If billionaires are so worried about a wealth tax, why can't they just get a second job?
Remote
Susan Potter
@SusanPotter@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06I talk to machines.
Indie quant developer and algo trader teaching ordinary folks to fuck a system designed to oppress them. Polyglot software engineer (#Haskell, #Erlang, #Scala, #Nix, #NixOS, #Fsharp, #Python) and recovering software engineer in "tech".
Has a penchant for #OptionsTrading, #FunctionalProgramming, #Economics, #SystemsThinking.
Antifascist, immigrant, gay af. #effice
0 Followers
0 Following
38 Posts
Joined April 02, 2017
Website:
Consulting:
Twitter:
Github:
I often get confused for an adult because of my age.
Replying to
I am smirking when I hear non-developers talk about how they don't need to hire a developer now. They may just have to learn the hard way all the things experienced productive developers learned along the way: the code was the easy part. Knowing what to build and how to build it to maintain, deliver, and validate it continues to be the biggest issues for non-trivial codebases.
Three statisticians go duck hunting. They spot a duck flying overhead where the first statistician shoots one meter too far left and the second shoots one meter too far right. The third statistician leaps for joy exclaiming, "we got it!"
Despite the average error being zero, there was no duck for dinner. #stats
Replying to
I think more than ever before we are getting to a point where mass scale software products used across businesses/organizations are less meaningful or useful. Get closer to the business wherever you build software and immerse yourself in the domain. Live it, breath it. Assuming you like it. If you don't find the domain you can appreciate.
I didn't know a president could increase the size of your car's gas tank. I used to only be able to pump $27 worth of gas in my car under Biden. Now I can pump $49 worth of gas in. Amazing.
I updated my website and added a /now page which basically is written as if I am filling in an old friend I haven't spoken to in a year what I am doing now: https://www.susanpotter.net/now/
There is a special place in hell for infrastructure engineers who configure their website with the most infuriating Cloudflare settings imaginable for a regular user, simply because their employer's backend engineers can't write scalable code. Medium, I am looking at you.
Can they both lose? Both are deserving of losing.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/28/sam-altman-open-ai-elon-musk-trial
Replying to
It doesn't mean you let LLMs produce shit code and just stir the pot (worst idea), it means that being able to build business systems customized to how the organization does things best is more possible than ever. Producing code was never the bottleneck. Its organization, structure, maintainability, adaptability, integratability, etc. are all paramount in this era as well as iteratively designing, developing, testing, deploying, etc.
Replying to
Being much closer to where the money is being made and being able to quantitatively measure almost everything is super refreshing from an internal motivation perspective.
I always had issues with product feature requests that had no success criteria attached. "Sales promised this to ${BIG_CUSTOMER}." I just don't care to be doing busy work.
The wildest thing about gas prices going from $3.84 to $5.47 in just two months is that evidence was released by the DoJ that showed Donald Trump was credibly accused of child rape by someone who was 13yo at the time of the incident.
These data center companies are leeches on society:
"A data center drained 30M gallons of water unnoticed (and unbilled) — until residents complained about low water pressure"
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/08/georgia-data-centers-water-00909988
LMAO. The NodeJS/NPM ecosystem is hot garbage and I don't miss it:
"Every developer or CI pipeline that installs this package and has an npm token accessible becomes an unwitting propagation vector. Their packages get infected, their downstream users install those, and if any of them have tokens, the cycle repeats."
https://thehackernews.com/2026/03/trivy-supply-chain-attack-triggers-self.html?m=1
If I never see another K-1 form again, it will be too soon.
Dear Illinois (or anyone in any state): if your health insurance denies you coverage in stupid ways (it is rather common), be sure to file a complaint with your state's department of insurance (or whatever they call it). In Illinois it is here:
https://idoi.illinois.gov/consumers/file-a-complaint.html
These mofos get away with too much. The state should know more of their abuses.
A: When is Pentagon Ken getting fired?
B: Who?
A: Pete Hegseth
B: Doesn't calling him Ken imply he is good looking? I don't see that.
He's not even made for TV. What is his job description even?
Replying to
@0x2ba22e11 FWIW when I was a mathematics student (many moons ago), I had a "need" to build a searchable discography and tour dates website for my favorite band so I ended up learning perl 4 to build it...it was the latest version at the time. My second language was C++ which I think was a bad idea in retrospect.
So, I do think focusing on the learner's "needs"/interests and matching language to that are key to getting them further down the learning pipeline.
Iranian State Media! Sometimes bad people say the truth. @itsmemaudeholly@www.threads.com
All we need now is OpenAI to sponsor a new Giants ballpark in a 10 year deal...
Does anyone remember WBVN?
Replying to
@bkim I feel you sometimes. Optimism is rare for me. I should caution that there are so many organizations and leaders that don't get any of this yet and they may not be the majority even in the long-run, but spend time in the domains you like and find the nicer, safer spaces with less toxic leaders. This applied even before, but, in my case, I focused too long on other useless vanity things and I regret it looking back. But onwards!
Replying to
@antifarben @ricci I think we need to shut down, open up the case and replace the defect parts.
Replying to
@TarkabarkaHolgy this is why I recently had to part ways with someone who demanded I have the same energy for all her issues as issues closest to my heart. Even after explaining I was reserving my productive energies for my own causes, she couldn't accept that my progressive priorities were different.
Replying to
Also are we sure this guy is still alive?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/26/donald-trump-correspondents-dinner-shooting
Or are we already Weekend At Bernie's it now?
Replying to
@LieschenrelleuM@kolektiva.social @Vivaldi@social.vivaldi.net maybe you shouldn't install Claude Desktop which does the spyware install or use an OS that separates app spaces so installing spyware for a browser isn't possible from outside the browser...
Is the implication that fixing 80% of the problem is worse than using Chrome or Edge? Wild "logic".
Replying to
@richservo@masto.ai @rbreich@masto.ai ahhh, I thought you were doing a whataboutism on the "culture wars".
Replying to
@antifarben @ricci sadly, I can't create a Jira and the people who can (Congress) are fucking AWOL.
Note that the NASDAQ-100 index hasn't made a new high since Oct/Nov. The Dow is not considered a growth engine for the economy and often catches up during growth tops. Top forming? Nobody knows but the Dow at new ATHs isn't really that positive for suggesting the economy is great.
OpenAI is just copying Anthropic now and it's frontier models are mostly inferior too.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/07/openai-chatgpt-cyber-ai-model-00910704
Replying to
Also that link placement to the LA Times article is hilarious and is a function of highlighting on a phone for the linking. Also I can't edit the weirdly written paragraph until I return from school drop off later now. Sigh. This is why I shouldn't reflexively do this crap.