Galen S. Swint

Father, American, Texan, Texian and Baylor U graduate. Views are my own. Data related tweets: @data_ase.

[Programmer Humor @PR0GRAMMERHUM0R]

howIsItGoing

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

250 years ago today, on June 28, 1776, a half-finished fort made of palm tree logs and sand did something it had no business doing: it beat the most powerful navy on earth and saved the American South. We just hit the 250th anniversary of one of the most improbable victories of the entire Revolution.

The setup looked hopeless. A massive British fleet under Admiral Sir Peter Parker sailed into Charleston harbor to crush the rebellion in the south before it could grow. Guarding the city was an unfinished little fort on Sullivan's Island, defended by Colonel William Moultrie and a few hundred men. The walls weren't even done. One British officer reportedly figured they'd flatten it in an hour.

Then the palmetto logs did the impossible. The fort was built from soft, spongy palmetto wood packed with sand, and instead of shattering when the British cannonballs hit, the logs just absorbed them. Iron sank into the mush and stuck. The fleet hammered that fort for hours and could not break it, while the American gunners coolly fired back and tore the British warships apart. Several ships ran aground. Admiral Parker himself got hit so hard that the blast literally ripped the seat out of his pants.

And then the moment that became legend. When a cannon blast knocked the fort's flag down, Sergeant William Jasper climbed out over the wall, in the middle of the bombardment, grabbed the fallen colors, and raised them back up so everyone could see the fort still stood.

By nightfall the British fleet limped away. They wouldn't seriously come back to the south for nearly three more years. South Carolina loved that fort so much it put the palmetto tree on its state flag, where it still flies today.

A quarter of a millennium later, the lesson still lands. Sometimes the thing everyone writes off as too soft and too unfinished to matter is the exact thing that refuses to break.

[1776 Live @250YearsAgoLive]

Thomas Paine publishes an open letter in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, under the name “Republicus,” which advocates for the name “United States of America” for the new nation now emerging.

This is the first time such a term has been used.

[Terrible Maps @TerribleMaps]

How many edges does the U.S. need before it looks right?

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

> you’ll never start a rocket company
> you’ll never build your own engines
> you’ll never be able to use off-the-shelf parts
> you’ll never survive three launch failures
> you’ll never reach orbit
> you’ll never win NASA’s trust
> you’ll never launch cargo to the ISS
> you’ll never compete with Boeing
> you’ll never compete with Lockheed
> you’ll never make rockets reusable
> you’ll never land a rocket vertically
> you’ll never land one on a drone ship
> you’ll never reuse a booster
> you’ll never fly the same booster 10 times
> you’ll never fly the same booster 20 times
> you’ll never fly the same booster 30 times
> you’ll never recover and reuse the fairing
> you’ll never lower launch costs
> you’ll never launch every month
> you’ll never launch every week
> you’ll never launch multiple times a week
> you’ll never carry astronauts
> you’ll never replace Roscosmos
> you’ll never fly civilians to orbit
> you’ll never manufacture satellites at scale
> you’ll never build the biggest constellation ever
> you’ll never make satellite internet work
> you’ll never make satellite internet fast
> you’ll never make satellite internet affordable
> you’ll never serve rural customers
> you’ll never serve aircraft and ships
> you’ll never build a methane rocket engine
> you’ll never make full-flow staged combustion work
> you’ll never build the most powerful rocket ever
> you’ll never build a rocket bigger than Saturn V
> you’ll never build it out of stainless steel
> you’ll never launch Starship
> you’ll never separate Super Heavy and Starship
> you’ll never relight Raptor in space
> you’ll never bring Super Heavy back
> you’ll never catch a booster with Mechazilla tower arms
> you’ll never launch 85% of mass to orbit worldwide
> you’ll never change the economics of space
> you’ll never force the entire industry to copy you
> you’ll never win
> you’ll never IPO

Congratulations to @elonmusk and the SpaceX team. You did what countless people said was impossible, and you did it time and time again.

Today is your day. You deserve this. May it be a glorious one.

