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Allison Kaptur

@akaptur.bsky.social
119 followers 158 following 33 posts

software engineer, mountain enthusiast, casual artist

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Reposted by Allison Kaptur
dan @danabra.mov · 18/09/2026
i spent all of my free time for a month on this. it's done. so i wrote about it.
overreacted.io
How I Vibed a Proof of Conway’s Conjecture — overreacted
You can just prove things, apparently.
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Allison Kaptur @akaptur.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
I’m happy to see more people hopping mad about the democrats‘ text campaigns. Hopping mad is the correct amount of mad to be data4democracy.substack.com/p/hook-and-s...
Screenshot of text: “ But the most devastating result of this strategy doesn’t show up on an FEC report. In exchange for a quick return today, fundraising consultants are liquidating the party’s long-term future, turning potential lifelong donors into people who now delete Democratic messages on sight. Every frantic appeal trains donors to see the party as desperate and unserious. What respectable organization treats its supporters this way and expects to keep them? In the long run, these tactics are less a boon to the party’s finances than a siphon.”
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ngrok @ngrok.com · 11/08/2026
Compression and LLMs are trying to solve the exact same problem: predicting what comes next. @anniesexton.com's interactive essay walks us through the basics of compression to reveal its surprising overlap with every language model you've ever used.
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Allison Kaptur @akaptur.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
This is grim but I think it’s all correct
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Allison Kaptur @akaptur.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
I’ve been noticing this also with Opus 5. It’s not just jargon I don’t know but jargon it invented, when I already have perfectly good jargon I was already using.
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Allison Kaptur @akaptur.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Moishe is so thoughtful and that really comes through in this piece (thereby proving his point!) tk.xyz/notes/fe9ecc...
tk.xyz
TK — A new way to write from Medium
Fall back in love with writing.
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Reposted by Allison Kaptur
Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 26/07/2026
Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed: “Investing in machine-checkable correctness is now among the highest-leverage infrastructure work an org can fund” karimjedda.com/engineering-...
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Allison Kaptur @akaptur.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
“Legibility of effort“ is a great, useful framing from Nolen: eieio.games/blog//blog/l...
eieio.games
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Allison Kaptur @akaptur.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
This is a really good writeup about keeping a mental model of your code in the age of LLMs: yes, it’s wonderful to have great mental model of your entire system, but in practice almost everyone with a coding job is working in a system where that’s not possible. www.seangoedecke.com/in-defense-o...
seangoedecke.com
In defense of not understanding your codebase
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Reposted by Allison Kaptur
cyber professional @permadeath.com · 08/07/2026
here's the other half of my post: why AI token cost discussions are basically just noise and have little relevance to whether businesses should adopt AI tools for software development
permadeath.com
There's no accounting for AI
or budgeting, or hiring, or anything else you took for granted
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Phillip Carter @phillipcarter.dev · 05/07/2026
Great read surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/02/08/n...
surfingcomplexity.blog
Nobody knows how the whole system works
One of the surprising (at least to me) consequences of the fall of Twitter is the rise of LinkedIn as a social media site. I saw some interesting posts I wanted to call attention to: First, Simon W…
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Allison Kaptur @akaptur.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Here’s a very similar article about astrophysics: if you do science that no one understands, what have you accomplished? (Serious question, not rhetorical, that all these scientists are wrestling.)
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Allison Kaptur @akaptur.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
The mental model problem has been an interesting one for me too. With coding tools, when and how do I refresh my mental model of the existing system and build my mental model of how my changes fit into it? www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/arti...
Screenshot of text: “Whenever I write code, I'm also reading the code and rebuilding my mental model of how everything works. If a bot writes the code for me I still need to do the work of building mental models and I'm no longer getting it for 'free' from writing code. I'd need a separate practice, something like review++, to keep on top of it. Just reading code doesn't work that well, in the same way that reviewing your highlighted notes is not actually prepping you for an exam.”
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Gillian Branstetter @gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Very thankful for this letter to Becky Pepper-Jackson (the 16 year-old trans girl SCOTUS ruled against yesterday) from James Dale, a gay man whose expulsion from the Boy Scouts was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2000.
