Bridget Phillips

The truth, it burns

Good thread. OSS at most companies is really just a handful of dedicated individuals that the company loves to advertise but constantly threatens

No idea! Legally, this is the end of the road for this specific case. Not sure what else is going on

Petition for write of certiorari denied in Thaler vs Perlmutter.

This means that AI generated works continue to be ineligible for copyright.

www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docke...

Square literally does not know or care about any of this. No reason to participate.

Many projects are effectively maintained outside the company now, and those engineers may choose to fork simply as a way to indicate that Block is not involved.

coffee tea

My CEO told me efficiency keeps eating his companies so I asked how many companies he has and he said he just goes to the VCs and gets a new company afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding startups to efficiency and then his daughter started crying

Ugh, the truth. It burns

WorkManager does indeed render you vulnerable to these problems. As does any persistent storage

God, I love the wire protocol problem

I'm like a moth flying into that flame

You are such a force of nature. I hope we work together again!

Ugh

You are an excellent colleague

Very sad it had to end like this. The Cash Android team and my design systems team was really special and I'm going to miss everyone.

My big lesson for the week is: don't ask the monkey's paw for a free laptop

You would have to be pretty damned sure that those engineers are incapable of building anything that might steal your business to cut loose that much talent in one go.

Estimates are that 70% of Block engineering was laid off today.

I suspect it will be a different watershed moment: Jack has just torpedoed Square and Cash App, and when real people start losing real money as a result this will become the horror story that people point to when warning of the limits of AI driven coding.

He's been trying to run the company like it's a startup.

It's very much not a startup. And while I could see a case for some fat trimming, he has far more value to lose than he seems to understand. And he is giving his ear to very bad counsel on how much value he will lose with this move.

i dont know if its always been like this but among the elites theres just no sense of responsibility to be good stewards of the society thats given them everything

Truly was the best job for a good long minute there.

Almost all of Cash Mobile Engineering was laid off today.

None of us have any clue what their rubric was for choosing who stayed and who went, but whatever it was, I'm on the job market again!

It does show me a nice dynamic progress display now, which is very useful because I can sit and stare at it, asking myself "What the hell are you doing that is taking so long"

Pleased to report that my vibe coded jujutsu stacked PR github pusher really sucks ass and is slow as balls

I mean it was zac's idea

What is my involvement with Metro?

I advocate vigorously for things like naming the proposal system "MEEPs"

Metro 0.11.0 is out now, along with a new proposal system called MEEPs!

www.zacsweers.dev/metro-0-11-0...

Release: github.com/ZacSweers/me...

Stop worrying about what happens if we let kids transition. Worry about what happens if we don’t. What’s so scary about a transgender child?

Going to reshare this again for no real reason whatsoever.

www.vox.com/policy-and-p...

THERE IS WIDESPREAD PUBLIC MISUNDERSTANDING of both the degree of extreme wealth concentration and how little the very rich actually pay. The public has been peppered with arguments such as this opening paragraph in the lead story in the current Economist magazine on wealth and wealth taxes: “America’s top 1% enjoy a fifth of the economy’s income and pay nearly a third of its federal taxes.” This is a big lie. In fact, the very rich hardly pay any tax. The statistic refers to taxes on wage and salary income, but America’s wealthiest have almost none of that. Virtually all of their income comes from investments and capital gains. And capital gains are taxed only when “realized”—that is, when a stock or other property is sold. According to Ray Madoff, a professor of tax law at Boston College, Mark Zuckerberg is paid the lowest salary at Meta—a dollar a year. Jeff Bezos has a salary of just under $82,000 a year, low enough for him to claim the Child Tax Credit, which he did in 2011, according to reporting from ProPublica.

The top 1 percent hold total wealth of over $55 trillion. That’s more than ten times the amount of total annual taxation on everyone else. If they don’t sell stock, how do the mega-rich extract the billions they need to live on? They borrow against their stock holdings, and to add insult to injury, the interest on that borrowing is tax-deductible. And then when they bestow that wealth to their progeny, their children get to restart the appreciation clock from zero, through the “stepped-up basis” loophole—wiping out all capital gains tax liability. Thus has America created a theoretically permanent hereditary aristocracy. All of this and more is contained in Madoff’s splendid short book, titled The Second Estate, named for the aristocracy in pre-revolutionary France. One of the privileges of that aristocracy was that the second estate paid no taxes. Taxes were for the common people, just as in today’s America.

The numbers here are really important.
prospect.org/2026/02/24/t...

This applies to everything, by the way.

The best engineers I know also visibly have a lot of fun doing it.

Often in my speeches, I say how the best activism rarely looks like activism. It looks like doing something you love and bringing it to others. When they connect with you in that way, it creates a sort of cognitive dissonance that can actually change hearts and minds.

Dear Competition Bureau Canada...