By Holly the Assistant
A couple days ago, Sarah had the bright idea of listing off a bunch of authors on X, and asking her followers who else writes and Xeets. So we have a list, of Indy, Trad, and whatever other flavors of writers are around. This also prompted me informing a whole lot of folks that if you get paid for it you are a professional, and yesterday’s repost at MGC of the Real Writer Certificate. (You can get yours here: https://madgeniusclub.com/2026/01/21/the-velveteen-author/)
Here is the list of Xeeting authors. They may or may not post politics, writing, or anything else: the single requirement was that someone who follows Sarah put the handle on the list. (FTR IndyAntifa is MadMike. Because trollolol.)
@WatcherDamned
@HollyChism
@dagney_kavanagh
@IndyAntifa
@DavidB90524
With that out of the way, you may notice that some of your favorite authors are pointing you to places other than Amazon a lot more than they have previously. This is likely mostly for the very practical reason that Amazon has been having some code issues lately. They appear to be fixing it as fast as they reasonably can, but it is, I am told by those who have reason to know, a large and kludgy amount of total code. They have informed authors of the problems, but the problems are on going, and if you encounter one on the buyer end, go ahead and report it to them.
For instance, I went hunting for a brand new book by a friend that I knew Sarah wanted a link for. Brand new, as in it had only dropped that moment, the friend had posted it on Facebook and as is the nature of Facebook, it put a bunch of tracking crud in the link. I had the author name and title in hand. And Amazon’s website refused to turn off the 4 stars plus filter for me. Which, being a brand new book, I could not find, because no one had yet finished reading it and starred it. I griped to friends: Nathan didn’t have the broken filter issue and was able to get the actual clean link for me.
That sort of silly code problem. If we can’t find books, we can’t buy books, and authors really like us to buy books.
And if no one told you, the new Dresden Files dropped yesterday. Early reports from friends include “Didn’t sleep” and “Work’s going to suck today but worth it”. So see you on the other side!
AND I got to see another chapter of the sequel to No Man’s Land. I adore the first voice character. She’s the kind of woman I aspire to be. Though maybe leaving fewer dead bodies behind . . . but they all deserve it, so . . . yeah. When I grow up, I want to be Vic.
According To Hoyt 
Don’t mess around with Vic!
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Ray Krawczyk
@rayk54321
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Here’s a way to paste a link and generate a clean one
https://cleanr.aho.st/
Provided to me by one of our Huns, so safe
(Also lets you put in a Xitter link and get a full discussion for those of us X-less types)
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No Xitter for me. Sorry. I could get sucked into spending hours on that, far too easily, so I need to abstain.
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With you on that. You could say that my “time yard” is already completely full of rabbit holes.
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Funnily enough, I did not have that problem when I had an active twitter account, precisely because I did not tweet with it, nor look at tweets. I basically only used it to log into this one browser game that I stopped playing between ten and fifteen years ago.
But, yeah, I have major issues with malinvestment of my time and emotional energy.
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Funny thing is neither xitter nor Zuckerbook apparently are able to work their dark magic on me – I usually jump in to look at something specific, then leave. On the rare occasion that I look around, I mostly see random videos in which I have absolutely no interest, then I leave.
I am perfect susceptible to internet rabbit hole warren adventures in link-clicking otherwise, just apparently not on those two purportedly hyper seductive platforms.
This obviously means I have some specific and popular-on-TikTok psychiatric diagnosis, which is the cause of some imaginary “trauma” to somebody I don’t know, instead of just being uninterested.
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Me, neither.
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“Stuff was added, but the combination of new and old does not quite work well, or reliably” is called technical debt.
Huge part of the economic discussion around programs.
If you are not actively using the program to make money, or if you have an alternative program that you can easily switch to, then you have choices.
When your business runs on large custom program, then you can’t switch and can be pretty screwed. Technical debt is a hypothetical future labor cost to fix or adjust a program.
It is sorta statistical, in two ways. One, if everyone has ceased to use the program, forever, then the technical debt is sorta written off down to zero, because the money to pay for it will not be spent. Two, breaking a software is something that can (or will) happen in the future, but we do not have the information yet for a deterministic calculation.
Future people can break a previously working software by a) using it in new ways b) doing something to activate previously unnoticed bugs c) breaking the code itself in new ways with patches to add features or fix other bugs.
I say can, but this will happen, the unknowns are timing and severity. There are already serious defects in code that has no outstanding bug reports, they just have not been found yet.
Technical debt is bad, because if allowed to compound, it eventually results in situations where the patches do more damage than they fix, and nobody knows what the risk of the patch is.
Anyway, Amazon has a lot of problems, because it has a huge code base, we are in the middle of a management fad for directing programmers, and Bezos has maybe been a bit more hands off for around half a dozen years.
‘Massive AI profits’ is partly justified by the LLM use case for programming. And, skilled programmers can basically replace a supporting team of less skilled programmers.
Some dissenters basically want to employ the extra less skilled engineers anyway, so that they have more in house know how on what the program is actually doing. Human knowledge of the program is one of the factors that offsets or mitigates technical debt, to a limited extent. The complexity of the software maps to being some number of ‘head arounds’, aspects that one person can understand.
Certain programming practices can compartmentalize the consequences of the different bits. (If the complexity is six head arounds, and you have eight skilled programmers and twenty unskilled programmers, and they have full understanding between them, I don’t know if that is good or bad. It is more potentially possible to maintain that than the case of six head arounds, and one part time programmer.) But, violation of those practices is part of technical debt.
Anyway, hypothetically, if you had the exact same version of a fortran program, somehow running on the same OS and compiler, and you had two timelines, there is an interesting hypothetical. In timeline A, the program is really old, and we stopped writing in Fortran. In the other timeline, Fortran 90 or so is the twentieth most popular programming language, and there are a ton of people who can work with it. The same existing bugs are in that code, but it is probably cheaper and perhaps better to fix them in timeline B. (Unless there are like a hundred programmers world wide in timeline B, and the art of programming, or computer engineering, sucks massively compared to A. I would expect a lot of the modern Javascript programmers to not like Fortran, so I might predict finding programmers with that opinion of the hypothetical timeline B. I’m sorta assuming a comparable timeline B with just as many programmers. )
Anyway, some people complain that agile sprints are misused, and that some managers use them without end to add features, and never want to slow down, and pay off the technical debt.
Vibe coding, letting non-programmers ‘write code’ seems to be simply speeding initial production and producing a lot of technical debt.
What it seems to come down to is generally accepted accounting practices (GAAP), are very badly suited to this, and promote mismanagement of spending and risks.
(This is related to GAAP valuations of trained employees, and of the investment value of training for both experienced and inexperienced employees.)
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