medium.com
To the Trans Girl Who Just Lost at the Supreme Court: So Did I 26 Years Ago
A letter to Becky Pepper Jackson about her trans sports case defeat at SCOTUS yesterday
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Drawing the line on AI writing, literally notes.archie-hall.com/p/drawing-the-… #AI #writing
If I had to pick the two dimensions that matter most, I'd bid for:
• What role does AI play in the writing process?
• How mechanical, versus ideas-led, does the final product need to be!?
So in that just-draw-a-line spirit, I sketched out my own two-by-two chart with examples for those ranges?. Top of my "Al involvement"
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Allison Kaptur @akaptur.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
A reflection on AI in math that speaks to a problem in software engineering too
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depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
it has come to my attention that busytown is anti pig
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Camille Fournier @skamille.themanagerswrath.com · 31/05/2026
Boring but functional post on something I think more leaders need to address: guidelines for respectful use of AI medium.com/@skamille/gu...
medium.com
Guidelines for Respectful Use of AI
As companies adopt AI tools, a lot of time is spent on thinking about AI policies from a security, compliance, or even cost-focused angle…
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Allison Kaptur @akaptur.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
This is a smart take - there’s a way to use AI to turbocharge your growth, and a way to use it so you never learn anything. I’ve also seen “problem decomposition” remain a huge part of the job and one not really accelerated by AI.
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Stephen Judkins @stephenjudkins.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
"Absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion." This is a pithy explanation of why I dislike LLM "slop"
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Kelly Vaughn @kvlly.com · 25/11/2025
The engineer-manager pendulum model no longer accurately reflects how engineering leadership operates. Most of us aren’t just an IC or a manager. Technology has forced us to live somewhere in the middle. I wrote about what this actually looks like now: www.modernleader.is/p/pendulum-r...
modernleader.is
The engineer–manager pendulum is breaking
The hybrid era of engineering leadership is here, and the traditional IC/manager model is no longer suitable.
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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 11/08/2025
And just for clarification, "learn to write well" doesn't mean "learn to write with big words and complex grammar" It means: learn to... -articulate an argument and support it with sound evidence and logical reasoning -organize your writing so the reader can easily understand complex ideas
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Allison Kaptur @akaptur.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
This resonates: blog.val.town/vibe-code
blog.val.town
Vibe code is legacy code
Updates and articles from the Val Town team
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Recurse Center @recurse.com · 23/07/2025
We spent two months talking with RC alums and thinking deeply about how LLMs are changing programming and learning. Here’s what we learned, and how we're currently thinking about AI at RC: t.co/ddFj486ch8
t.co
https://www.recurse.com/blog/191-developing-our-position-on-ai
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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
This is shocking. Pure totalitarianism from DHS, and also blatantly unconstitutional. www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...
newyorker.com
How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests Led to My Deportation
As an Australian who wrote about the demonstrations while on campus, I gave my phone a superficial clean before flying to the U.S. I underestimated what I was up against.
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Robert David Sullivan @robertdsullivan.bsky.social · 14/04/2025
“how many politicians have you seen doing photo ops in nurse scrubs?”
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Camille Fournier @skamille.themanagerswrath.com · 19/03/2025
Holy crap this article
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Mark Harris @markharris.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
One thing Democratic leadership could do right now is to name an alternate HHS secretary--someone to provide ongoing public updates and health information. And do it for other departments too. Start showing voters what a Democratic government would look like--press conferences, speeches, all of it.
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Camille Fournier @skamille.themanagerswrath.com · 08/02/2025
I keep thinking about this www.liberalcurrents.com/once-and-fut...
liberalcurrents.com
Once and Future Liberal Institutionalism
When conservatives want to burn down the system.
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Reposted by Allison Kaptur
Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
theonion.com
It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible
The task of reporting is not a simple one. Each and every day, reporters and editors at publications like The Onion make difficult decisions about which issues should receive attention, knowing that o...
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