This works great for international geo-politcs as well. It’s much more important to watch what leaders do than listen to what they say.

I started but could not finish a project I was calling “g(overnm)it blame” - the idea was to track each bill through committee and to the end either a sort of commit history to see which legislator (or at least which committee) added what part of the final bill.

I found it infeasible, but I’m wondering if you saw rich enough data while making this that you think such a project is viable?

Maybe I'm too software-engineer-brained now, but to me it seems like lawmakers should just be using a tool like git directly. The legal code is a codebase, every bill is a PR, the arguments and proposed changes are captured in review comments, and the PR is accepted/rejected on a vote.

Aside from "lawmakers don't/won't understand the tool", why not do it this way?

I think they pretty much do, it’s just not recorded as such in an easily retrievable format.

From what I understand, it depends on the stage. The United States Code certainly tracks any and all amendments, and you can fully trace which member introduced which amendment, when and where it passed, and even verbatim floor debate.

However, the draft stage isn't documented this way. Members negotiate whatever between themselves (well, really their staffers) and this happens over email, in discussions, via Word documents - whatever works.

I guess in the git metaphor, drafts are in flux while being worked on as a commit, and are squashed and then accessible as such squashed commits once initially introduced or whenever they lead to bill amendments. You can't necessarily track down what member was responsible for a specific sentence in an amendment.

The thing is that there is a voting process eventually so it can at least in principle be known which version is proposed by which legislator, or which committee.

The people behind changes aren't actually as attributable as it sounds though because amendment text gets collaborated on, so showerst might propose an amendment with the key parts of LPisGood's wishlist in it, and then the bill itself will die and then various parts will get cherry picked into an omnibus bill in 6 months anyway.

I've see similar stuff in open source a few times. X post a bug report, Y replies with minimized case, X makes a PR, Z makes a few suggestions, Y add some comments, X updates the PR and W merges it.

Who are the other two?

In my book, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, members of the PayPal Mafia.

How do they consistently mess things up ? Current market cap 3.7T, only Apple and Nvidia are bigger. Youtube is a huge success, Search is still growing at 10%-15% which is crazy, cloud growing at 35%ish, TPUs enable them to be independent from NVidia etc. Gemini market share went up from 5%-6% early 2025 to 21% early 2026. I personally bet Gemini market share will keep growing. They are executing well on all verticals imo, not messing up.

Exactly. You might not like what Google does, but you can't deny it's a massive commercial success. Just because their approach to creating and delivering apps might not be to your liking, you might actually be the niche.

Yeah but if we think about this in terms of "people love dumb things", then it makes sense what the other person is saying, no? As an example, compare it to how people are when it comes to tech, as in, they are tech-illiterate. Us, power users would not want an OS that is dumbed down... or compare it to YouTubers who are richer than an SWE and all they do is upload "brainrot". That is the audience, that is why these YouTubers also have "massive commercial success".

That’s my take. Without any competition, they languish and do nothing, ruining any promising ideas.

You need some qualifiers. Google is very good at engineering. For example, I hate that Google uses my data to serve ads, but there isn't a tech company I would trust more to safe guard my data.

Where Google has fallen down is trying to productize new things. Imagine if Apple had Google's software prowess, or Google had Apple's ability to conceptualize a complete product.

Would you not trust Apple at least as much?

I do, but Apple captures way less data. Most data they have, I gave them.

People predicted that about Twitter but it didn’t really happen

That's because Twitter only really does one thing. Also, despite not having any hard stats twitter has been down an awful lot more these past few years

I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc?

If you weren’t doing much of that before, I struggled to think of how you were doing much engineering at all, save some more niche extremely technical roles where many of those questions were already answered, but even still, I should expect you’re having those kinds of discussions, just more efficiently and with other engineers.

> I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc?

The vast majority of software engineers in the world. The most widespread management culture is that where a team's manager is the interface towards the rest of the organization and the engineers themselves don't do any alignment/consensus/business thinking, which is the manager's exclusive job.

I used to work like that and I loved it. My managers were decent and they allowed me to focus on my technical skills. Then, due to those technical skills I'd acquired, I somehow got hired at Google, stayed there nearly a decade but hated all the OKR crap, perf and the continuous self-promotion I was obliged to do.

It seems that to some number of folks, "engineering" means "writing code."

> I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc?

I'd suspect the kind that's going away.

That kind was already reserved for junior roles, contractors, and off shoring.

I’m not sure everyone would agree with that statement. As a more senior engineer at a big tech company, our execs still believe more code output is expected by level. Hell they even measure and rate you on lines of code deltas.

I don’t agree with it or believe it’s smart but it’s the world we live in

In a lot of larger organizations there is a whole stable of people whose job is to keep stakeholders and programmers from ever having to talk to each other. This was considered a best practice a quarter-century ago ("Office Space" makes fun of it), and in retrospect I concede it sometimes had a point.

In my case

* meeting with people, yes, on calls, on chats, sometimes even on phone

* “aligning expectations”, yes, because of the next point

* getting consensus, yes, inevitably or how else do we decide what to do and how to do it?

* making slides/decks to communicate that, not anymore, but this is a specific tool of the job, like programming in Java vs in Python.

* thinking about market positioning, no, but this is what only a few people in an organization have agency on.

* etc? Yes, for example don't piss off other people, help custumers using the product, identify new functionalities that could help us deliver a better product, prioritize them and then back to getting consensus.

Ime a team or project lead does that and the rest of the engineers maybe do that on a smaller scale but mostly implement.

Well that’s why AI will not replace the software engineer!

>If you weren’t doing much of that before, I struggled to think of how you were doing much engineering at all

Isn't like half of our industry just churning out JS file after JS file to yet again change how facebook looks?

Yeah companies which also operate CAs can print as many certs as they want so it’s tempting to use a bunch everywhere with very short expiry.

It is a co-op where creators make videos without the threat of being demonetized or algorithmically punished - and it’s not garbage in the way you might expect people fearful of being demonetized might be.

Lots of excellent legal analysis, history, logistics, engineering content there.

It was initially founded by some of the most popular information YouTubers like CGPGrey, but he mysteriously left the project (I suspect one side wanted to be evil and the other side did not)

I mean, with any sufficiently large project or system it’s rarely super accurate to say one person did something.

I also never get these. It might be because you interact with them.

I browse logged out. Interact when them I do not. The weight loss and solar scams are forced advertisements before every video.

> I browse logged out. Interact when them I do not.

The logged out experience is closer to the interests of the average person. So if you're not pruning (and savings) your interests, that's hardly surprising.

The average person wants to be served AI slop and scams?

What the average person says they want and what they will actually chose behaviorally will often not line up.

> I browse logged out.

This is like the guy who goes to the doctor complaining of eye pain whenever he drinks tea. "Have you tried taking the teaspoon out?"