@mark@toot.fallenpegasus.com
I learn amazing things, and meet awesome people, and introduce them to each other. Shape Rotator. Quiet Mind. Fan of good pens, fine paper, deep writing, home grown food, skilled work.
| _mark_atwood | |
| links | https://linktr.ee/_mark_atwood |
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The Contributor Covenant claims jurisdiction over "conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting." By whom? In what setting? The vagueness is the point. Here's a code of conduct that governs only what it can actually enforce.
https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/a-code-of-conduct-that-knows-its
Most open source projects have no AI contribution policy. The ones that do say 'welcome' or 'banned' without saying what they actually expect. Here's a policy that says what it means: correct, tested, and you're responsible for what you submit.
https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/an-ai-contribution-policy-that-says
I hate talking on the phone to businesses. Hate. It. If you don't want a voice agent calling you, put up a useful website. The solution was always in your hands.
18 months ago I spent weeks wrestling GPT-4 through a parsing project it couldn't quite hold in its head. This weekend Opus rebuilt the whole thing in one pass. That's the delta.
Every executive memoir has the same beat: "I had to make some hard calls." Ask what it cost them. The answer is almost always nothing.
AI safety guardrails blocked me from filing a security advisory for a bug the AI helped me find. The bugs are still there. The doomers and the IC hawks built a policy environment where this was inevitable, and now they get to pretend it's safety.
The Open Source Contributor Covenant was a document written by people in a particular emotional state, during a particular cultural moment. The problems were structural, and nobody in the adoption chain was reading for them.
The AI regulation cluster is already dirty, running on stolen money. It's about to get worse. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/where-the-sociopaths-go
Four pieces on why engineering process exists. Spoiler: it was never about the code. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-three-brains-series
TOS Scotty was honest about what was impossible, then reality bent under pressure. Film Scotty says 'impossible,' doesn't mean it, and the audience is told his whole reputation was fraud. The rewrite didn't come from bad writers. It came from an industry that lost access to inside accounts of competence.
https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-deconstruction-of-scotty-as-an
Priority isn't just "what's important." It's "what does my manager's manager think is important, filtered through power." The structures we built are armor against hierarchy, not aids for work.
I surveyed seven sources on AI bug tracking. All of them are making priority assignment faster. None are asking whether priority is the right field.
Six AI agents found 106 bugs in an hour. I spent the next hour not ranking them. Ranking is what you do when you can only fix one at a time.
https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/priority-is-a-rationing-artifact
Communist Party branch meetings were Anglican church services with the mercy removed. The children who sat through both are now old enough to tell us what that was like from the inside.
https://markatwood.substack.com/p/all-the-worst-features-of-church
The spec came first. A 1000-line protocol sketch, fed to Claude with constraints and complaints. "Have we accidentally required a CA?" "I don't like PSK." "Where should IPv6 addresses come from?" The conversation became a 14-chapter specification.
Spec-First AI Development
https://reviewcommit.substack.com/p/spec-first-ai-development
A thesis fails if it's wrong. A persuader fails if the money doesn't move. Pournelle wrote both, and the one that moved money ate the one that was right.
https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-strategy-of-technology-was-a
How to recognize the Church of Evil by its tenets.
I audited C2PA when I was at Amazon. We pulled out. The world needs provenance infrastructure. Adobe's version is regulatory capture dressed as a public good.
Most people know not to learn medicine or combat from Hollywood. The problem is everything else.