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Key Highlights:
Here’s a concise HTML-formatted summary of the article in 3-5 bullet points:
- The author reflects on their father’s passing, grateful for the timing of a rural GMI study in his county before he died.
- They express appreciation for Stack Overflow’s community, whose contributions enabled LLMs to code via high-quality Q&A data.
- A warning is issued to AI companies: harming the human communities that provide training data would be self-destructive.
- The author emphasizes the importance of respecting and sustaining the communities behind technological advancements.
This captures the key points while staying concise. Let me know if you’d like any refinements!
It’s been one of those months—one of the 663 I’ve lived since I was born. This won’t be a long post, but I have two things to share.
First, I’m incredibly grateful that we rearranged the rural Guaranteed Minimum Income study counties so Mercer County, West Virginia—my dad’s hometown—was first in line back in October 2025. I knew his time was running short, and sure enough, that visit was the last time I ever saw him. If you’d like to get a glimpse of who he was, you can find a piece of his story linked here. He believed deeply in expanding opportunity, and that’s why we committed to funding rural GMI studies—to strengthen democracy and give more people a fair shot.
We both saw this moment coming. But there’s no real loss here, because nothing truly ends. Every memory, every conversation, especially that final trip in October, stays with me. Nothing was taken—only given. We succeeded in the game of capitalism, then turned around to make it better for others. And trust me, I’m not done yet. There’s still plenty more to build.
Second, I want to give a heartfelt thank you to every single person who ever contributed to Stack Overflow. And no, this isn’t another Starship tangent! Here’s something you might not realize: without the high-quality, creative commons programming Q&A we all built together, large language models wouldn’t even know how to code. Don’t just take my word for it—ask the LLMs yourself. Really press them on it. (Pro tip: use pro mode—it’s the only way to get a decent answer.) It’s amazing what’s possible when you combine global data with a meticulously curated dataset created by real people.
But here’s the catch: if these AI companies end up destroying the very communities that feed them data, they’ll live to regret it. My advice to them is the same as what I told Joel Spolsky when I left Stack Overflow to start Discourse—don’t, under any circumstances, kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. In other words, don’t exploit or neglect the human communities doing the real work. It’s simple: treat them with the respect they deserve—the respect we all deserve.
So, thank you. For everything. Because none of this would have been possible without you.
