Gordon Weakliem

Doctrow nailed it, reverse centaurs are going to be a job category

I feel like most of the time, it's a spreadsheet. Currently on a project with this intricate flowchart, but the left side of the flow chart is 2 individuals. The whole process is the corporation trying to extract information from two of its employees.

My afternoon yesterday: figure out what I have to do to our multilayered corp Terraform environment to deploy a second workflow from the same git project. 3 months of working with this framework, I can't change it but I have to use it. If it were a vendor I could bring more pressure to bear.

Yet, your typical engineering firm has dozens and dozens of custom Excel sheets that are excellent SaaS in disguise. Basic CRUD and spreadsheet like software that is super easy to ship by small team (even more with LLMs), with people who can actually use it should you listen to what they want.

Me versus the AI coming for my job

In the Age of AI, you should leave breadcrumbs. People are worried about knowledge transfer. The answer is, leave breadcrumbs. One thing we've lost is the engineer's notebook, or more simply, a diary. You don't even have to write it. Just dictate it to your assistant, like in Mad Men.

Great now I need to stop by microcenter and buy a Mac mini

Finally got around to reading this. Went through a big Stafford Beer kick about 1.5 years ago and it seemed interesting but academic, this frames the ideas so nicely for current tech.

Said it so many times, it's all projection. These people say these things were being done because it's what _they_ would do if they were in power. Now they're in power and here we are.

I think that Honnold and most free climbers have accepted that they will probably die on a mountain. In "The Alpinist", I think Reinhold Messner (in his 80s) says that he can't believe he's lived this long and all of his contemporaries died in mountaineering accidents.

Some bullshit. They died by another’s hand, that’s murder

I’ve heard and read several things lately that were leading me to this belief, but I think this is the right framing.

GDL has so much great art but I missed these when I was there, where does one find them?

Yeah this one actually inspired me to get on X. It's not a good look. His X handle is even suspended now.

Employer restricts us to using only Copilot, which has really chafed. Today I figured out how to set up copilot-cli and my day got immensely better

Why Smart Ideas in Tech Keep Failing (And Why We Suck at Selling) Podcast Episode · The Joe Reis Show · 01/16/2026 · 16m

Joe Reis: "Data is where abstraction goes to die" 💯

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...

China’s Qwen and DeepSeek edge out US AI models in Christian values benchmark US start-up Gloo’s Flourishing AI Christian benchmark tested how the output of AI models ‘help people flourish’, CEO Pat Gelsinger said.

Hot take: Chinese culture is more conservative than western culture, at least the segment of western culture that builds leading AI models. Training sets are culturally biased. Therefore:

www.scmp.com/tech/article...

Yann LeCun's advice for young students wanting to go into AI Former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun said current and prospective CS students need to focus on skills "with a long shelf life."

The same advice was passed around 20 years ago. Then mobile and the whole JS explosion happened. Every generation gets to rediscover the same lessons.

I'm confused though, didn't everyone agree that a liberal arts degree is worthless?

www.businessinsider.com/yann-lecun-a...

Honestly it's really surprising that Meta or Google haven't built an internal model trained on their own code base (or samples). I'm not sure if the solution here would be training, or RAG, or MCP or something else?

The company I work at has a lot of homegrown terraform, the biggest challenge is working with our AWS IAM setup. I’m trying to figure out how to educate copilot on that codebase. Yes, Copilot is all we get to use

Got my Reachy last night, up and running and passed a few basic tests. Assembly took about 2-3 hours as advertised. Camera seems very dark I’m wondering if it’ll be able to do facial recognition. The hand following app worked ok though. @hf.co

YouTube video by AI Tinkerers Beyond Instructions: How Beads Lets AI Agents Build Like Engineers

Interesting interview with Steve Yegge. I didn’t realize he and Ryan Carson both work at Sourcegraph. I’d like to see an interview with both of them, they seem to have a bit different approaches.

youtu.be/s96O9oWI_tI?...

