No. 388 · Arlington, Va. · Sun, Oct 25, 2026

Tertulia

A quiet corner of the internet. No algorithms, no ads — just Josh’s notes on government software, Scala, and where AI agents should be allowed to go.

Tuesday, January 20
Monday, January 19
“Through state-owned organizations, as well as the broader public sector, [Nordic societies] disprove the belief that governments stifle innovation. Moreover, Nordic governments show how to use new technologies to solve the biggest social and environmental problems while ensuring the disruptions and gains of innovation are distributed fairly.”
www.peoplespolicyproject.org The Nordic Model Invents The Goods ❖ People’s Policy Project Through state-owned organizations and the broader public sector, Nordic societies are leaders at the technological frontier.
“It is so fucking wild to me, how skepticism toward American intervention abroad is still waved off as knee-jerk lefty radicalism, as if the last quarter-century never happened. The recent history of U.S. meddling in the Middle East - wars sold on false premises, states shattered rather than stabilized, millions killed, tens of millions displaced, trillions wasted, resentments deepened for generations - ought to have made caution a baseline, not a fringe posture. Opposing yet another intervention isn’t a matter of ideological purity or reflexive anti-Americanism; it’s the only rational response to a track record of catastrophic unintended consequences that we seem determined to forget.”

— Freddie deBoer

freddiedeboer.substack.com If You Want Freedom and Democracy For Iranian People and All Peoples, You Must Start By Admitting What America Is and Does we do not liberate, we do not rescue, and we do not permit democracy to get in the way of getting what we want

“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.
Sunday, January 18

I pay for YouTube premium to not see ads, but every video now has sponsored content. Why am I paying YouTube?

Also pushed a quick fix to hide the language selection UI for code blocks. It's not needed when rendering a post; I know what language I'm putting into the editor when I write it! No big changes today unless I start feeling super motivated later, trying to find the willpower to get invested elsewhere... on a Sunday.

Dad hack: the little one didn't want to sleep, but they were complaining a lot as if they were tired. I started reading to them about cosmology and the big bang. BOOM! Right to sleep.

press.uchicago.edu Battle of the Big Bang “Excellent.”—Steven Poole, The Wall Street Journal • “Terrific.”—Liz Else, New Scientist (Best Popular Science Books of 2025 So Far) • “A brilliant overview of the state of modern cosmology.”—Alex O’Connor, alexoconnor.com • “This will expand readers’ min…

TODO: There's a bug with link previews: if you post a link whose description is too long, it won't trim the description. Instead, it will simply fail to insert it into the database. What should happen instead: if a page's og:description is longer than expected, we trim it, and append ellipsis.

There was a bug posting link previews with long descriptions 💪🏻

Use case for another user type? If the focus of this platform is rich text, why not poetry, and let some poet friends try it out?