[Palmer Luckey @PalmerLuckey]

Check out this very cool shot that we are allowed to show you captured by our global space surveillance system!

[Laurent @scion_x_]

Ça fait un moment que je me pose des questions sur le bilan (provisoire) de Milei en Argentine. On lit tout et son contraire. Alors j'ai arrêté de lire les commentaires et j'ai regardé les chiffres bruts.

L'Argentine, c'est l'expérience grandeur nature que les économistes attendaient depuis 50 ans. Même pays. Même peuple. Même culture. On change UNE variable : la méthode économique.

Avant : des décennies de gestion étatiste et péroniste, "redistributive". Le résultat concret ? 211% d'inflation, 42% de pauvreté, un État en déficit permanent qui finance son train de vie en faisant tourner la planche à billets.

Puis arrive Milei. Méthode inverse, brutale, assumée : on coupe, on déréglemente, on arrête d'imprimer.

Deux ans plus tard (photo à son arrivée (fin 2023) vs aujourd'hui) :

Inflation annuelle : 211% → 31%
Inflation mensuelle : 25% → ~2%
Déficit public : −5% du PIB → +1,8% (excédent)
Croissance : −1,6% → +4,4%
Pauvreté : 42% → 28%

Sans débat. Jugez par vous-mêmes.

Et le point essentiel : ces gains ne vont pas "aux riches" ou "aux marchés". Ils vont d'abord aux plus pauvres.

L'inflation est l'impôt le plus injuste qui existe — elle frappe ceux qui n'ont aucun actif pour se protéger. La diviser par 7, c'est rendre du pouvoir d'achat à ceux d'en bas. Et 14 points de pauvreté en moins, ce sont des millions de gens, pas une ligne Excel.

Pendant un siècle, on a expliqué aux Argentins que l'État les protégerait en dépensant toujours plus. Résultat : un des pays les plus riches du monde en 1910, ruiné. On vient d'inverser la méthode. Regardez le résultat.

À un moment, il faut accepter ce que les faits racontent : sur le terrain économique, la méthode libérale a livré en deux ans ce que des décennies de socialisme avaient promis sans jamais tenir. Et ça profite d'abord aux plus modestes.

On peut détester le style de Milei — la tronçonneuse, l'outrance, les sorties improbables, il n'a rien d'un homme d'État classique. Mais on ne juge pas une politique économique au style de celui qui la mène. On la juge à ce qu'elle fait à la vie des gens.

Et les chiffres ont parlé.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

Jurassic World Rebirth (2025) had a budget of $180 million.

This had a budget of $180 😂

[Everything Price Sufferer (but especially eggs) @agraybee]

I didn't know Helen of Troy could generate so much conflict.

[Galen S. Swint @swintgs]

Dare I say, @SpaceX takes off "like a rocket"...

[Arthur MacWaters @ArthurMacwaters]

AOC will look at this and unironically declare that Elon is one of the stupidest people alive and not an engineer https://t.co/KbLp8COMPQ

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

Choice of language for software projects has become a very different game now that we have robot friends to do most of our code generation and translation for us.

I have people wondering why I just shipped a project in Rust when I don't like the language and don't hand-code in it myself. I did this because I am adjusted to current reality, and now I'm going to talk about that.

The age of hand-coding is mostly over. It no longer matters as much whether the computer language I use is comfortable to my hand, only whether the robot friend I'm using can generate it at high quality.

It also matters whether I can read the language, because I am going to want to run my eyeball over it to review the code. Rust meets that bar - I find it kind of spiky but basically readable.

Rust is a good deployment language for me to choose when (a) I want solid memory-safety guarantees, and (b) the code is already mature and I don't expect to need to do exploratory programming or serious feature development on it in the future.

In particular, this makes Rust a good place for me to land my old C projects. Which is why in the last couple of months I have migrated two of them to Rust. C to Rust translation by robots is cheap and easy now; I will probably continue to do this. Each time I get a bug report on one of these projects in the future, boing! Rusticated.

