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We've all had enough of this nonsense

2025-09-26 15:27:27

Every few years, the same sad contingent of Ruby malcontents tries to cancel me from Rails. At the peak of the woke era, back in 2022, they were actually successful in getting Ruby Central to uninvite me from doing the yearly keynote at RailsConf. But now RailsConf is dead, Rails World is thriving, and the cancellation nonsense is over.

Only I guess nobody told that same sad contingent! Because three days ago, they tried yet again, with the same trite grab bag of accusations: "he holds racist and transphobic views, as well as a number of other traits undesirable". And to add to the outrage theater, they named their little letter after a French resistance action fighting the Nazis during WWII. Subtle!

Except this time, nobody cared. In fact, quite the opposite. Thousands of people have taken to X and elsewhere to reject this nonsense, and that's apparently making one of the organizers very sad:

So far though, my experience has been that there are many more negative responses than positive. Maybe the Ruby community isn’t the place I thought it was, and MINASWAN was always a lie. That makes me sad. 😢

I guess I would be sad too if I had named my group after THE GOOD GUYS and then it turned out that everyone thought I was THE BAD GUYS. But that's exactly what happened. The outpouring of support from all sides has been overwhelming.

This is what it looks like when preference falsification finally falls. When normal people are no longer afraid to say no to these people. Then it's revealed just how small and isolated these aggrieved individuals actually are.

Tobi from Shopify said it best:

It’s such a terrible mental tax on builders that divisive clowns just ride in and spew these bullshit terms that they clearly don’t understand themselves in bad faith. Ignore & keep building.

That's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to reject and ignore these nut jobs. Then we're going to keep building.

Calling someone a "nazi" is a permission slip for violence

2025-09-25 07:27:33

The last loonies on tech's woke island are getting desperate. It used to be that a wide variety of baseless accusations of racism, misogyny, or white supremacy could inflict grave social and professional consequences for the accused, but that's no longer true. So now they've had to up the ante, and that's why everyone is suddenly a nazi to these people.

Because if you can't intimidate people into silence and compliance with the woke orthodoxies by threatening their job or their social circle, you might be able to threaten them with actual violence or worse. That's what the "nazi" accusation is there to convey: That violence has been authorized.

The slogan has been around for a while: Punch a nazi. It has a sorta quaint, winking phrasing, so you'd be forgiven for thinking that maybe it wasn't actually meant as a real threat. But I think that theory has gone out the window. Just look at what happened to Charlie Kirk.

This is a natural consequence of all the lost terrain. The DEI bureaucracies in tech have been decimated or dismantled. The tone-setting social media, X, can no longer be wielded for narrative control (and Bluesky keeps shrinking from purity purges). And finally, the American administration went from blue to red in 2024.

Lost terrain means lost leverage. Which means the usual threats have stopped working because they relied on that institutional and broad social leverage to be effective. And these loonies know that.

The threat of violence, however, is evergreen. It's the final resort of a movement that has lost a political and philosophical path to victory in the public square. It's sad, it's pathetic, but you're not wrong to be worried when political assassinations are justified and exalted in reference to the "nazi" threat.

But that's just all the more reason you can't give in, you can't give up. The defeat of wokeism in the workplace should give you comfort. These people are not invincible. The wheels have been falling off their political project for years now. You can and should say "no" when they come with the "nazi" nonsense too.

The great falls of Boeing, Intel, and Apple

2025-09-22 20:13:11

It takes ten years for the culture of a great company to fall apart once the CEO seat is given to someone without an engineering or product background. That's been the story of Boeing, Intel, and now Apple. Legendary American companies that all got lost when a bean counter, marketing man, or logistics hand took over.

Boeing's troubles started when they were taken over by McDonnell Douglas in 1997, but really accelerated after 2005 when they installed their first CEO with no aerospace background. The result, after ten years of cost-cutting and outsourcing, was the 737 MAX MCAS tragedies, and an organization gutted of ambition and engineering pride.

Intel did the same thing, and almost at the same time. In 2005, they too installed their first CEO without an engineering background. Ten years later, they were stumbling with delayed nodes, stalled progress, and no answers on mobile. Now the entire business is teetering.

