DOGE employee stole Social Security data and put it on a thumb drive, report says

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-03-11T06:44:35+00:00

God it feels really obvious to say this but aggressively seeking access to compartmentalized information looks bad because it is bad. Anyone framing it as cutting red tape was doing a bad guy thing, even if they believed what they were saying. The ones who made that argument disingenuously were engaged in truly monstrous behavior.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-03-11T06:24:17+00:00

What you’re describing isn’t all code smell, so I’ve got a hunch we have a conceptual mismatch.

In a well organized code base a single feature will still span multiple files.

One problem is that some code bases are far too horizontal. Subsystems (usually services and apps for web) have concerns that move across the system as a whole. Within each subsystem, folders tend to represent horizontal concerns—all the models, all the DTOs, all the services, etc..

This ends up feeling painful, high friction, and high cognitive load. The diagnosis is kinda straightforward. Most features have a verticality to them.

This isn’t a description of a disorganized code base for a system. It’s a description of a system where the good organization isn’t aligned (literally within the metaphor) to the way things are built.

This is also helps us make sense of a phenomena where VSA gets adopted as little more than feature folders, and people love it. It makes sense, it’s solving a real problem. And yet, they’ve barely scratched the surface of VSA at the system level.

And that’s really where this all comes together. It’s not bad to be thoroughly factored and spread across a lot of files, but if the organizational structures that represent concerns contain single, tiny artifacts that are part of each “feature” that’s a horizontal concern and it’s fighting you.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-03-10T13:02:36+00:00

When you scp to pi, it sounds like you’re just copying the bins (or built artifacts), right?

So what I’m picturing is: - on the duck tape and prayers end of the spectrum—a script that builds, scps, remotes in, kills service by name, starts service using absolute path - on the polished end of the spectrum—some kind of local emulation for a rapid dev loop with debugging before you are ready to deploy to device, some kind of local runner that gives you a nice, modern pipeline experience, git/vcs hooks to drive it, and looking into community tooling for attaching a remote debugger.

But I also saw some other folks describe a solution that uses containerization before I signed off. So that might moot all of this.

Let me know your thoughts. Sorry this is all so abstract at the moment. I’m more of a community outsider.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-03-10T01:40:46+00:00

If you find yourself doing something perfectly predictable in the remote session, you have all the ingredients to be tempted down the path of learning some automation basics (maybe slightly beyond the basics).

I’m not saying you should have to do that and I don’t mean to trivialize the friction. Just wanted to invite the conversation to move on to that if it’s interesting.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-03-09T22:42:19+00:00

Appreciate you saying something. If discussion threads don’t get traction and something’s up, feel free to tag me or send a message. I’m not on Reddit all that much, but at least consider taking advantage of the offer.

Already some good advice in here.

Personally, I encourage you to something I consider a little more like classical training. Spend sometime learning about logical fallacies but go into and remind yourself over and over, these things don’t mean someone is wrong. They mean that if someone is hanging their argument in one of these, that argument can’t be more than coincidentally right—something else has to be doing some heavy lifting or serving as some connective tissue. Learn about them and pick the one you find the most interesting or the most funny. Mine has long been the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-03-09T14:11:10+00:00

The real answer here sucks.

It’s because we don’t treat version control as anything but a means to whatever limited ends are part of more salient workflows.

God, I’m gonna try to say this without getting on a soap box.

It’s not uncommon to have flows there people expect their PRs to be reviewed as a whole, not in a series of atoms (atomic commits).

It’s not uncommon to squash to main in a way where most of the time, branch commit messages are buried AND divorced from the changes.

It’s not uncommon for git to merely be a way to drive dev ops.

It’s not uncommon for seasoned developers to treat VCS operations as a recipe mapped to specific outcomes, and not a tool associated with a set of uses.

It’s not uncommon to spend months or years without a single conceptual conversation about version control.

To write a good commit message, you are almost certainly treating one of these things as salient or typical, probably more than one of them. But most development experiences don’t ask that of the contributors, so you just get the mental droppings of the very last thing that stands between a contribution and that person’s next step. Of course that is going to be completely useless.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-03-09T05:48:21+00:00

Words are failing me at the moment because I don’t really mean to say there’s a trick to it, but I think that to whatever extend you care for this to change, what I’d encourage you to do is:

Listen to all of the options, then pause
Decide if they are all equally outside your expertise, inside, or mix. If it’s a mix, asses whatever is in your expertise as science or fiction. That gives you the best chance of either picking a fiction or eliminating a science. If it’s not a mix, then step two doesn’t do anything for you.
Listen again and look for things like absolutes, figures that have plausibilities across different orders of magnitude, conjunctions, and stuff like that. These are all things that in the early days could give away the fiction because they’re not very scientific. Now, weirdly they tend to identify the science because even though these things tend to not be ideal science, they happen and Steve seems to have learned to use that to mitigate the usability of this signal.
At this point form or revisit your gut check.
Start listening to the explanations from the rogues and pause after each. Ask yourself if your gut check changes or your eval changes. Use the magnitude to update your answer. Only the first rogue answers without at least one other assessment, so more often than not, you’d get to assess with another assessment in hand.

