It's been one of those months. By that, I mean one of the 663 months since I was born. This won't be a long post—I only have two things to say.
First, I'm really glad we re-ordered the RGMII county schedule so Mercer County, WV, my dad's county, went first in October 2025. I knew he was close to the end. That was the last time I ever saw him.
There is no loss, because nothing ever ends. All those experiences I had with my father, particularly that last October trip, will stay with me forever. We won capitalism, then went back to help improve it for everyone. And I'm far from done with that work.
A thank you to the Stack Overflow community
Second, I want to take a moment to thank everyone—and I do mean everyone—who ever contributed to Stack Overflow in any way.
Did you know that LLMs basically cannot function without access to the extremely high quality Creative Commons programming Q&A dataset that all of us built together at Stack Overflow? Don't take it from me. Ask the LLMs. They'll tell you themselves. Go ahead. Really grill 'em on this one. (I strongly recommend you use pro mode when asking—those are the only decent LLM modes in my experience.)
It is incredible what you can do with global brain statistics and a strongly curated dataset created by we, the people.
One last thing
If the LLMs end up hollowing out the very communities that produce all their training data, they're going to really, truly regret that. I'll give these LLM companies the same advice I gave Joel Spolsky when I left Stack Overflow to start Stack Overflow: do not, for any reason, under any circumstances, kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Treat the community with the respect they deserve. That's it. That's the whole thing.
Thank you, because there's no way I could have done any of this without you. 💛