicative intent* is a fundamental part of human expression. Words and music and paintings and shit are the how, not the what, and there is no “what” for an LLM, only patterns of “how”.

everybody realizes the layers of rigor being added to make agentic coding reliable is just reinventing waterfall from first principles, right? we all get that?

i mean, i’m not knocking it, specs matter once outcomes matter! but we all see this, right?

Came here to say she’d do it with style.

I don’t trust the unjerrified

Ultimately it’s just the Douglas Adams’ “anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things” line, but for virtue and product SKUs

Starbucks, being a corporation, can do no *wrong*; it is a pure expression of Market. We, as lowly humans, demonstrate our virtue by admiring — but ultimately abstaining from — its temptations

My hot take: It’s the blandest possible framing of the “capitalism brought us prosperity, but our decadence will be our downfall” RETVRN-brain

I’m always impressed when boosters insist that AI breaking everything will “force the powers that be to institute UBI” and similar arguments. How optimistic! How bold! Perhaps consult with the people whose starvation you believe will “force the issue”…

METRIC TIME

MAKE.MONEY.FAST

Years back during one of the United mergers my honorific and middle initial somehow got baked into my name. flights got booked as “Jeffmrc Eaton” and BOY did tsa not find that amusing

like, again, in one continuity, for a while, but don’t worry

ayo I don’t want to alarm you but this year BATMAN WILL DIE

I did one of the tests a few months back — I liked it a lot, am worried about how the experience will devolve with pvp everywhere AND relatively long cycle times between play sessions, but I’m definitely gonna be playing the hell out of it for a while

an extreme example of load bearing catchphrases (in this case, “Believed to Be Death” as an approved version of something we might colloquially call “potential casualty” or “possible death”) being swapped in for more syntactically sensible words and phrases, disregarding the result

half a pack, same as in town

Autocorrect did me NO FAVORS

Berlin experience unlocked: late night food run with Rob after 12h of meetings results in a complex “bartering Marlboro Reds for donner kabob” scenario

We’ve gotten used to AOC and her team’s presence, but her social media arrival was like an apex predator arriving on a sleepy herbivore island

Relentlessly cheerful curiosity about the interesting things other people think and do never fails

WE need it

Somebody needs to make little Posting Suits for rats to see if they like it

welp, guess my next week is spoken for

We need FEWER now-relevant Stross stories, not MORE /cc @knowtheory.net