You may believe that Rustacea is stuffed with Communists and sexual deviants. You might even be right. I don't have to care whether that's true anymore, because I have a robot friend who is in all relevant ways smarter than they are.

The wider lesson here is that the developer and user community around a language doesn't matter as much as it used to in whether you should get involved with it. Because in the future, we're going to be relying on human community brains less and artificial intelligences more. And that future is now.

Not everything C gets moved to Rust, though. I lifted cvs-fast-export to Golang instead, because I think it's fairly likely that I'm going to have to do significant development work on it is in the future, so the payoff from a language I'm more comfortable reading and modifying by hand goes up.

I'm certainly never going to start a project in C again. What would be the point, other than masochism? I spent 40 years writing C and I'm very good at it, but I will cheerfully leave it and it's buffer overruns and its heap corruption and its undefined behaviors and its portability problems behind.

It helps that my robot friends are good at writing C code that doesn't have those problems, but...why even go there? Why expose yourself to those risks if the robot misses something?

These days I do my exploratory programming in Python or Golang. My robot friends are extremely good at generating code in both those languages. I think they're slightly higher leverage on Golang, possibly due to that language having a smaller surface?

Python used to be my favorite language. I soured on it for a while after the 2-to-3 transition was massively botched, and the GIL meant concurrency in it was a disaster area, and managing library dependencies became an even bigger disaster area. I'm a little happier with Python now that I can declare strict typing and uv has reduced dependency pain somewhat.

But I think if I think I'm going to have to write anything much larger than a glue script in Python, I just shrug and reach for Golang instead. I'm very comfortable in Golang. Over time, I'll probably migrate my older Python projects to Golang because that's cheap and easy now and the performance win can be quite significant.

I don't know what other languages I'm going to be using in the future. I do know that choosing a development language is a much less grave commitment than it used to be, because if it turns out to be not well suited for the job I'm doing, I can simply have my robot friend translated to a better one.

[NWS Fairbanks @NWSFairbanks]

☀️ Today in Utqiagvik (the northernmost city in the United States), the sun rose above the horizon at 2:57 AM and won’t set again for 84 straight days or until August 2nd! Here's a look at a timelapse showing the sunset and sunrise this morning. #akwx

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

I toured the Sagrada Familia in 1971 with my family. I have never forgotten that experience. I was 13 years old, and the projected completion date of the cathedral they gave us then seemed impossibly far in the future.

The interior is utterly bizarre, like a hallucination about exotic biology frozen in stone. There is nothing anything like it anywhere else in the world, and that's why I'm glad they've finally finished it.

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

https://t.co/SE22OIGiia

This is truth being spoken.

Golang isn't perfect - I have my grapes with it - but this article zeroes in unerringly on what the language gets right.

[Barrett Linburg @DallasAptGP]

Let's talk about what's going on in Texas

[swyx @aiDotEngineer WF @swyx]

this is a big deal, on the order of Kelsey Hightower’s “Kubernetes The Hard Way” and probably all ai engineers should go thru this once

mostly i advocate “just in time learning”, but this is one scenario you want “just in case”

[Mia The mystery girl @GirlMia9079]

Weather in May 😂

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

Allow me to rock your world.

America has about 6000 hospitals. 5121 of those are publicly accessible and 1224 are completely free. That's twice as many charity hospitals as Canada has Tim Horton's. Literally.

Then, when you see a doctor, the doctor speaks English and went to school somewhere you've heard of. Harvard is not the only way to get educated, but it is nice in the fall.

We don't push people into medically assisted suicide for cost reasons.

We don't ask people with emergency conditions to sit in the ER for 10 hours before they see a doctor.

So yes, if you have a cutting-edge disease and you go to a private hospital and get the best care in the world, you're on the hook for it.

But note that you are also ALIVE.

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

Too good not to share! I did not know this.

If you want to "void" a row in a paper tape, you punch out every dot, and that happens to be the DEL character in ASCII.

[Polymarket Football @PolymarketBlitz]

The biggest winner of the draft is this old dog who got his spot on the couch back.