Finally, Apple. Steve Jobs handed the reins to Tim Cook in 2011, but such was the strength of the product pipeline and culture that Jobs left behind, that it initially looked like Cook could break the spell. Show that it was possible for a logistics man to steer one of the great ships of American ingenuity and tech supremacy.

But now the ten-year curse is hitting Apple with an eerily familiar thud. They wasted a decade chasing a self-driving dream without direction, and ended up with the worst possible car interface to show for it. They completely missed the boat on AI, and embarrassed themselves with Genmoji and vaporware ads. And the Vision pro has been an expensive tech demo that nobody actually wanted to wear three months after they bought it.

The profits still gush from glories past, and the tollbooth operation on the App Store, but the soul has left the machine.

While these three stories are different, they're drawn from the same archetype: Great companies need bold, hands-on leaders who live and breathe the stuff they make or they'll eventually hollow out.

It's tempting for boards of public companies to think that all care and competence around product can be delegated down the org chart. That someone who can hit the numbers is all you need at the top. But it's not.

You need an Andy Grove, Phil Condit, or Scott Forstall. You need someone so professionally invested in the work and the culture that they'll refuse to let the search for surface-level efficiencies drain the foundation of its strength. You need an engineer or a product person as CEO.

As I remember London

2025-09-15 16:19:00

As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go. Compared to Copenhagen at the time, there was something so majestic about Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and even the Tube around the turn of the millenium. Not just because their capital is twice as old as ours, but because it endured twice as much, through the Blitz and the rest of it, yet never lost its nerve. I thought I might move there one day.

That was then. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.

Copenhagen, by comparison, was about eighty-five percent native Danes in 2000, and is still three-quarters today. Enough of a foreign presence to feel cosmopolitan, but still distinctly Danish in all of its ways. Equally statistically evident on streets and bike lanes.

But I think, what would Copenhagen feel like, if only a third of it was Danish, like London? It would feel completely foreign, of course. Alien, even. So I get the frustration that many Brits have with the way mass immigration has changed the culture and makeup of not just London, but their whole country.

That frustration was on wide display in Tommy Robinson's march yesterday. British and English flags flying high and proud, like they would in Copenhagen on the day of a national soccer match. Which was both odd to see but also heartwarming. You can sometimes be forgiven for thinking that all of Britain is lost in self-loathing, shame, and suicidal empathy. But of course it's not.

Recently, a projection that Danes would be a minority in their own country by 2096 caused an enormous stir in Denmark. Politicians across the spectrum decried what a catastrophe that would be for this world's oldest continuous monarchy. But a demographic nightmare worse than that has already enveloped London!

So it's tough to blame the Brits for being pissed. No matter how hard they voted one way or the other, Brexit or no Brexit, the erosion of their national identity kept marching forward at an ever-greater pace. Not due to some unavoidable cosmic destiny, but due to equal parts policy and apathy. The boats kept coming, the migrant hotels kept expanding, and the British authorities kept cracking down on anyone who dared criticize that trajectory or the present-day reality.

Which brings us back to Robinson's powerful march yesterday. The banner said "March for Freedom", and focused as much on that now distant-to-the-Brits concept of free speech, as it did on restoring national pride.

And for good reason! The totalitarian descent into censorious darkness in Britain has been as swift as its demographic shift. British police are now making 30 arrests a day for wrongthink, wrongspeech, and other online transgressions against "the regime narrative", as the BBC would have reported, if this were a statistic from a foreign nation.

Most recently, five officers(!) came to arrest comedian Graham Linehan for illicit tweets. When much of the media reports a story like this, it's often without citing the specific words in question, such that the reader might imagine something far worse than what was actually said. So you should actually read the three tweets that landed Linehan in jail, and earned him a legal restraining order against using X. It's grotesque.

The easy way out of this uncomfortably large gathering of perfectly normal, peaceful Brits who've had enough is to tar them all as "far right". That's not just a British tactic, but one used across Europe, and previously in the US as well. It used to work very well, because the historical stigma was so strong, but, like hurling "nazi" and "fascist" at the most middle-of-the-road political figures and positions, it's finally lost its power.

