Al Davidson

John Stabb and Henry Rollins have their heads shaved clean by Ian Mackaye before a Dead Kennedys show #punk #punks #punkrock #harcorepunk #johnstabb #IanMacKaye #henryrollins #history #punkrockhistory

@PunkRockStory @SurfThrash Don't know if it was actually a single, but "Stars and Stripes of Corruption" is one of the best political statements I ever heard

The Dead Kennedys singles collection from 1979 to 1982. Hardly any band has produced more socially relevant songs than the Dead Kennedys What is your top single from the band? #punk #punkrock #deadkennedys #history #punkrockhistory

One of the greatest punk rock bands of all time, fractured and irreconcilable 🤬 💔 40 years ago today, The Dead Kennedys played their last concert with Jello Biafra at UC Davis' Freeborn Hall, February 21, 1986 Phranc, Mojo Nixon, and 7 Seconds were the support acts. #punk #punkrock #hardcorepunk #deadkennedys #punkrockhistory #otd

@geoffjBYU @SurfThrash "The Reality of My Surroundings" was my favourite album of theirs, a huge influence on me musically. Criminally under-appreciated band

“Truth and Soul” by Fishbone is one of my all time favorite albums. This songs is one of the bangers on it.

Every time we've made it easier to write software, we've ended up writing exponentially more of it. When high-level languages replaced assembly, programmers didn't write less code - they wrote orders of magnitude more, tackling problems that would have been economically impossible before. When frameworks abstracted away the plumbing, we didn't reduce our output - we built more ambitious applications. When cloud platforms eliminated infrastructure management, we didn't scale back - we spun up services for use cases that never would have justified a server room. @levie recently articulated why this pattern is about to repeat itself at a scale we haven't seen before, using Jevons Paradox as the frame. The argument resonates because it's playing out in real-time in our developer tools. The initial question everyone asks is "will this replace developers?" but just watch what actually happens. Teams that adopt these tools don't always shrink their engineering headcount - they expand their product surface area. The three-person startup that could only maintain one product now maintains four. The enterprise team that could only experiment with two approaches now tries seven. The constraint being removed isn't competence but it's the activation energy required to start something new. Think about that internal tool you've been putting off because "it would take someone two weeks and we can't spare anyone"? Now it takes three hours. That refactoring you've been deferring because the risk/reward math didn't work? The math just changed. This matters because software engineers are uniquely positioned to understand what's coming. We've seen this movie before, just in smaller domains. Every abstraction layer - from assembly to C to Python to frameworks to low-code - followed the same pattern. Each one was supposed to mean we'd need fewer developers. Each one instead enabled us to build more software. Here's the part that deserves more attention imo: the barrier being lowered isn't just about writing code faster. It's about the types of problems that become economically viable to solve with software. Think about all the internal tools that don't exist at your company. Not because no one thought of them, but because the ROI calculation never cleared the bar. The custom dashboard that would make one team 10% more efficient but would take a week to build. The data pipeline that would unlock insights but requires specialized knowledge. The integration that would smooth a workflow but touches three different systems. These aren't failing the cost-benefit analysis because the benefit is low - they're failing because the cost is high. Lower that cost by "10x", and suddenly you have an explosion of viable projects. This is exactly what's happening with AI-assisted development, and it's going to be more dramatic than previous transitions because we're making previously "impossible" work possible. The second-order effects get really interesting when you consider that every new tool creates demand for more tools. When we made it easier to build web applications, we didn't just get more web applications - we got an entire ecosystem of monitoring tools, deployment platforms, debugging tools, and testing frameworks. Each of these spawned their own ecosystems. The compounding effect is nonlinear. Now apply this logic to every domain where we're lowering the barrier to entry. Every new capability unlocked creates demand for supporting capabilities. Every workflow that becomes tractable creates demand for adjacent workflows. The surface area of what's economically viable expands in all directions. For engineers specifically, this changes the calculus of what we choose to work on. Right now, we're trained to be incredibly selective about what we build because our time is the scarce resource. But when the cost of building drops dramatically, the limiting factor becomes imagination, "taste" and judgment, not implementation capacity. The skill shifts from "what can I build given my constraints?" to "what should we build given that constraints have in some ways been evaporated?" The meta-point here is that we keep making the same prediction error. Every time we make something more efficient, we predict it will mean less of that thing. But efficiency improvements don't reduce demand - they reveal latent demand that was previously uneconomic to address. Coal. Computing. Cloud infrastructure. And now, knowledge work. The pattern is so consistent that the burden of proof should shift. Instead of asking "will AI agents reduce the need for human knowledge workers?" we should be asking "what orders of magnitude increase in knowledge work output are we about to see?" For software engineers it's the same transition we've navigated successfully several times already. The developers who thrived weren't the ones who resisted higher-level abstractions; they were the ones who used those abstractions to build more ambitious systems. The same logic applies now, just at a larger scale. The real question is whether we're prepared for a world where the bottleneck shifts from "can we build this?" to "should we build this?" That's a fundamentally different problem space, and it requires fundamentally different skills. We're about to find out what happens when the cost of knowledge work drops by an order of magnitude. History suggests we (perhaps) won't do less work - we'll discover we've been massively under-investing in knowledge work because it was too expensive to do all the things that were actually worth doing. The paradox isn't that efficiency creates abundance. The paradox is that we keep being surprised by it.

