Alaka Halder

@tnorthcutt How long did you spend in Valencia? It's such a great city. My sister lives downtown and says Fallas is both wonderful and sheer torture to live and work through

As a side note, visiting Valencia during Las Fallas was an incredible experience. I genuinely don’t know how locals tolerate this festival. It’s nearly nonstop marching bands and (LOUD) firecrackers 24/7 all week. Truly insane. A spectacle on steroids.

@Ask_Spectrum I already spoke with customer service, but they weren’t able to offer discounts. The outages are getting out of hand and Spectrum usually fails to follow through with promised refunds (even if you reach out to support). I'm glad to be switching.

@HalderAlaka Good evening and thanks for reaching out. I’m sorry to hear you’re having an issue with our service. Please send us a message so we can check into this for you. -ZB

How does @GetSpectrum retain any business in Austin? Constant outages, steep rate hikes, zero flexibility, and competition from better, cheaper options like Google Fiber. I’m excited to drop Spectrum in April!

We're also hiring a Senior Data Analyst, Healthcare Economics (same job family, different team). Please reach out if you're interested, or know someone who might be a fit! job-boards.greenhouse.io/garnerhealth/j…

We’ve spent decades terrified of overpopulation, but the real crisis might actually be that we’re running out of people. In this salon, Dean Spears and @HalderAlaka dive into why falling birth rates are a human welfare problem we aren't ready for. If you want to know why population collapse isn't just a myth, you need to watch this.

We've spent decades obsessing over sentence length, but for someone not thinking past next week, a 10-year term is irrelevant. In this recent salon with @jenniferdoleac & @HalderAlaka, they discuss why we must stop focusing on the severity of punishment and start increasing the probability of consequences.

Sometimes @claudeai Opus 4.6 is great, and sometimes it forgets that (1) today is Sunday and (2) Tuesday is not the day after Sunday, even though you’ve told it at least three times. 🙃

🤠 This weekend in Austin.

Private Discords and WhatsApp chats are a poor substitute for public forums. Noisy, disorganized, hard to search. I'd pay for @X, @LinkedIn, or old-school forums if they protected you from slop and spam. I'm hiring right now and using LI Premium; $30+/mo buys you zero respite.

R.I.P. Christopher Sims (21 Oct. 1942 - 14 March 2026) - a giant in macroeconomics and one of the finest human beings I have ever met -

In my little corner of tech, the serious hiring and founding energy over the past decade has remained in NYC and the Bay.

Billionaire tax flight and HQ moves get a lot of attention, but high-skill labor markets seem much stickier. Elon moved to Texas, but xAI engineering hiring is still concentrated in Palo Alto.

@benconomics My open role could be a good fit too, and we have a couple of econ and public health PhDs and MA on the team!

@benconomics I think this one (same job family, different department) would be a better fit: job-boards.greenhouse.io/garnerhealth/j…

Come join my team at Garner! I'm hiring a Senior Data Analyst to work on recommendations, directory, and appointment booking. You'll own KPIs, run experiments, and build models to guide 2.5M+ members to high-quality, affordable care. job-boards.greenhouse.io/garnerhealth/j…

Casey is almost 12 and has severe arthritis. He struggles to walk but remains super devoted to helping his owner, Cathy, who's in a wheelchair (and also awesome!) 😭 Cute to watch Casey as he begrudgingly trains his grandson Shadow to step into his paws tubitv.com/tv-shows/55211…

A few months ago, I accidentally discovered Dogs With Jobs, a Canadian TV show from the 2000s. I never watch TV but am on season 5. It’s transformative. It gives me hope that humans too can be good, if we try. It’s also irrevocably turned me against 95% of (spoiled) pet dogs.

Senior people may get more out of AI tools as they know what good work looks like and can tell when AI is missing context or gone off the rails. Earlier in your career, you're building that judgment. But do you need reps building from scratch? Does AI change the learning curve?

@neversupervised That kind of iteration can exist, but one complaint I've heard is that it feels worse as you're running multiple threads in parallel (or expected to). Must be harder to enjoy the craft when you're context switching or feel that you have to sacrifice perfection for throughput.

It does remove some of the intrinsic pleasure that attracted some of us to engineering as children: the thoughtful, meticulous, step-by-step iteration that leads to a working solution. But the new world is interesting in its own way. I suspect most people have confused feelings, in part stemming from fear of job and purpose loss.

1/ Some data science and engineering peers are anxious about aggressive pushes to adopt Claude Code at their workplaces. They feel it's taking away creative work and replacing it with tedium: designing tests, compiling test datasets, evaluating outputs For now, this surprises me