That’s the best counterargument I’ve heard.

It’s like Orwell, but dumb.

I think it's useful to think of MAGA political culture as a long running, decentralized reality TV show from which hundreds of "influencers" are profiting by generating new story lines. We're now in season 11 and the shark jumping and brain-breaking plot twists are coming at an accelerating pace.

I think Trump was the GOP elite’s worst nightmare.

They built the machinery of a permanent GOP majority slowly and carefully over decades. They remade voting rules and SCOTUS to that end. It took decades.

Decades.

And they were sooo close.

Trump walked up & stole it right out of their hands.

The DNC clearly felt that they could treat the left side of the party like crap because they had no other choice. That’s how the Democratic Party has worked for years.

Are they right?

Fuck if I know. It pisses me off but I keep voting for their candidates. Like a sucker.

Maybe they are.

It’s even harder to say if Sanders would have won the general election than to say if he would have won the primary without DNC interference.

I’d argue that BS represented change, which is what the elections have been about since 2008, removing Trump’s biggest advantage.

It’s not knowable, tho.

Trump is the king of the low propensity voter.

But I knew a few Bernie enthusiasts who sat out the 2016 election because HC was not acceptable to them. These people were LPV because they didn’t vote, saying “if voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal”.

But that’s anecdote not data.

We’ve covered my “Storm Thurmond caused HC to be the nominee in 2016” theory of American politics.

At this rate we’re straying close to my “Donald Trump is the kwisatz haderach” theory. Or a joy-riding car thief, depending on the metaphor I use.

Both come down to party control of primaries.

15% of the delegation may not sound like a lot of votes, but it’s huge.

Bernie had 39% of the vote in the 2016 convention. Less than that 15% margin.

It’s hard to prove a counterfactual, but he definitely was close to winning and I think he would have won the primary without the interference.

Yep. Their job is entirely antidemocratic.

They are there to ensure that party elite preferences are protected from the riffraff.

Remember that this structure was invented after the 68 convention when the segregationists were still Democrats. Those guys really knew how to suppress votes.

My normative view is that they should never have let him run if they weren’t going to let him have a fair chance.

Agreeing that he could run and then blatantly undermining him was a mistake. Duplicity is a bad look.

I think it was significant in losing the election. But I don’t have data so 🤷.

No but he did, at least in 2020, sign some agreements about how he would run and what would happen if he won. One key point was that he would be officially listed as a Democrat and not an Independent or a Socialist.

I couldn’t find anything about 2016.

Primary voting rules vary by state. Some states don’t even have official primaries.

This one is hard to blame on the DNC, as much as I would like to.

The DNC set the rules for him to be eligible to run on the Democratic ticket in both 2016 and in 2020.

They could have just said “no”, but they didn’t.

They wanted his constituency to be engaged. He drew coverage and DNC hoped his people would stick around to vote for the dem even if he lost.

Clinton Campaign Had Additional Signed Agreement With DNC In 2015 NPR has learned that Hillary Clinton's campaign had an agreement, separate from one also signed by Bernie Sanders' campaign, providing control over party decisions in exchange for relieving DNC debt.

www.npr.org/2017/11/03/5...

This says that the DNC had an understanding with HC before the campaign even started.

If it’s correct, claims about Obama not handing money over are ex-post-facto justifications for decisions that had long been settled.

I think both parties have mechanisms to do exactly this. In 2026 Jeb Bush was the slot anointed one, but Trump kicked his ass. Same thing happened in 2008 when Obama whupped Hillary Clinton.

I think the GOP mostly does it with money and access. But the Dems also have all that and superdelegates.

But it sure is nice to not need to deal with zsh syntax to whip up a quick tool.

Deadlines encourage us to do dumb things. But actually shipping product that does stuff people want is what keeps the lights on.

LLMs seem to accelerate all the challenges we had before.

The foot-guns are bigger, faster and more subtle.

The fact that the knowledge we encode is able to cause banks of billions of entrained light switches flip on and off in the right way to do things is almost a side effect.

But it’s a side effect that has remade the world several times over.

💯! It’s a fundamentally hard problem that makes naming and cache coherency look trivial.

I see software engineering as a form of knowledge management.

My chief meta-concern right now is how do I feed my discernment while using an LLM to write and explore code.

I’m using them to plan code that I could poop out without thinking hard so that I can understand the sorts of errors they make.

Too few SWEs are willing to wrestle with ideas in this way and I f you’re too solution focused, you wind up evolving a big ball of mud before you realize it.

So far, I see LLMs amplifying these tendencies.

They bring speed, but they also bring distance, which costs discernment.

The trick is to write only the docs that need to be written.

Some information churns too fast or has too much nuance to be recorded or transmitted accurately and must be passed on by the techniques of oral tradition.

You can’t make that go away, but you can try to minimize it.

And when you coordinate across teams with different codebases, even finding a home for the WHY ontologies gets really hard. The further they get from the code the easier they are to lose.

It’s easy to use LLMs to pump out more bad docs that nobody ever reads, except maybe other bots.

…is an entirely different problem.

It’s a layer cake.

I use this syntax because of an affordance of my language or tooling.

I do this ugly hack because of an optimization or a historical fluke.

I call this service because of a legal business reason.

The reasons need an ontology too.

For me, the fundamental interesting part is building sound ontologies. Everything flows from that.

Consistent and clear naming helps you write honest code, code that doesn’t lie to you about what is happening.

The “what” documentation is the code, when done right.

The “why” documentation…

My chief worry is that LLMs will take away the opportunities to rummage needed to build the intuitive grasp that I believe makes good design possible.

I can’t tell if the junior devs do dumb stuff because they’re junior and they need to be taught or because the LLM cheats and they can’t see it yet.

There are problems and then there are problems. I like grubbing around in code and building a mental model of it that relies on being elbows deep in its guts.

I find the coordination and review stuff horribly dull. But I do it because it’s my job and it lets me get paid to do the former.

Not no fool Billy Idol lip, neither!

Another great solution for “I’d like to try something different” that works at any coffee shop is to simply ask for a recommendation.

And then don’t be a dickhead about it if you don’t like the suggested drink.