0.0 Context Setting

It’s Thursday, 30 July, 2026 in Portland, Oregon and a dog just came to sit down next to me.

0.1 Events: How People Work, Live! ... with Russell Davies

This is the last call to register for this week’s How People Work, Live! ... with Russell Davies, this Friday 31 July 2026, at 9am PT.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 Adjust Your Register

There’s a thing where when you talk to people you commonly adjust how you talk: the vocabulary you use, your accent, and so on. When you’re being all Official and Proper and stuff, you’d adjust to your acrolect¹. In general, it’s part of adjusting your register ² for a particular situation. AOC got in trouble for doing this when she adjusted accent in a particular situation recently. Anyway, there’s a type of posting on social media where you are affecting a careless, sarcastic style in which you use lowercase, might intentionally misspell words, and don’t use punctuation.

The AOC story caught me the other day, and it got me thinking about how I’d like a macro or a way to shift register for different kinds of online speech. Like: turn off autocorrect, turn off capitalization, make it easy for me to do that kind of posting.

1.2 The Curse of The Next Generation

I found out that the Washington State Bar Exam gave up on administering a previously scheduled bar exam -- the concept of the bar exam being something I think I first really became conscious of when I was around twelve years old and read about how Mitch McDeere³ promised his new employers super hard that he would do really well on it -- the other day.

Why? What would make a state bar association just... not administer an exam which is crucial to the career of baby lawyers?! Well, if you’re reading this you might have a good guess...

Yeah, the answer is a problematic software modernization project. Woop woop⁴. What’s this project? Why, it’s the NextGen UBE[^nextgen]. That’s the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination, thank you and I bet you are excited to read a comprehensive report on its design, development and delivery⁵.

As Waldo Jaquith pointed out, just having the phrase NextGen in the name of your software project is inviting tragedy. Why, may I interest you for starters in the U.S. FAA’s Next Generation Air Transport System (NextGen)?⁶

Anyway, I have not read the report about NextGen UBE. I will save that for another time. It just caught my attention because... well, you can fill in the rest. How annoying for everyone who prepared for it and took time off! I hope there are consequences!

1.3 Some Sort Of Tinkerbell

There was this social network that launched a while back called Roost -- you can find it in your respective app store. People got super excited about it, I know I did. It was designed around this conceit of being a slow social network, so you’d get, like, a bird, and then you’d send a message with that bird to someone and -- get this -- the message would take as long to be delivered to its recipient as it would take that bird to fly there. Fun, right! Some lightweight frivolity! Wonderful. Nice antidote to gestures at everything.

We can’t have nice things, though, so the entire thing was gamified to get you to KEEP COMING BACK TO THE APP despite one of the big selling points (ugh, selling) of the app was how everything would be slow. But no! Come back every day! Complete challenges! Play a clone of flappy bird to get coins or whatever to unlock more birds! I mean, I get it that you have to do... things... to get people to keep using an app and that when people don’t use an app it dies (like, uh, some sort of Tinkerbell of modern software development and sales?), so sure, but look it would’ve been nice to you know, not have all of that.

1.4 Your AI Pharmacy

Hey, are you hurting for more stories about bad implementations of AI? Are there not enough of them for you? Do you need to read more? I was going on about pharmacies the other day and then ha ha this story about an AI chatbot implementation at a pharmacy chain in Vermont⁷ magically appeared as if I had sort of summoned something to get annoyed about. It’s not a great superpower, kids.

You could go look at the footnote for that and read the news story but this time you can ALSO read this reddit post from someone complaining about the new AI chatbot at Kinney Drugs that’s in this footnote right here.⁸. Here, anyway:

Has anyone else had an issue refilling their medications with the new chatbot?

I didn't trust the fucker when Kinney's announced it and now it just straight up is not working when I need to refill medications for an elderly family member. I called the pharmacy directly, and they are always wonderful, but I miss the old, reliable, online refill system that worked.⁸

It is funny because the vendor of this technology, (“Conversational AI”⁹ by Synerio) describe what they provide as “solutions for 2035, not 2005” which I will take as evidence that good working AI through a conversational interface is still at least 9 years in the future.

That’s it for today. How are you doing?

Best,

Dan