Poetry in Neon

The Portico of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge the other night. The illuminated quotes are a part of the work of the American contemporary artist Glenn Ligon which can be found in galleries throughout the building. If you’re interested, here’s a video.

Quote of the Day

” We stand at a crossroads. One path leads to despair, the other to destruction. Let’s hope we make the right choice.”

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bonnie “Prince” Billy | Our Home

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The End of Programming as We Know It

Tim O’Reilly is one of the sharpest observers of the tech industry around, and this long essay is an example of what he does best — to escape from “the sociology of the last five minutes” that plagues coverage of the industry. You don’t have to be a programmer to appreciate it.

Sample:

AI will not replace programmers, but it will transform their jobs. Eventually much of what programmers do today may be as obsolete (for everyone but embedded system programmers) as the old skill of debugging with an oscilloscope. Master programmer and prescient tech observer Steve Yegge observes that it is not junior and mid-level programmers who will be replaced but those who cling to the past rather than embracing the new programming tools and paradigms. Those who acquire or invent the new skills will be in high demand. Junior developers who master the tools of AI will be able to outperform senior programmers who don’t. Yegge calls it “The Death of the Stubborn Developer.”

My ideas are shaped not only by my own past 40+ years of experience in the computer industry and the observations of developers like Yegge but also by the work of economic historian James Bessen, who studied how the first Industrial Revolution played out in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts during the early 1800s…

TL;DR. AI is not the end of programming. But what programming is will change.

My commonplace booklet

Screenshot

From “Could the world decouple from US Trade?” in the FT

The answer, oddly enough, is that apart from poor Mexico and Canada, is “yes”. So why are governments all over the world quaking in their handmade boots?

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• “In the Machiavellian sense, corruption is not just about illegal and legalized bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined.”

From “Corruption, Tariffs, and US Renewal” by Eric Schliesser on the Crooked Timber blog.

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