Skip to content

Standard Reader

Author

Steven

@stvn.sh

I help people, usually software engineers, do good work. Director of Engineering. ENFP-A, Bisexual, Neurodivergent, Ecosocialist. https://stvn.sh

Posts

3

Publications

1

Readers

4

Letters from the Edge of ChaosJun 14, 2026

You’re not “AI Native”.

It’s an interesting new obsession of ours. Don’t get me wrong, disregarding context for a second, I think generative AI is potentially revolutionary technology, I just don’t believe you. I’m not trying to be mean, I’m trying to be helpful, and that means I have to be critical. I don’t like rhetorical questions either, nor do I think you’re helped by me beating the living daylights out of a strawman of my making, so let’s honestly grapple with this. I can’t promise it’s all going to be comfortabl...

Letters from the Edge of ChaosJun 4, 2026

Elon Musk is stealing your retirement.

I need to talk about SpaceX’s IPO, the shaky foundations it’s built on, the fraud it’s being used to commit, and the consequences for you and your grandparents. Two cases to make: the engineering can’t be built on schedule, and the economics double-counts itself. Let me start with “orbital data centers,” a piece of their S-1 filing, alongside Anthropic’s recent announcements. Critics usually attack orbital data centers on launch physics. That’s the weakest argument. The energy to lift a data cen...

Letters from the Edge of ChaosApr 19, 2026

Programming Still Sucks.

Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a few faces turning around toward us, rolling their eyes ever so slightly before returning to their previous conversation. Yes, this question again.

ProgrammingLeadership