Scott Boehmer

Author: Scott Boehmer

  • Conservative Seniors & Survivorship Bias

    One of the abiding realities of our political era is a major generational split anchored on the right by disproportionately conservative seniors and on the left by disproportionately progressive millennials and post-millennials. This is often thought of as a perfectly natural, even inevitable, phenomenon: Young people are adventurous, open to new ways of thinking, and not terribly invested in the status quo, while old folks have time-tested views, assets they want to protect, and a growing fear of the unknown and unfamiliar.

    …

    But it is important to note that some generational disjunctions in political behavior are driven by demography. It’s well understood that millennials are significantly more diverse than prior generations. But there is something else driving the relative homogeneity of seniors: Poorer people are often hobbled by chronic illness, and succumb to premature death.

    Ed Kilgore

    Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors (New York Magazine)

  • Come On Get In

    Here’s another song I enjoy – Come On Get In by KT Tunstall.

    Come On Get In (KT Tunstall – YouTube)

  • Trusting LLM Generated Code Is a Security Risk

    The rise of LLM-powered code generation tools is reshaping how developers write software – and introducing new risks to the software supply chain in the process.

    These AI coding assistants, like large language models in general, have a habit of hallucinating. They suggest code that incorporates software packages that don’t exist.

    …

    Running that code should result in an error when importing a non-existent package. But miscreants have realized that they can hijack the hallucination for their own benefit.

    Thomas Claburn

    LLMs can’t stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything (The Register)

  • Does Upzoning Destroy Property Values?

    There is a ton of confusion–and a fair amount of debate–over what happens to property values when you upzone. Does allowing more housing through upzoning drive prices down or does it drive up housing costs? It’s a question with some strong opinions on both sides. We dive into the latest research.

    Justine Underhill

    Does upzoning destroy property values? (YouTube – Justine Underhill)

  • Crypto Crime Is Legal

    A Monday night memo from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, citing Trump’s crypto executive orders, has dismantled the Department of Justice’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) and directed the agency’s Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit to “cease cryptocurrency enforcement”. The memo also directs prosecutors to “not charge regulatory violations in cases involving digital assets including but not limited to unlicensed money transmitting…, violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, unregistered securities offering violations, unregistered broker-dealer violations, and other violations of registration requirements under the Commodity Exchange Act” unless they have specific knowledge that the defendant knowingly and willfully violated a specific requirement — erecting a major barrier to prosecuting such cases.

    Molly White

    Crypto crime is legal (Citation Needed)

  • 20 Years of Git

    Twenty years ago today, Linus Torvalds made the very first commit to Git, the information manager from hell.

    Over these last 20 years, Git went from a small, simple, personal project to the most massively dominant version control system ever built.

    Scott Chacon

    20 years of Git. Still weird, still wonderful. (GitButler Blog)

  • Unicorn Overlord

    When I was a kid with a Super Nintendo, Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen was one of my favorite games. Unicorn Overlord, released last year, is a great spiritual successor to that old favorite. The core gameplay is similar, but Unicorn Overlord adds enough to be a fresh experience. I recently finished playing through the campaign and had fun with it right up to the end.

    If you like strategy games, I recommend giving it a try.

    Unicorn Overlord

  • Financial Literacy 101 for Farms

    Sarah Taber published a video essay on farming as a business that I think is worth watching even if you’re not a farmer.

    Financial Literacy 101 for Farms (Sarah Taber – YouTube)

  • Let’s Rewrite the Whole Thing

    I’ve worked as a software engineer for close to two decades. Re-implementing a complex system in a new programming language is a hard problem. Trying to make such a change rapidly rather than taking your time to isolate and convert it in small chunks is asking for trouble.

    The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

    Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.

    Makena Kelly

    DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse (WIRED)

  • Views Are Lies

    Views are the most visible metric on the internet. You can see, in more or less real time, how many views something got on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and most other video platforms. X tracks views for every single thing you post, as does Threads. A view is the universal currency of success — more views, more fun.

    But it’s all nonsense. Views are nothing. Views are lies.

    David Pierce

    ‘Views’ are lies (The Verge)