A wide, satirical infographic titled **“THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO ‘HAVING VISION’”** in large blue capital letters across the top, with a patterned light-blue background. **Panel 1: “1. SYNTHESIZE YOUR PURPOSE WITH BUZZWORDS”** On the left is a cartoon brain labeled **“RANDOM THOUGHT”** feeding into a machine labeled **“CORPORATE JARGON GENERATOR.”** Speech bubbles coming out of the machine say: **“LEVERAGE SYNERGY,” “DISRUPT PARADIGMS,” “PIVOT TO EXCELLENCE,” “THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX,” “GLOBAL INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM.”** Below is the caption: **“Just add ‘Global’ or ‘Innovative’ for maximum impact!”** **Panel 2: “2. EMBRACE THE VAGUE”** On the left, a photo-style image of a person holding a smartphone with charts, overlaid with a large red X. Text below reads: **“TOO SPECIFIC (AMATEUR).”** On the right is an abstract, colorful cloud with a thought bubble icon. Text below reads: **“VISIONARY (PRO)”** and smaller text: **“If it’s not wildly open to interpretation, it isn’t a vision.”** **Panel 3: “3. FOSTER A CULTURE OF ‘ALIGNMENT’”** A cartoon boardroom scene with a smiling figure at the head labeled **“VISIONARY LEADER.”** The leader has a halo above their head. Surrounding them are seated employees with empty speech bubbles. One large speech bubble above the leader reads: **“We are all fully aligned behind the strategic imperatives!”** Caption below: **“Achieve Total Alignment (i.e., Nobody Questions Anything)”** **Panel 4: “4. THE ‘VISIONARY’S’ TOOLKIT”** Four icons with labels: – A megaphone labeled **“BROADCAST, DON’T LISTEN”** – A VR headset labeled **“IGNORE REALITY”** – A stack of inspirational images labeled **“SUBSTITUTE INSPIRATION FOR STRATEGY”** – A shield with a clock labeled **“FUTURE-PROOFING SHIELD (DEFLECT ACCOUNTABILITY)”** **Panel 5: “5. THE ULTIMATE GOAL: THE ‘VISION’ PLAQUE”** A framed gold plaque on a wall reads: **“TO BE THE WORLD’S LEADING PROVIDER OF HOLISTIC, FUTURE-FORWARD SOLUTIONS.”** Below, small text says: **“Congratulations! You’ve ach…

friday pro tips

“It's the bubble that sucks, not these applications. The bubble doesn't want cheap useful things. It wants expensive, "disruptive" things: Big foundation models that lose billions of dollars every year.”

“This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes.”

+1. Great article

Nomads looked at this setup and realised the problem wasn't discipline; it was design. If balance was impossible inside the architecture, then the architecture had to change. Rather than treating work as the fixed centre of a life, they treated it as one component among many and rearranged the rest accordingly. They worked in sprints, reclaimed weekday mornings, took long walks between calls, or used downtime to build skills that fed back into their professional world. Days became flexible units, not fixed boxes on a calendar. Their argument wasn't against work; it was against the assumption that work should dictate the shape of everything else. Once work became portable, the rest of life could be rearranged around it.

What if nomads were never the outliers? globalnatives.substack.com/p/nomad-work-p… (yes. I enjoyed my nomad years: 2013-2018). #DigitalNomads #RemoteWork #flexibility

In this special edition of ThursdAI recorded live from the AI Engineer Code Summit in New York, Alex sits down with the teams behind Google's massive week of... ThursdAI Special: Google's Big week - Anti Gravity, Gemini 3 and Nano 🍌 with Kevin, Ammaar and Kat

Episode is live on blog:
thursdai.news/googlers

If you like the direct source, the pod is up on YT as well (feel free to sub)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eew...

And everywhere where you get your podcasts, just type ThursdAI

Those of you in the Fort Worth area should come and say hello! Sunday December 14 9a-12p. At Avoca Coffee 1311 Magnolia. Book signings, Q&A, fun all around!

Wikipedia talks about a very different critical take.

“[the painting] embodies his refusal to be daunted by newness or enslaved by traditional artistic values. His quest to find the beauty and grandeur of modern experience, and leave the past behind, is magnificently on display…”