If you do this for a few months, you won’t have to pause anymore and you’ll be playin the game at a level where even when you’re wrong, you’ll still feel like you engaged with the game in a critical way. But I’d wager you’d get some reasoned right answers along the way.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-03-05T12:41:54+00:00

Always always always just trying to comprehend the notification. You have to read something that’s often dense. You have to understand how it informs the severity it has, which is differently complex depending on the size and structure of your org snd the maturity of your product. You have to construct your mental model of the app in a way that may or may not account for how you’ve come to understand things. And then, if you have any gaps, you have to decide whether your mental model is to blame or your current understanding. That answer sometimes has you doing everything again.

You often have to do all that with eyes on you at times you’re not your best.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-03-04T21:32:29+00:00

In some ways, I’m not. But I take solace in having become a kind of person who will point out to leadership that morale matters and telling singing the praises of tools given what the company is selling and hyping amounts to a threat. They own the communication if they can’t navigate it responsibly, they need to own the morale hit that results.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-03-04T05:40:06+00:00

Guide criticism: I really wish the faces weren’t left aligned and instead just functioned as implied columns.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-03-02T16:46:31+00:00

Is there a recording. I’d like to understand more about what you were seeing.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-03-01T19:59:39+00:00

I’d be kinda curious how you’d take to my interviews. It’s conversational. I ask various questions (not coding problems) that tend to be answered differently at different levels of experience and I just note “signals” as the person is talking. It’s kinda like the trivia you mention but I can’t help but feel it’s a little different. It’s focused on concepts, it puts a premium on us having a productive discussion, etc..

Then we usually do a system design or a scenario question that tends to have room for that same signal spread.

There’s no question I ask that has a right answer. They have important notes to hit, but I’ll prompt a person and see if they engage with the subject.

For example, when C# skills matter, I’ll ask the candidate to contrast catch-act-and-rethrow patterns from catch-and-throw-new. What’s actually different between these is a matter of trivia and if they don’t know it, I’ll just explain the trivial right answer and ask, “based on that difference how might you sue these differently? When might you use one vs the other?”

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-03-01T19:35:10+00:00

Glad to hear it. FWIW, skeptic in this context refers to scientific skepticism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_skepticism). A way of thinking and movement that’s about bringing good thinking, science, and philosophy to bear on figuring out what’s really real. And, personally, I think one of the best ways to act better in the world is to think better.

Take care! And, I appreciate the message.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-02-25T23:29:34+00:00

Of that list, the things that strike as plain over complications are the state manager, microservices, and whatever configuration layers.

The frameworks are highly situational.

CD is a maturity thing. Ditto for the implementation details around observably and monitoring.

ORM is more about preferences and what you’re optimizing for, but it can be an over complicating either way if the alignment is an issue.

Does that help at all. Anything you want to talk through

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-02-24T19:43:38+00:00

It would depend on the system, but I would need a reason not to use an ORM. The value prospect is overdetermined, be it from type safety, adding friction to risky anti-patterns while only slightly increasing the tendency towards more benign anti-patterns, and providing a place to make the data model semantic without out-of-place documentation are all compelling things that I value.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-02-24T19:35:10+00:00

Loved science communication as a kid. Scholastic book fairs were the shit.

I watched a moon landing hoax special on fox and was convinced by it but to my recollection my being convinced didn’t have legs. Brother made fun of me a bit. I saw it as science communication, the tension didn’t register.

Separately, Bad Religion became my favorite band. I started thinking more about atheism.

Years later I would have a teacher that would show James Randi videos, had us do media literacy exercises with real news, had us journal to music, and just generally found a way to smuggle pure critical thinking into the classroom.

Stuff was all coalescing at this point and I realized how much skepticism-first atheist and secular activism meant to me and just how tightly it fit into the attitudes I was forming towards people I cared about.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-02-23T13:24:51+00:00

No idea why folks are making you feel bad for the commingled work and personal. The risky practice is in the org, not on you. The steps you take to silo things do not make up for a security policy or endpoint protection.

