codyin'

berkeley high school, 2000-2004

2024-02-25T00:00:00Z

"i'm assuming cody's high school had various student-organized collectives who published zines to keep the other students informed"

my high school was a strange place. it was pretty large (approximately 3200 students when i attended) and one of berkeley's few remaining reservoirs of reflexive rebellion. the student body worshiped ungovernability; bringing order to chaos required first showing cause, and adults usually couldn't. a lot weird stuff i remember turned out to be shockingly relevant to my adult life. berkeley high was, in many ways, closer to a community college than a high school - and a weird one at that.

i've told enough odd stories about my experiences there that one of my friends suggested i write them down. it sounded like a fun idea.

i've never failed a latin exam

2024-03-17T00:00:00Z

during my junior or senior year - i can't recall which - i somehow managed to juggle my schedule such that i was done with classes by 1pm. i was the only one who did this (it required the questionable decision to take biology over the summer), and consequently, i had one to two free hours between the end of my school day and the end of my friends'. my only recollection of how i filled this time was screwing around in novel ways.

like crashing one of berkeley high's latin classes.

the adults' least favorite day of spirit week

2024-04-07T00:00:00Z

berkeley high had spirit week. it was traditional enough to end in a football game or dance or something, but my social cohort celebrated our school spirit in another way (irreverence) so the attention i paid it was only passing and incidental. i remember only two days of spirit week. one, the day on which we were all supposed to wear our school colors, was traditional and anodyne. the other was pimps and hoes day.

sometimes it takes getting treated like an adult to realize that you're just an asshole

2024-04-27T00:00:00Z

kids learn that they fucked up by having adults tell them "you fucked up." part of growing up is learning to figure this out on your own; by the time you hit adulthood, you should be able to infer when you fucked up without help. adults show each other that we fucked up subtly. our shoulders shrug, we sigh, our faces get sad. we usually don't say "you fucked up," because that's how you talk to children, not other adults.

fucking up at berkeley high often got you talked to like an adult, not a child.

direct action gets the goods (the goods are bad)

2024-05-05T00:00:00Z

did you know there's a foolproof method to get out of class? to get everyone out of class? whenever you want? you did, you just don't think about it that way. that's because you're not a berkeley high student.

we must have learned some chemistry at some point

2024-05-12T00:00:00Z

berkeley high had two advanced placement chemistry teachers. one of them, mr. brand, drew the adoration of his students by being an enthusiastic and capable educator. he'd put on goofy costumes to do dumb skits, take them to the park across the street to blow stuff up, and generally be a fun, lovable dork. his students absolutely loved him.

the other teacher was mr. glimme. he mocked students to our faces and spent most class time on his computer ignoring us. we loved him more than mr. brand.

just watch this instead

2024-06-08T00:00:00Z

i have decided that no writing about my berkeley high experience could explain it better than just watching the music video for "frontier psychiatrist" by the avalanches. we listened to that song a lot in high school, and it captures the bhs vibe better than any prose could.

of course the pirates fucked up the fight

2024-06-09T00:00:00Z

one of the many cultural coronal mass ejections from the internet in the early aughts was the "pirates versus ninjas" "debate". (that wikipedia page is wrong to place it in the "late 2000s" - it was in full swing by 2004 at the latest.) it was an excuse to have goofy, zero-stakes arguments with peers, and therefore catnip for dumb teenagers. you could do more than have mock arguments, though. you could get even stupider with it.

even the teacher dragged you

2024-06-15T00:00:00Z

in my entire berkeley high tenure i only recall one instance of anyone getting bullied for good academic performance. it was by a teacher.

obamacare is my fault

2024-07-07T00:00:00Z

on march 23, 2010, barack obama signed the patient protection and affordable care act into law. a lot of people got mad about it, and at barack obama, its champion. in this, they erred. obamacare is my fault.

in loving memory of a guy who is not only still alive but in class with me right now

2024-07-14T00:00:00Z

the year before i entered berkeley high, some students burned down a building. not on purpose or anything - someone just started a trash can fire that got out of control. i guess the building wasn't really needed, so the administration replaced its remains with a grass circle that has some benches and stuff. it was a surprisingly nice space (for berkeley high anyway) and we students collectively decided that it needed a proper name, so we started calling it the Bradley Johnson Memorial Green. our classmate bradley johnson wasn't too happy about that.

you don't have to "become" ungovernable if you start out that way

2024-07-27T00:00:00Z

berkeley high has an open campus, meaning that students can come and go as they please. in theory, outsiders aren't supposed to be able to, but during my tenure there the campus wasn't physically laid out to accommodate access control, so the administration had no real way to keep random people out. the adults, concerned about student safety, experimented with various ways to partially close the campus. none of them worked, because they all required the consent of the governed, and we never gave it.

chinaman town

2024-08-11T00:00:00Z

i spent most of my berkeley high career in proximity to its upper echelon of teachers, thanks to a combination of my affinity for schooling and my bizarrely good fortune. my record wasn't perfect, though - my freshman year history teacher was a real piece of work, one of those incompetent creeps who manage to dig themselves into faculties and remain there despite rank incompetence and misbehavior, presumably due to some combination of luck and blackmail. apparently he was hired to "resuscitate" the berkeley high football program, but in the time i was there nobody really gave a shit about the football program - even my buddy who played on the team - so i'm guessing he suckered a bunch of people to get the gig. reporting about his career before and after berkeley high paints the man as a piece of garbage, and that sure squares with my experience of him at berkeley high.

