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Disenshittification
May. 21st, 2025 09:56 pmI went to PyCon in Pittsburgh last weekend, once again traveling on my own dime and time, per the new way of things at Google. At least they comped me one of their sponsor passes for reg.
Cory Doctorow did the opening keynote, on his theory of the current malaise in the tech industry. Which was quite an opening to the conference: We'd like to thank our sponsors and now here's Cory Doctorow to rip them a new one. I'm a big fan of Doctorow, and think he has a lot of insight. I really do think tech companies have gotten themselves to a point in consolidation-friendly and competition-unfriendly political environment where not only are things getting shittier for users and other stakeholders, the companies have also really painted themselves into a corner and are suffering from stagnation (even in an environment where there's some really amazing development in technical capabilities). Doctorow highlights Jay Saurik's phrase about how the DMCA (and similar laws promulgated by treaty agreements and free-trade deals) prohibiting the circumvention of digital locks makes a de facto crime of "Felony Contempt of Business Model". Doctorow's suggestion that countries should retaliate against tariffs with IP liberalization instead of retaliatory tariffs (i.e. making it possible for their entrepreneurs and firms to compete with US big tech instead of just revenge-taxing their own consumers) is certainly an intriguing possibility!
I think the world Doctorow envisions would be so much better for a lot of people, including software engineers specifically. For those at startups, sure, you could actually get your "compete with the big players" start-up funded, for one thing. But also for those at big companies, which could actually compete with their rivals, instead of just carving out separate fiefdoms and taking occasional all-in/all-out-double-time shots at someone else's crown.
I got to spend a lot of time with my colleagues, especially meeting members of the new Python Team and catching up with members of the former one, many of whom seem to have settled into some really cool Python work at Meta (working on Instagram's high-performance CPython fork or the Rust implementation of their Python type-checker). It's so heartening to see people who enjoyed working with you and are happy to see you and would enjoy to work with you again. (Not that I don't get that on my current team, it's just very reduced.) And I ran into Itamar, a colleague back from my ITA days, and Allen Downey, my CS professor from Olin. Spent most of my time at the convention center, but got to take in a bit of local color. Ate some big sandwiches at Primanti's anyways.
I spent Friday morning in conversation with Cory Doctorow at the PSF lounge in the expo hall, wandered the expo floor, caught talks on new Python features that I hadn't read up on before (e.g. template strings, the effort to escape once and for all from the Global Interpreter Lock), heard about people's fascinating projects. All the talks will be posted to their YouTube channel over the next week or two. The Python community really is a pointedly liberal and activist one, too, there's a real insistence on "Python is for everyone". Python really did carve out a unique niche in its balance of usability and "batteries included" power.
After getting back: This week has been pretty busy with a lot of city and school events. This evening was Somerville's Slice of the City pizza-party get-together for our neighborhood. Tomorrow morning, Erica's class is participating in the Argenziano Wax Museum, an event where the third graders portray people from history (this year focusing on figures from the American Revolution). Tomorrow evening is Argenziano Heritage Night, a big cultural festival at the school that Erica looks forward to every year.
Cory Doctorow did the opening keynote, on his theory of the current malaise in the tech industry. Which was quite an opening to the conference: We'd like to thank our sponsors and now here's Cory Doctorow to rip them a new one. I'm a big fan of Doctorow, and think he has a lot of insight. I really do think tech companies have gotten themselves to a point in consolidation-friendly and competition-unfriendly political environment where not only are things getting shittier for users and other stakeholders, the companies have also really painted themselves into a corner and are suffering from stagnation (even in an environment where there's some really amazing development in technical capabilities). Doctorow highlights Jay Saurik's phrase about how the DMCA (and similar laws promulgated by treaty agreements and free-trade deals) prohibiting the circumvention of digital locks makes a de facto crime of "Felony Contempt of Business Model". Doctorow's suggestion that countries should retaliate against tariffs with IP liberalization instead of retaliatory tariffs (i.e. making it possible for their entrepreneurs and firms to compete with US big tech instead of just revenge-taxing their own consumers) is certainly an intriguing possibility!
I think the world Doctorow envisions would be so much better for a lot of people, including software engineers specifically. For those at startups, sure, you could actually get your "compete with the big players" start-up funded, for one thing. But also for those at big companies, which could actually compete with their rivals, instead of just carving out separate fiefdoms and taking occasional all-in/all-out-double-time shots at someone else's crown.
I got to spend a lot of time with my colleagues, especially meeting members of the new Python Team and catching up with members of the former one, many of whom seem to have settled into some really cool Python work at Meta (working on Instagram's high-performance CPython fork or the Rust implementation of their Python type-checker). It's so heartening to see people who enjoyed working with you and are happy to see you and would enjoy to work with you again. (Not that I don't get that on my current team, it's just very reduced.) And I ran into Itamar, a colleague back from my ITA days, and Allen Downey, my CS professor from Olin. Spent most of my time at the convention center, but got to take in a bit of local color. Ate some big sandwiches at Primanti's anyways.
I spent Friday morning in conversation with Cory Doctorow at the PSF lounge in the expo hall, wandered the expo floor, caught talks on new Python features that I hadn't read up on before (e.g. template strings, the effort to escape once and for all from the Global Interpreter Lock), heard about people's fascinating projects. All the talks will be posted to their YouTube channel over the next week or two. The Python community really is a pointedly liberal and activist one, too, there's a real insistence on "Python is for everyone". Python really did carve out a unique niche in its balance of usability and "batteries included" power.
After getting back: This week has been pretty busy with a lot of city and school events. This evening was Somerville's Slice of the City pizza-party get-together for our neighborhood. Tomorrow morning, Erica's class is participating in the Argenziano Wax Museum, an event where the third graders portray people from history (this year focusing on figures from the American Revolution). Tomorrow evening is Argenziano Heritage Night, a big cultural festival at the school that Erica looks forward to every year.
