I live in Washington, D.C. and work as a software developer. I'm active in the labor movement and interested in political economy, ecology, and the history o...
The mass adoption of the consumer web and the smartphone changed the occupational structure around software. For the nearly twenty years I've worked as a developer, I have almost without exception worked with product managers. The future of that relationship is unclear to me, because the way my work is changing would seem to present the option to employers of combining my job with that of a…
Let's say you're like me, and enjoy looking for birds of many different species in the District of Columbia. How many different species could you expect to find if you look regularly and diligently, in a variety of habitats, throughout the year? Doesn't eBird already already provide an answer to this question with its checklist for the District of Columbia? This will show you that there are three…
This year some friends and I have been doing a "Hegel Year" reading group. My interest in Hegel was spurred by reading and discussing the "value-form" readings of Marx's Capital . Several writers in that tendency, such as Tony Smith and Chris Arthur, see Marx as having owed a tremendous debt to Hegel and as being, in some sense, imperfectly understood by those who do not understand Hegel.…
I have a hunch that one of the more useful applications of LLMs in the longer term will be transforming unstructured prose into structured data with the guidance of a schema. By "schema" I mean a formal syntactic structure (e.g. a JSON Schema, TypeScript type) chosen by a human being with a particular set of retrieval tasks in mind. For a very cool example of what this approach can yield, check…
Many economists argue that the tariffs mooted by the new U.S. administration are likely to decrease economic growth relative to a scenario without additional tariffs. Would tariffs at least slow the pace of climate change and other ecological crises, simply by decreasing the growth in carbon-intensive economic activities? Probably not. In April of 2018, a group of climate scientists, economists,…
I have been a skeptic of some of the more breathless claims made for Generative AI since at least October 2023, when I participated in a panel organized by Syracuse University . Specifically, I have been skeptical of claims that these technologies will dramatically increase labor productivity in most or all occupations. This is generally what is meant by those who see Generative AI as a 'first…
If you had a standard American education more than a few decades ago, your view of Native American societies before the arrival of European colonists is likely inaccurate. There were many more Native Americans, in more dense settlements, than you were taught. They consciously transformed the landscapes in which they lived on a vast scale, contrary to the still popular romantic image of bands of…
Have you heard of the " socialist calculation debate "? There are many brief essays intended to introduce a general audience to it, often expressly written to vindicate the doctrines of one political tendency or another. If you read a few of these, you will quickly notice they tend to repeat one of three stories about the debate: Austrian economists like Mises and Hayek foresaw the problems a…
People's Republic of Walmart , by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, is the latest short text on a political theme to issue from Verso and Jacobin Magazine 's joint publishing venture. Its theme is planning, as it exists within capitalist firms today and might exist in the socialist polity of tomorrow. The supercession of the market by economic planning was long thought, by both proponents and…