Steve Smith

"TDD slows me down"

Good

Google to pay $68 million over allegations its voice assistant eavesdropped on users Class-action lawsuit alleged that Google's voice assistant illegally recorded and shared private conversations with advertisers.

Do you remember when people were saying "I think my phone is listening to me, i'm getting ads for stuff I spoke about" and people said "They arent listening to you, they're just this good at predicting your interests"?

Well, it happens they were doing exactly that.
www.cbsnews.com/news/google-...

Me!

Why The "10x Engineer" Is A Dangerous Myth | with Charity Majors 📽️ AVAILABLE NOW

Watch: youtu.be/aDCOuZ80lDQ

YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio)

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Stay free

NEW: Our investigation for @thenerve_news reveals not only that Peter Thiel’s Palantir is completely enmeshed in our critical national infrastructure.

It’s also the ‘cloud support’ for our nuclear weapons system 🤯
1/

www.thenerve.news/p/palantir-t...

TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes According to its new privacy policy, TikTok now collects more data on its users, including their precise location, after majority ownership officially switched to a group based in the US.

BREAKING: Now that TikTok is under US-based ownership, the social media app potentially collects more detailed information about its users, including precise location data.

My latest for @wired.com:

www.wired.com/story/tiktok...

Object-love is originally narcissistic

Distractions from the Beckhams

For those keeping score, Bellingcat, The New York Times Visual Investigation Team, & Washington Post's Visual Forensic team have all published analysis showing the ICE shooter wasn't in the path of Renee Nicole Good’s vehicle when he shot her, contradicting statements by the President & his cronies

I feel like I haven’t even been properly lied to about the purposes of this war

a guy wearing a “i ❤️ ny” cap reading the qur’an in one hand and the communist manifesto in the other

day one in mamdani’s new york

Mayor Mamdani 🫶

You put that there

Thank you. Stay independent, stay private!

It's been a big year at Signal. Thanks to you, more & more people are speaking privately and freely. Thanks to you, we hit the top of app stores in multiple countries & served as critical global comms infrastructure. It's an honor to build Signal for you, with your support. 🩵

immigrants score the lowest on tests, but they also take all our jobs, while at the same time taking all the welfare and buying all the homes

YouTube video by Modern Software Engineering We Tried Trunk-Based Development... The Results Were Shocking.

Trunk-Based Development has a reputation for being fast, fearless, and incredibly effective… but does it actually work in the real world?

In this video, we have a company providing us the details of how they put Trunk-Based Development to the test...

WATCH ➡️ youtu.be/CR3LP2n2dWw

We Tried Trunk-Based Development... The Results Were Shocking | @davefarley77.bsky.social

TOMORROW NIGHT @ 7PM (UK)

Subscribe & hit the notifications bell 🔔 so you never miss an upload! ➡️ youtube.com/@ModernSoftw...

Test Desiderata 2.0 - Coding Is Like Cooking Kent Beck is one of the original authors of JUnit, an open source tool that kick-started a huge shift in programmer behaviour that I and others have found immensely valuable. In 2019 he published his ...

I am really enjoying having some time between contracts at the moment... I just wrote an article about the test desiderata - this has been on my mind to write about for several years at this point! coding-is-like-cooking.info/2025/12/test...

It's crossed my mind

It's always a Wordpress plugin

Perfect, thank you. I wish that Newcrafts 2019 video was still online. I frequently refer back to it

You were saying the naive/common sense view is instrumentalist but we should be thinking about postphenemonology?

@ethicistforhire.bsky.social do you have a canonical online reference for your Newcrafts 2019 argument that "it's just a tool" is insufficient/naive

I tried but @davefarley77.bsky.social refused to let me press the scale button 🆙️

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features."

There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

How can there be a bubble when the tulip farmer is so rich?

TDD is more important than ever Lately, I've been reminded of the heady days of my agile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development) youth by how often I've found myself asking, "how will we test this?" As I've mentioned frequently on podcasts and recent Q&As about AI, an odd paradox has emerged in the software industry: 1. Developers experienced in agile engineering practices like test-driven development tend to be among the most skeptical of AI code generation, often citing fears that software quality is being thrown out the window 2. Developers experienced in agile engineering practices like test-driven development tend to be among the most successful at building great software with coding agents, often citing creative techniques enabling agents to verify the correctness of their work In the late 2000s, I always knew I was talking to a solid programmer if their first question upon being handed a complex task was to ask, "how will we test this?" Agile developers learned back then that literally everything hinged on establishing a fast, reliable, automated way to verify your code fulfilled its intended purpose. Without tests, you can't refactor aggressively, deploy frequently, or delete safely. Over the 2010s, many of us learned patterns and heuristics that allowed us to take shortcuts and tone down our testing zeal in the name of pragmatism and efficiency, but the underlying skill of concocting ways to verify our code never stopped being valuable. Well, here we are again. In 2025, the only thing that matters when it comes to coding agents like Claude Code and Codex CLI is to ensure they are equipped with the tools they need to independently verify the correctness of their work.

TDD is more important than ever