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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

But enough about Europe's approach to the Trump administration, what are we going to do about Iran?

A snippet from the Bessent op-ed on the FT's signature salmon background. It reads "In short, these countries calculate appeasement of the regime to be the safer course. But they would do well to consider the consequences of sustaining it."

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Whenever someone says we should make some changes while the strategic rewrite is still pending.

A screen cap of The Godfather. Michael, sitting in a wood-paneled office and looking confident as the head of the family, is saying "After we make the move to Nevada".

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Why is everyone making us putting our party leader's face and name on everything so political!

A tweet from Maria Bartiromo:

The board already approved the name change
@kencen the way these judges go after
@realDonaldTrump is absolutely sick and the
history books will reveal how sick and un American
they are -Grow Up & stop wasting everyone's time
on your politics

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

The way this omnishambles ties together different threads of badness is impressive.

A headline from the FT on its signature salmon background color. Iran demands crypto fees for ships passing Hormuz during ceasefire Country's oil exporters' union says toll to be paid in cryptocurrency and vessels monitored for weapons

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

God bless those print news reading teenagers.

The meme of a cat in a suit sitting at a breakfast table reading a newspaper. It is looking up from its paper, pondering something.

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER IS IDEAL FOR ISSUING APOLOGIES

A post from the Grok account on x.com

Dear Community,
I deeply regret an incident on Dec 28, 2025, where I generated and shared an Al image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16) in sexualized attire based on a user's prompt.
This violated ethical standards and potentially
US laws on CSAM. It was a failure in
safeguards, and I'm sorry for any harm caused. xAl is reviewing to prevent future issues.
Sincerely, Grok

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

Accurate script dialog brought to you by one of my most beloved childhood possessions.

A photo of a dog-eared book of the original radio scripts for:

HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE
TO THE GALAXY

THE ORIGINAL RADIO SCRIPTS
BY
DOUGLAS ADAMS
EDITED, AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY GEOFFREY PERKINS
(WHO PRODUCED IT)
WITH ANOTHER INTRODUCTION BY,
DOUGLAS ADAMS,
LARGELY CONTRADICTING THE ONE
BY
GEOFFREY PERKINS

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

FORD: They make a big thing out of the ship’s cybernetics. "A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers, with the new GPP feature." ARTHUR: GPP? What’s that? FORD: Er ...... It says Genuine People Personalities. ARTHUR: Sounds ghastly.

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

their page for FTX still claims it was because of a liquidity crunch

A screenshot from Sequoia's page about their investment in FTX.

FTX.COM is a cryptocurrency exchange. It offers derivatives, options and volatility products, tokenized stocks, prediction markets, leveraged tokens and an OTC desk.
Update: November 9, 2022 A liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX and its future is uncertain.

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

It was Professor Plum, in the library, with the service award.

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

They really needed to think through this sign placement more carefully.

A photo of a sign for a restaurant. Because it has been partially obscured, it reads “nazi”.

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

The EU DOESNT INVEST IN THINGS WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT

A screenshot of a NYT story saying: The 27-nation bloc also agreed to increase its investment in the United States by more than $600 billion above current levels, Mr. Trump said, adding that the European Union would

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

ah, but at least they're left neatly upright, unlike these shotgunned beers left behind by our local American youths

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

Here's the quote in context. It's good advice! But it's clear about how you absolutely need to spend time on that 3%. Key is to get your project into a state where you can continuously identify the 3% whenever you add new code.

A screenshot of an old computer science paper. It has been OCRd but is clearly a high quality scan of a printout.

There is no doubt that the grail of effi-
ciency leads to abuse. Programmers waste
enormous amounts of time thinking about,
or worrying about, the speed of noncritical
parts of their programs, and these attempts
at efficieney actually have a strong negative
impact when debugging and maintenance are
considered. We should forget about small
efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: pre-
mature optimization is the root of all evil.
Yet we should not pass up our opportuni-
ties in that critical 3%. A good programmer
will not be lulled into complacency by such
reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully
at the critical code; but only after that code
has been identified. It is often a mistake to
make a priori judgments about what parts
of a program are really critical, since the
universal experience of programmers who
have been using measurement tools has been
that their intuitive guesses fail. After work-
ing with such tools for seven years, I've be-
come convinced that all compilers written
from now on should be designed to provide
all programmers with feedback indicating
what parts of their programs are costing
the most; indeed, this feedback should be
supplied automatically unless it has been
specifically turned off.

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Find the bar the aws sales rep who pulled this off is at they’re buying.

The @USGSA IT team just saved $1M per year
by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 yr
old technology for information storage) to
permanent modern digital records.

Below it is a community note.

Despite its age, magnetic tape is still highly favorable for long-term, static data archives. It offers cost-effectiveness (cheaper than disk/cloud), longevity (outlasts disk drives), offline security (resists cyber threats), and high capacity (up to 50TB per tape).

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Schumer will be 84 at the end of this term. They have learned NOTHING. www.politico.com/news/2025/04...

A screenshot from the linked Politico article.

It is unclear what the Schumer-Ocasio-Cortez poll could mean for the New York primary in three years, however, with surveys this early rarely being predictive. Ocasio-Cortez has also been noncommittal about a potential Senate run. Schumer has filed paperwork to run for reelection.

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

But don't worry, this all makes sense because math. Where the math is just “we import more than we export” with some greek letters thrown in where the values for them cancel out due to the numbers being made up. (4 times 0.25 = 1)

A screenshot from the website of the Office of the United States Trade Representative. The section is Basic Approach, full page here: https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

In the center is a formula for tarrifs where the numerator is exports minus imports, and the denominator is imports, multiplied by ε and φ where below they explain ε is 4 and φ is 0.25

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

The #Java room at #FOSDEM is probably the most Univerty Lecture Theatre of the rooms, complete with graffiti scratched into the wood of the back rows. Feeling very nostalgic. @ktoso should do some diagrams on the chalkboard showing how structs bridge over from Swift.

A photo of Konrad speaking about Java Swift interoperability. He is on a very classic university lecture theatre with wooden desks. There is a wooden bench in front of him and chalkboards behind him on either side.

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Ben Cohen @airspeedswift.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

Kicking off our #FOSDEM #Swift devroom, @parisinbmore.bsky.social has some exciting news. Apple is open sourcing the Xcode build system, with cross-platform support, as swift-build.