Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)

Moderately well-known software developer. American living in France/Malta.

I have a poetic license to kill.

I build big things with AI and teach devs how to use it effectively.

Feel free to disagree with me. Feel free to push back on my ideas. That's how we learn. If you revert to insults, I'm happy to block you. We all should strive to be better. Yes, that includes myself.

I Am: https://curtispoe.org/
I Wrote: https://github.com/Ovid/
I Support: LGBTQA+
I Dream: Of our future in space.

Public Key

npub1n2snycspn4y5l5lmps55qcl09m0uue3grvn64l7q8xf5xqc8d4fs7he42n

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsf4gfjvgqe6j2060asc22qv0hjah7wvc5pkfa2llqrny6rqvrk65cprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqyg8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2z6nhxp

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

nostr.wine

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1n2snycspn4y5l5lmps55qcl09m0uue3grvn64l7q8xf5xqc8d4fs7he42n

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Last Notes

2026-06-12 10:20:56 UTC

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My favorite was Reuters editorial software which always replaced "queen" with "Queen Elizabeth."
Queen Elizabeth commands tens of thousands and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/116/736/621/898/682/407/original/a57a0eb24479d941.png

2026-06-12 09:35:19 UTC

In Malta, August 15th is a holiday: The Feast of Mary's Assumption. Unfortunately, this did not fit on our calendar.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/116/736/450/519/038/913/original/7981e55b304be4f7.png

2026-05-26 10:10:51 UTC

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Oh, please. Here I am, sitting at my desk eating, and you're over there trying to make me cry. Not nice!

2026-05-26 09:51:36 UTC

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In the 90s, after working for an insurance company that heavily relied on Lotus Notes, I decided that use of this software was my litmus test for employers. If they used it, I wouldn't work there. It has to have been one of the most hostile pieces of sofware I have ever worked with :)
https://hallofshame.gp.co.at/lotus.htm

2026-04-02 12:18:41 UTC

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I probably should have said Urukagina, the ruler of the city-state of Lagash (in modern-day Iraq). He canceled debts and freed slaves. Documented priests and wealthy abusing the poor by seizing property and using excessive fines. Roughly 2400 BCE. First documented case I can find, though WHY he did this is contested.

2026-04-02 11:26:35 UTC

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If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, the 2000-year-old Chinese dynastic cycle covers this with the "Mandate of Heaven." We can also document this behavior in ants, hyenas, birds, and other creatures: if you can get away with it, it takes less energy to steal than to create.
The pattern keeps repeating: gain leverage over something people need, then extract. It doesn't matter whether the leverage is grain, land, trade routes, or algorithmic lock-in. 4/8

2026-04-02 11:26:35 UTC

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The parallel was too tidy. The pattern went much further back.
I started with a simple question: why does wealth extraction feel so relentless right now? Gig work, algorithmic rent-seeking, AI displacing workers while stock prices soar. My assumption was that capitalism was broken and I was wondering what "post-capitalism" would look like. But now I think I was wrong about capitalism. 2/8

2026-04-02 11:26:35 UTC

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Ibn Khaldun documented this cycle in the 14th century. Acemoglu and Robinson formalized it as "extractive institutions" (and won a Nobel prize for it). It's not new.
And then I started thinking about @npub1fdr…lvhs's enshittification framework: attract users, lock them in, extract value. That's not a description of platform capitalism. That's a description of Ur. Of Athens. Of Rome. Of the East India Company. Same pattern, different API.
This isn't a "capitalism is bad" argument. 5/8

2026-04-02 11:26:35 UTC

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I was starting from a position of "knowing" the truth and trying to justify it rather than discovering the truth.
The deeper I dug, the more uncomfortable the evidence became. Sumerian temple economies centralized grain surpluses, then extracted labor from dependent populations. Athens ran on slave-worked silver mines. Rome displaced small farmers, creating a landless class pacified with bread and circuses (the "lazy Romans demanding handouts" trope is grade-A bullshit). 3/8

2026-04-02 11:26:34 UTC

OK, I've been silent for a while because ... research. My wife's gonna kill me if I write another book, but I realized she's not on Mastodon, so let's keep this our little secret, eh? My question: does the following make your socks roll up and down or is it a yawnfest?
I was comparing AI job displacement to the Enclosures—English commons privatized, millions of workers displaced. Seemed like a tidy historical parallel. Unfortunately, I kept reading. And reading. And reading. 1/8

2026-03-09 13:27:08 UTC

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I miss those conferences :/

2026-03-09 12:53:04 UTC

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He was sharing a hotel room with me, but he didn't go to the conference. We hung out in the evenings.

