Ruby is gay

NEW: Are restaurants starting to taste the same? Food distributor Sysco has been on a relentless acquisition spree, becoming one of the largest companies in food service. This consolidation means higher prices for mass-produced food made under grueling conditions.

In the hype for all the new albums I missed the silver anniversary for my favorite album the year I was born and one of the greatest albums ever Long live At The Drive-In - Relationship Of Command. You changed my life in ways I can’t express.

So strange: Practically no one outside of Amazon seems to know about Amazon Q Developer. It's Amazon's "version" of GH Copilot. All devs at Amazon use it (and like it AFAIK!) It excels working with anything AWS. And it's a public product! Like they were hiding it... but not!

FWIW, there is no record, in any District Court or Worcester Superior Court, of a case against first name: "Ferreira," last name: "de Oliveira" via Masscourts.org

In this episode of Complex Systems, Patrick McKenzie (aka @Patio11) is joined by Dave Guarino (@allafarce), a software engineer and policy wonk. They explore the complexities and challenges of public programs, focusing on SNAP aka CalFresh in California, where Dave was the founding engineer and then director. They discuss how society’s complex preferences become policy, driving obviously bad UXes (like 200+ questions for an application) for structural reasons. Patrick and Dave debate structural issues within government agencies that lead to these inefficiencies, the lack of user-centric design, misaligned incentives, a “cavernous gap” in feedback loops, and surprisingly simple ways anyone can influence public policy and improve government systems. -- Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (01:03) Complexity of naming government programs (03:45) How policy decisions are made (07:19) Why SNAP applications are so complex (14:17) Why no one stops overly complex applications (18:44) Political economy of different benefit programs (24:56) Sponsor: Check | WorkOS (26:13) Limited visibility into user experience (29:24) Lack of application completion rate tracking (35:27) Starting where you are (43:44) Challenges of modernizing legacy systems (48:35) Broken feedback loops in government (53:01) Tech's understanding of service design (57:07) Issues with improper payments methodology (1:04:45) Effective ways to influence policy (1:09:43) Increasing agency in government agencies (1:14:56) Getting niche policy ideas into circulation (1:18:04) Importance of frontline knowledge and user feedback (1:21:33) Improving government services (1:22:06) Wrap -- It's here on X in full, and on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. Links in comment.