I really feel for the Brits because it's not obvious how they get themselves out of this pickle. They're still reeling from the Pakistani rape gangs that were left free to terrorize cities like Rotherham and Rochdale for years on end with horror-movie-like scenes of the most despicable, depraved abuse of British girls. Unlike Linehan's tweets, I actually implore you not to peruse these stories too closely, though, because they'll make you sick. So how do you even begin to correct course?

I don't know. But I'm glad that there clearly are many Brits who are determined to find out. Unwilling to just let their society wither away while their bobbies chase bad tweets instead of the rampant street thefts or those barbaric rape gangs. Unwilling to resign the rest of the country to the kind of demographic replacement that befell London over the last two decades.

You can rest assured that I'd be in the streets waving a Danish flag if these were my conditions in my native country. I think that's a pretty universal sentiment. There's absolutely nothing racist or xenophobic in saying that Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits, and Japan primarily a set of islands for the Japanese.

Here's how the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen of the Social Democrats, recently put it in an interview:

There are really a lot of us Danes who believed that when people came to this ‘world’s best country’ and were given such good opportunities, they would integrate. They would become Danish, and they would never, ever harm our society. All of us who thought that way have been wrong.

This is the challenge before not just the British establishment, but much of the European one too: To come to the realization of the Danish Prime Minister. Someone nobody could credibly charge with being "far right".

Which should give the Brits some solace. The Social Democrats in Denmark were once staunch believers in unfettered immigration and thought it dirty to even talk about the problems, but eventually reality and public pressure led them to better ideas. Why shouldn't that be possible in the UK?

Don't give up. You survived the Blitz. Britain will be back.

Apple has no one left who can say no

2025-09-14 18:50:57

Apple spent a decade trying to develop their own car with Project Titan. It never launched, and was finally canceled in 2024, but not before the company had spent ten billion dollars on getting nowhere. In the same time frame, Tesla launched the Model X, Model 3, Model Y, and the Cybertruck. But maybe that's just because manufacturing cars is really hard, and at least Apple had some superior software ready to go? Also no.

We know this because the CarPlay Ultra project has been heralded as the one good salvageable part from the Project Titan disaster. Now it's available in the wild, with Aston Martin being the prestige launch partner, and? It's total shit.

Check out this review from The Straight Pipes of the new Aston Martin Vantage. It's a beautiful, fast, and deliciously bonkers British hotrod, but the CarPlay Ultra integration is so bad that it's the single worst thing about the car, according to the reviewers.

Not only is the integration ludicrously laggy — like 12fps kind of laggy, like can't-even-keep-up-with-the-engine-reving kind of laggy — it's also buggy as hell. It crashed on the reviewers during their short time with the car, leaving them driving blind on real roads without any gauge cluster. WTF.

How does something like this go out the door at Cupertino? How does this company, so famed for its obsessive attention to detail, let CarPlay Ultra ship in such a laggy, buggy, and dangerous state?

Because Apple no longer has anyone left who can say no. You saw it with ad after ad that had to be pulled after getting pummeled by the public. You saw it with Apple Intelligence that was sold as the reason to get an iPhone 16, but in reality just was just dumb gimmicks, like genmoji. And now you see it with CarPlay Ultra.

I guarantee you there are programmers and designers inside Apple who know CarPlay Ultra wasn't ready to ship, but were overruled by managers who felt they needed to stick to their contractual obligations, quality be damned.

That's what happens when there's a lack of leadership who actually care about quality, about customers, and about the product. Who would be pained to let something as dodgy as this go out the door. When that's absent, the train wreck that everyone can see a mile away is going to happen is simply allowed to happen. Nobody reaches for the emergency brake, nobody wants to take responsibility to avoid disaster.

This is why companies led by founders tend to have much better products. Steve Jobs didn't always get it right, but you know that he and Jony Ive would have been in physical pain to see the Apple logo on something this laggy and broken. (Or so you'd hope, Ive did preside, towards the end of his time at Apple, over the five dark years of catastrophically unreliable MacBook keyboards!).