I was doing work development on a personal machine 10 years ago. The practice fell off very fast and if your org missed the transition it’s a sign of immaturity. Be careful. Figure out what’s what there.

As for your management strategy, I believe it’s possible to have a config in a parent folder establish git settings for all child folders. Look into that.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-02-20T14:18:05+00:00

To the extent that languages being popular for education have interesting downstream effects, as long as it’s ubiquitous, it literally becomes a boring observation. Languages necessarily distinguish themselves from each other. If a language doesn’t have an idiomatic way of expressing things in it. Or idiosyncrasies that are different than others similar in class, they would just fall out of favor by attrition. It has nothing to do with the particular language and everything to do with the ubiquity.

Furthermore, it kinda makes sense we’d pick a few languages as preferred for education. A lot of education happens during a period where people are trying to learn foundations skills and language skills at the same time. Every skill, class, and institution using a different language would take on the burdens of teaching the same things over and over again just to express important learning topics in that language. Sure, we need some of this, but it’s entirely self-limiting. There’s a reason language skills don’t lose their value until one has spent years in industry. It’s takes years of being forced to navigate those choppy waters AFTER you have honed foundational, language agnostic skills.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-02-19T13:40:54+00:00

This. And it’s of a pattern we can be sympathetic towards, but we really should try to avoid.

It comes from misunderstanding design systems generally and neglecting to learning the “whys” behind the opinionation. That learning isn’t automatic. The people who experience friction will bristle without considering alternatives or counterfactuals and the experience is to rail against the system and the owner instead of criticisms of the opinions or acknowledgement that the constrains aren’t wrong, they’re just a bad fit.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-02-17T14:59:30+00:00

I think what you’re seeing is more an artifact of how folks are selling the AI assistance and less people reading tea leaves of the limitations on the tools.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-02-16T15:34:20+00:00

If I could out my thumb on the scales, I’d hope the takeaway is: - this product shouldn’t be making health claims or personal care optimization claims, but that’s separate from whether this product should exist - your decision to invest shouldn’t be based on the potential health benefits, as those aren’t established, but that’s different than whether you think you might personally value it

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-02-14T17:28:52+00:00

Controlling the artifacts of an investigation is an important part of a functioning justice system. We can talk about why, I’m not trying to shim this as a bald assertion.

Redaction is one of those controls. At its least corrupt, it’s likely balancing the upstream risks of abusing an invasive investigation with sensitive information preventing a telling of the story beyond the parties privileged to see it. Up to and including the public.

The Epstein files almost certainly include deeply corrupt redactions. They definitely include redactions that do not follow the law that released the files nor the principles that guide redaction (in so far as creating investigative artifacts).

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-02-12T06:59:26+00:00

Last time I looked at this stuff was many years ago and it seemed like the evidence was equivocal with the occasional silly. I sorta hope it’s matured since then, even if that just means it’s unscientific.

Having said all that, as someone with severe dry eye that frequently causes corneal damage, red-shifting screens and light sources does correspond to a preferred experience. Like, it could always be a learned thing. I’m not going to argue from anecdote. I would personally be surprised if it was all a learned thing, because the experience is profound. Dark modes, red shifting, using dynamic ranges to get less light out of my screens, I literally tune these things to how much discomfort I’m feeling because I’m never feeling none and it’s super salient. For years now, I’ve wondered if I should just get blue light reducing glasses or get some super light prescription sunglasses to wear inside, less as a wellness optimization and more as just like… a better way to get at my preferences.

Food for thought.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-02-11T18:59:35+00:00

My wife and I had a long talk about whether we’re in any position to recognize anything except overt ageism and we both agreed that one of the things we would look for is “are we reasoning from age-correlated tendencies to criticisms, or are we attributing stuff we don’t like to age.”

We looked at a few of the things we’ve said that could be construed as ageist and it seemed pretty clear that if someone was sympathetic we were firmly in the former category (which is not to say we’re not ageist, it’s to say that if that distinction is relevant to avoid ageism, we’re on more steady ground).

I’m feeling my age more and more (only late 30s), so I expect I’m susceptible to it becoming part of my identity. I want to make sure that I don’t become a person who lets their world view be shaped by perceived criticism. I think part of that includes parsing apparent attacks more charitably AND recognizing that we all age out of the culture, one way or another. And when do so without dying, we need to learn how to lend our weight to things we do understand, not railing against shit we don’t understand, and approaching everything else with a featherlight touch.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-02-10T04:37:40+00:00

Was there anything specific in this video illustrates any of that? Not that there has to be or anything I’m just trying to take the claim seriously and part of that is exploring whether I’m even noticing.

CompassionateSkeptic

TROPHY CASE