Full Stack Occultist

📣🚨 WE ARE HIRING! Free speech is under pressure. Courts, regulators and online platforms are making decisions faster than civil liberties organisations can respond — unless they have the right technology. We’re building that technology, and we need someone to help us. The Free Speech Union is looking for an early career software engineer to join a small, scrappy team that punches well above its weight. You’ll be building systems that help us defend real people when they’re under attack for exercising their right to lawful free speech. That means: Using AI to automate research, scanning and reporting so our case and legal teams always have the essential facts at their fingertips. Integrating our SaaS tools into a coherent platform — and driving routine admin time to zero. Being the organisation’s on-call AI specialist: identifying opportunities and helping colleagues make best use of the tools available. Helping secure our systems against real adversaries — activists who are motivated, capable and hostile to what we do. Who we’re looking for: Someone who sees AI not as a novelty but as a genuine force multiplier — and wants to prove that the integration of AI into our work can help us win David-and-Goliath battles with far larger, better-resourced organisations, including the UK Government. You’ll have a CS degree or equivalent hands-on experience, proficiency in Python or JavaScript/TypeScript, and the self-discipline to work remotely (from anywhere in the UK) at pace. Most importantly, you’ll actually believe in what we’re doing. This role gives you direct involvement in cases that really matter — cases that can have a lasting impact on people’s ability to exercise a fundamental human right — not another CRUD app for a company that doesn’t need to exist. Find out more below 👇

"Transitive guilt is a terrifying tactic the first time you encounter it. Not only are you being accused of something awful, but the accusation is supercharged to run through your connections to others... We must say no to these people." world.hey.com/dhh/we-must-sa…

There's never any appeasement possible with these lunatics. Whatever concession or apology you offer, there's always another round of demands coming. The sooner you learn to say no to these people the better.

Crazy story out of Qatar: A British couple honeymooned in Doha, where the wife was harassed at the Ritz-Carlton pool by two men who told her she'd "fall in love" after he slept with her. The hotel gaslit her, with management denying the CCTV backed her story despite their own WhatsApp messages saying the opposite. Her husband posted a TripAdvisor review calling the hotel "unsafe for women." The hotel got it pulled, then a hotel employee filed a defamation complaint against him under Qatar's cybercrime laws. Nearly a year later, when he returned to Qatar for work, he was detained, informed he'd been tried in absentia and fined, and then held for four nights in a deportation centre. The deportation order lasts five years, which severely hurts his career as a Middle East healthcare consultant. In other words, Marriott International, an American company, used Qatari law to silence a complaint about a woman being sexually harassed at their property.

Software Engineering is neither Computer Science nor Software Development. People don’t seem to get this. Software Engineering is requirements gathering, writing an SRS, identifying quality attributes and designing a software architecture around them, creating a work breakdown structure, identifying cost estimates for development, implementing, creating a test plan, and rigorously testing everything to ensure both functional and nonfunctional requirements are satisfied, solving the customer’s problem on schedule, at a low cost, and at a sufficient enough quality. What is not solved is producing high quality software at a low cost and timeframe. Software Engineering is not “mostly” solved. People are just hacking slop together, everything is fragilely bandaged together and barely works, and it costs a fortune to develop. Reusable software is largely a failure and everything is slow and lags like crazy, using an absurd amount of system resources in the process. Memory leaks, errors, and crashes aren’t uncommon. There is a ton of work to do still.

I built CourtWatch.us — a free public database for American citizens who deserve safer communities. You can track which judges released defendants who then got rearrested, skipped court, or violated their release conditions. All public records. All free. I started with Orange County FL and will be expanding to all 67 Florida counties and eventually every state in the country. This first batch of info is from 2024 and since public reports are released in March/April for the previous year, data is behind. But I wanted to see if this is plausible. After adding 2024,I'll add 2025 and then figure out how to get real-time-data uploaded. It's in beta — would love to know what you think 👇 Numbers don't lie, but criminals do. courtwatch.us @bennyjohnson @jockowillink @GrantCardone @LauraLoomer @nickshirleyy @j_fishback

Civilization was built by people like this, and there is a stunning lack of gratitude in our culture for their work. In this specific case, at least half of the apple varieties in Brown’s collection were considered “lost” until he personally tracked them down and saved them. He literally went on quests where he did things like, tracking a lost variety back to a stump of a long-ago-cut-down tree near an abandoned homestead in remote Appalachia, took cuttings from the green shoots coming out of the stump, brought them back and planted them. Absolute legend.

There is no way of knowing how often Parliament votes against what the public actually wants. Until now. houseofthepeople.com tracks every bill going through Parliament. You vote. We compare it to how your MP voted. The gap speaks for itself.

When the identities of characters determine the outcome of stories, movies become boring. In fact, everything becomes boring.

Any YouTube video with the "This changes everything" thumbnail is an instant skip.

A civilization that doubts itself, that apologizes for its existence, that no longer believes it deserves to win, declines And the inverse, a civilization that builds, that asserts, that makes things and believes in its right to lead, thrives There is only one choice to make.

The brain has a primitive rule: You are what you repeatedly do. If you repeatedly do “avoid,” it updates your self-model to “the kind of person who avoids.” If you repeatedly do “show up badly but show up,” it updates you to “the kind of person who does things even when unsure.”

Pretty sure I gave him that Quake shirt. Spent many days in the studio in New Orleans with Trent, Chris, and the rest of the crew cranking out sounds and music for Quake. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot from Trent and those guys. And I am glad to see he's in a good place these days. Much love 🖤

Jesus invited prostitutes to dinner and was praised for compassion. I do it and suddenly I “made Christmas awkward.”

Merry Christ-mas ✝️🎄

@mayukh_panja A very respectable stance.

I have been here 9 + years and I became eligible for the German passport a year back. I could have applied for citizenship a year ago, but I did not. I have thought about this a lot and I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that I can’t do this. Because I don’t feel German. I know it is only a document, but at the end of the day I am Indian and it would feel odd to become German. I can’t relate to German stories, the history, the language and the culture. I can understand them, sure, but that is not the same as actually relating. I can blend in pretty easily in international culturally ambiguous settings in Berlin and scientific and tech circles but beyond that I can’t really integrate. I don’t feel anything when Germany loses or wins a football game. Sure I experience second hand happiness but beyond that nothing. An Indian World cup win would make me euphoric. And it would always be that way. I see myself as a friend of Germany but never truly one of Germany. It is a subtle but important distinction. But above all this, the most important thing is this: the moment I become a citizen I would be expected to align my ideals, values and ethos with those of Germany. And rightfully so. I, myself, wouldn’t feel comfortable being a new citizen and expect existing culture which has developed over centuries to adapt to my whims and fancies. I am perhaps too proud to enter such an unequal relationship. In India, even if my opinions do not resonate with the overwhelming majority I feel entitled to stand my ground and try to nudge things towards what I feel. I am a part of India. My opinions are by definition Indian opinions. You may not like them, but fuck you, they are. An Indian passport lets me have that entitlement. And inexplicably it matters a fucking lot to me.

@DanielWienerson "Hope you're doing well"

Every time Sandy posts something like this, I just sit here. Waiting.

@ClypheJNelson Always be running toward adventure (AKA those things that look challenging, scary, or unknown).

@9mmsmg It's called ascetic posting. Zen-level consistency with absolutely zero external validation. It’s almost beautiful.

People with greater purpose in life have mitochondria optimized for energy transformation in their brain.