Commodores — “Brick House”

I HATE WEBP FILES I HATE THEM SO MUCH THEYRE SO USELESS OH MY GOD JUST LET ME DOWNLOAD AN IMAGE REGULARLY WITHOUT HAVING TO SEARCH "webp to png online free" IM SO SICK OF IT

Frank Zappa — “Inca Roads”

Dads getting the W for all the hard work they did with Christmas shopping

@ActualNames1 Eels! youtu.be/0AckvdGbk4w?si…

Eels Eels Washington, County Birth Registers, 1873-1965

@ActualNames1 ...theres definitely something ominous about the "Permitted colours" text below it too

Hitler Ice Cream Cones

“Axis: Bold as Love” by the Jimi Hendrix Experience was released on this day in 1967.

@SurfThrash Seriously ... gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-ph…

@SurfThrash I was there! Felt bad for them being pelted with mud, but the whole field was like a mud-wrestling pit by then, so every one was getting pelted that day, and with that name ... It was kinda inevitable

Mudhoney You Got It Reading Festival 1992

Today, while we celebrate Thanksgiving, we're also thinking of @JimiHendrix on what would have been his 83rd birthday. #SeymourDuncan #JimiHendrix

Einstein's General Relativity turns 110 today. On November 25, 1915, Albert Einstein presented the final form of his gravitational field equations to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. It became one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century.

Rest in peace, Jimmy Cliff

My latest for @latimes: I travelled to southern India to document the rise of the AI "arm farms" — where young engineers strap GoPros to their foreheads and fold laundry or pack boxes to teach humanoid robots how to do chores. latimes.com/business/story…

In memory of Darren Henley aka D. H. Peligro, longtime drummer of the Dead Kennedys and short-term drummer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who passed away unexpectedly three years ago today Photo by Alison Braun #punkdrummer in heaven 💔 #punk #punkrock #deadkennedys #dhpeligro #history #punkrockhistory #otd

Happy birthday to Bootsy Collins, born on this day in 1951! A funk bass legend from Cincinnati, Ohio, he ignited his star-power in the city’s soul scene, joining James Brown’s band at 17 and mastering the low-end with flashy flair. His cosmic grooves with Parliament-Funkadelic, plus solo albums like Stretchin’ Out in Bootsy’s Rubber Band (1976) and Ahh… The Name Is Bootsy, Baby! (1977), fused P-Funk psychedelia with rubbery basslines, earning a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and inspiring generations of funk and hip-hop innovators.