2026-03-09 10:46:17 UTC

Holy crap. This was 17 years ago. I was asked to create a promo video pitching a conference in Portugal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNo0TAQPA6o

2025-11-25 19:09:25 UTC

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I think a lot of the the difficulty with inside-out classes is that they were difficult. It was tricky to get them right and after a while, people shrugged and went the easy way (as I did, too). If you make doing the right thing hard, people don't do it.

2025-11-19 21:06:08 UTC

My biggest mistake in the design of the new object system for the #Perl core is that I didn't make methods private by default.
Had I proposed it, I think it would have been the right thing to do. Pretty sure there would have been a rebellion against me.

2025-11-18 12:08:24 UTC

RE: https://social.lansky.name/@hn50/115570606505020117
Currently I've been trying to find out if Cloudflare was out or somehow blocked on our end. I've been finding that the sites I usually check for outages run on ... Cloudflare.
#note1u9y…0wly

2025-10-20 20:17:02 UTC

I saw a No Kings protest sign saying "Trump is fucking Satan."
I wondered what part of speech "fucking" is. It could be either an adjective or a verb. It works both ways.
Then I realized it could be both at the same time.
Then it means "Trump can go fuck himself."
**Update**: South Park? I've seen excerpts, but not in years. I don't know that I've ever seen a full episode!

2025-10-13 11:05:21 UTC

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That's what we called it in Texas, too. I felt that "Telephone" was probably a much nicer term to use :)
We had plenty of other racist things that children used to say ("eenie, meenie, minie, moe ..." used to be awful) that I had to unlearn once I realized what was going on. Pretty horrifying to grow up in such a racist society and not realize it at the time.

2025-10-13 09:32:52 UTC

As children, the teacher would line us up, whisper something into the first child's ear, who would whisper it to the second child, and so on. The last child would speak the sentence out loud and everyone would laugh because it was nothing like the original sentence.
As children, we called this game "Telephone."
As adults, we call this game, "Product Creation Process."

2025-02-18 05:52:12 UTC

Argument of the day, with me *again* explaining why we're going to have developers write tests for their software.
Him: Automated testing slows down development.
Me: Parachutes slow down skydiving.
I can't *actually* use that argument, but damn, it's tempting.
#software #SoftwareDevelopment #Testing #qa

2024-12-04 13:02:55 UTC

Things I think about in Zoom meetings: "if my head was smaller, my shoulders would look broader."
More hours to go of meetings. Is it too early for a drink?

2024-10-08 15:30:49 UTC

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Source? I mean, I can believe this, but I gotta have a source.

2024-09-25 08:11:26 UTC

Do you have a #ChatGPT account? If so, log in and give it the following prompt:
"What do you remember about me?"

2024-09-24 08:03:24 UTC

Federal law, for decades, requires hospitals to provide emergency stabilizing care to care to patients.
But if they're in states with strict abortion bans, they're often required to deny the care that federal law requires.
Vote Harris. Vote Blue. This evil is what happens when you treat women like brood mares.
#Abortion #HumanRights #Women #Republicans #Politics #GOP #Democrats
https://www.propublica.org/article/amber-thurman-georgia-abortion-wyden-emtala

2024-08-29 16:31:19 UTC

I’m in France. #Telegram opens, but nothing responds, even if I connect to the US via a vpn. Anyone else getting this?

2024-08-23 12:00:50 UTC

Hey, fellow software developers! Sometimes code passes your code bad data. Do you throw exceptions? Return false? Hope for the best? (YOLO)
Would love to hear your reasons why. And please share so other developers can weigh in.
#Developers #Software #SoftwareDevelopers #OpenSource #DivideByZeroAndConquer #Perl #Ruby #Python #Java #CSharp #NodeJS

2024-08-22 14:45:25 UTC

Some ads just don't age well.
Humble Oil became Standard Oil became Exxon became ExxonMobile became monsters.
#climate #ClimateChange
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/006/181/096/818/200/original/b2a749311d7cedfe.png

2024-08-10 06:53:27 UTC

For all of my #linux loving friends, click through, find the big red button (called the "votey", for some reason), and click it.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/gorillas