Alan Donovan

The moment Biden’s 2020 victory was announced our Brooklyn neighborhood erupted into an all-day dance party—though admittedly it was driven more by relief than hope.

Hi. I'm part of a group thinking about what custom hash maps and ordered maps in Go's standard library should look like. I'm excited to see what you've built.

Every Southerner knows this!

Yeah, it’s funny* how the absurd Veep was way closer to the money than House of Cards despite the latter’s pretensions at serious political analysis.

*sad

Tech workers are undoubtedly skewed Democratic—my workplace had a partisanship of 97% towards Hillary Clinton, highest of any in the country—but Morozov‘s conflation of “radical”, “anti-establishment” and “liberal” here is most confusing.

The real lesson of all these bloody triangles is that there is a hierarchy of intellectual labor with "sustained hard critical thinking" at the bottom and "spreading clever infographics on social media" at the top. I give you.. Donovan's Hierarchy™.

I would come! And bore the barman with progressively more deranged questions betraying ignorance of quantum field theory.

Think how many browser tabs you could have open at once! I don’t trust myself.

If there are no consequences and no means of enforcement for the US, in what sense is it actually a law, as opposed to “a set of guidelines”? Genuine if depressing question.

I finally had an experience that made me understand why so many great engineers are excited about coding assistants. But after 2 or 3 days of closely supervised vibe coding I became frustrated with the quality of the code. It’s a good working sketch but it needs to be carefully rewritten in place.

Thanks! Looking forward to bingeing it once I finish Emily in Vladivostok.

Someone in DoD clearly wondered: why should only the 9/11 hijackers get to use market manipulation to profit off their crimes?

Wouldn’t this admission strengthen any legal case that Anthropic makes against the DoD?

Over-falsity of confidence and asleepyness both entered our household lexicon after this scene!

Reminds me of that old skit:

News man: Henry Kissinger, tell me, what was the high point of your career?
Kissinger: Definitely in 1973, when I won the Nobel peace price for ending the war in Vietnam.
NM: And the lowest point?
HK: Oh, I would say 1975, when the war in Vietnam ended.

1 million satellites, 1 “teragram” of Alumina: these numbers are so beyond the normal units of orbital payloads that one wonders if the plan is intentionally exaggerated so it can be scaled back by 90% to allow both sides to claim victory.

It was an attempt at humor.

From www.ways-of-seeing.com/ch3 I always recall this line about a monumental painting of a swarm of nude angels: "Men of state, of business, discussed under paintings like this. When one of them felt he had been outwitted, he looked up for consolation. What he saw reminded him that he was a man."

These days they'll define any old word just because people say it. Outrageous!

Oh, “said”, duh. One of the challenges is never knowing when to give up on a tricky word!

Also that the most commonly used word in polite conversation was “arse”.

My experience of middle English, especially read aloud, is that it is surprisingly (if ploddingly) comprehensible until I hit some word like ”I-seide” that causes the wheels to completely fall of my bus.

Great essay from Hopkins on managerialism, conflicts of interest, the AI bubble, the decline of faculty governance, and how major donations paradoxically put universities in the red.

Also, since when has the Supreme Court cared about creating a “mess” when applying a principle such as money = speech or citizens may own bazookas?

“Using go fix to modernize Go code” by Alan Donovan — https://go.dev/blog/gofix

#golang

To be fair, a good painter does the same.

Fast enough, I should say. Polling will always be slower than inotify, but git status is much faster than find(1).

All FS notification packages struggle to abstract the huge variance in the underlying platforms. I want to try to make something that is simple, portable, and fast.

Yeah, a lot of clients (e.g. eglot) don’t watch the whole tree, so every time you switch git branches the server gets confused. I’m implementing a pure polling (no fsnotify) server-side watcher in gopls, stealing ideas from git status.

“Go 1.26 is released” by Carlos Amedee, on behalf of the Go team — https://go.dev/blog/go1.26

#golang