It's the same thing with the alarm bug in the iPhone. My wife, along with millions of others, judging from the endless online reports of the problem, has been struggling with the fact that the phone will randomly, intermittently just refuse to wake her in the morning. The alarm time will come and go, but there's no buzzing, no sound.

This has been going on for years. But that's just how it is, apparently, with the iPhone. Maybe the alarm works, maybe it doesn't. Good luck if you need to get up early for the airport or an important appointment.

Again, the problem is not the bug, it's the lack of ownership. All software has bugs! I've written many of them myself. But when we talk the type that has the criticality of making someone miss a flight or lose the gauge cluster on the road at night, you need to treat that like a CODE RED, and get all hands on deck to deal with it.

Apple has lost the power to do this. Because they've lost the will to say no. Because they've lost the last asshole who could insist that quality should count above quarterly earnings (as if the two even ought to be in opposition)!

If you leave the bozos in charge for too long, the entire organization will be shaped in their image. Tim Cook was a masterful logistics hand to Jobs, but he's been a bozo on product, quality, and care.

He's gotta go.

Words are not violence

2025-09-12 00:05:13

Debates, at their finest, are about exploring topics together in search for truth. That probably sounds hopelessly idealistic to anyone who've ever perused a comment section on the internet, but ideals are there to remind us of what's possible, to inspire us to reach higher — even if reality falls short.

I've been reaching for those debating ideals for thirty years on the internet. I've argued with tens of thousands of people, first on Usenet, then in blog comments, then Twitter, now X, and also LinkedIn — as well as a million other places that have come and gone. It's mostly been about technology, but occasionally about society and morality too.

There have been plenty of heated moments during those three decades. It doesn't take much for a debate between strangers on this internet to escalate into something far lower than a "search for truth", and I've often felt willing to settle for just a cordial tone!

But for the majority of that time, I never felt like things might escalate beyond the keyboards and into the real world. That was until we had our big blow-up at 37signals back in 2021. I suddenly got to see a different darkness from the most vile corners of the internet. Heard from those who seem to prowl for a mob-sanctioned opportunity to threaten and intimidate those they disagree with.

It fundamentally changed me. But I used the experience as a mirror to reflect on the ways my own engagement with the arguments occasionally felt too sharp, too personal. And I've since tried to refocus way more of my efforts on the positive and the productive. I'm by no means perfect, and the internet often tempts the worst in us, but I resist better now than I did then.

What I cannot come to terms with, though, is the modern equation of words with violence. The growing sense of permission that if the disagreement runs deep enough, then violence is a justified answer to settle it. That sounds so obvious that we shouldn't need to state it in a civil society, but clearly it is not.

Not even in technology. Not even in programming. There are plenty of factions here who've taken to justify their violent fantasies by referring to their ideological opponents as "nazis", "fascists", or "racists". And then follow that up with a call to "punch a nazi" or worse.

When you hear something like that often enough, it's easy to grow glib about it. That it's just a saying. They don't mean it. But I'm afraid many of them really do.

Which brings us to Charlie Kirk. And the technologists who name drinks at their bar after his mortal wound just hours after his death, to name but one of the many, morbid celebrations of the famous conservative debater's death.

It's sickening. Deeply, profoundly sickening.

And my first instinct was exactly what such people would delight in happening. To watch the rest of us recoil, then retract, and perhaps even eject. To leave the internet for a while or forever. But I can't do that. We shouldn't do that.

Instead, we should double down on the opposite. Continue to show up with our ideals held high while we debate strangers in that noble search for the truth. Where we share our excitement, our enthusiasm, and our love of technology, country, and humanity.

I think that's what Charlie Kirk did so well. Continued to show up for the debate. Even on hostile territory. Not because he thought he was ever going to convince everyone, but because he knew he'd always reach some with a good argument, a good insight, or at least a different perspective.

You could agree or not. Counter or be quiet. But the earnest exploration of the topics in a live exchange with another human is as fundamental to our civilization as Socrates himself.

Don't give up, don't give in. Keep debating.

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