the krispy kreme supreme donut excellence award

2024-08-12T00:00:00Z

berkeley high had a daily "bulletin" that contained campus announcements. the specific delivery mechanism changed every year i was there, but even at its most ignored i think there was a printed copy in every classroom each day. anyone could put something in the bulletin as long as they had a teacher's approval, but i suspected that the vetting of both the approvals and the announcements themselves was entirely perfunctory, and i floated this hypothesis to some peers. one of them, a big stickler for rules, found this ridiculous - of course they wouldn't let you put any dumb bullshit in the bulletin, especially if you had to forge a teacher's signature to do it.

folks, you already know which of us was right.

abstinence-only sex ed isn't the worst kind

2024-08-25T00:00:00Z

unsurprisingly, the united states' national fetish for useless, puritanical sexual education curriculum has failed to penetrate the berkeley public school system. i remember comprehensive, practical, age-appropriate sex ed in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and i think they're doing it even earlier now. i also remember "sex ed" in tenth grade. that one was considerably less useful - not because abstinence fanaticism had snuck its way into the high school, but because it turns out that sex ed doesn't exist solely on a spectrum between "usefully comprehensive" and "uselessly moralizing." there's a third option: just tell the kids a bunch of dumb nonsense. they're kids, how are they going to know?

hands-on racism workshop

2024-10-05T00:00:00Z

one theme of all these stories is that berkeley high's educational model was largely "fuck around and find out." as a comfortably middle-class white kid, i typically "found out" about power relationships by being on the right side of them - by learning that the person putatively in charge of you was not, and that there was a whole universe of agency that i could learn to exercise.

most of the school's black kids had a very, very different experience.

they had a damn band

2024-12-01T00:00:00Z

i've seen one and a half lacrosse games in my life. one of them was a women's lacrosse game i watched while touring the stevens institute of technology. i was curious about what women's lacrosse was "supposed" to look like, a confusion borne from my experience at that other half of a game: a debacle of mean-spiritedness that illuminated some things about high schooler morality but very little about lacrosse. it was a dumb argument that metastasized into spectacle, a strange outgrowth of berkeley high schoolers' general inability to adequately answer the question: why not?

gunfight at high noon

2024-12-07T00:00:00Z

the highest authority in any organization isn't the person with the fanciest title. it's not the person officially "in charge". the highest authority is the person with the keys. at a high school, that's a custodian. if the school is big and old enough, maybe it's one particular custodian who's been around long enough to collect keys to weird, forgotten spaces.

that custodian might be schmoozable.

l&d books: 2025

2025-10-19T00:00:00Z

My job has a learning & development stipend. I usually use it to buy books that are relevant to my work. Here are the ones I read in 2025 and what I think of them.

review: oxenfree ii

2025-11-27T00:00:00Z

I recently completed a playthrough of OXENFREE II: Lost Signals, the sequel to 2016's OXENFREE. I loved the first game, but the second fell flat. It inherited what made OXENFREE good, but not what made it great.

eliezer yudkowsky has escaped containment

2025-12-13T00:00:00Z

In February of 2009, the LessWrong forums were launched by some guy named Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky is a member of the demographic I call the Very Smartest Boys - affluent men who, despite lacking any particular expertise or accomplishments, consider themselves intellectual titans because they're good at a particular set of narrow, societally rewarded tasks like taking standardized tests. LessWrong was a haven for this type, and the forums echoed with heady philosophical and scientific discussions, even though the participants rarely had any idea what they were talking about. Yudkowsky himself would occasionally say something stupid enough to break out into broader nerd circles, and we'd roll our eyes and chuckle and then go back to ignoring him.

After sixteen years of self-promotion, he managed to get a book into the mainstream. Now I have to explain Eliezer Yudkowsky to my dad.

gullibility in math anal

2025-12-14T00:00:00Z

particularly obvious untruths frequently catch listeners flat-footed. the utterer can't possibly be lying, because such a lie would be trivially discoverable; so, i guess...their outlandish claim must be true? when your listeners are professionally credulous, you can build a lucrative career out of this type of lie. when they're high schoolers, you can generate some funny stories.

all the problems

2025-12-21T00:00:00Z

I saw my first dead body today.

it's just the job

2025-12-24T00:00:00Z

I've been asked more than once by junior coders: "When will I start feeling like I know what I'm doing?" They're not usually prepared for my answer, which is "never."

the old berkeley coffee shops

2025-12-27T00:00:00Z

I mentioned to my father that I was heading out this afternoon to Berkeley Espresso, which is where I sit as I write this. It not being one of his usual haunts, it took him, a third-generation Berkeleyan, a moment to remember it, but it soon clicked. "Oh yeah! I like that place! One of the last old Berkeley coffee shops." I knew immediately what he meant by this description, even though I'd never used it myself. They're slowly dying out, and I remember them fondly, so I figured I'd contribute my own small written memorial.

review: blood in the machine

2026-02-08T00:00:00Z

I just finished reading Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine. I'd received many glowing recommendations of it from other workers in tech, and frankly, my opinion of those recommenders has fallen a bit. But I do think it's worth reading, despite its flaws.

review: exit, voice and loyalty

2026-02-21T00:00:00Z

Once again, I used my job's learning and development stipend to purchase some books. The second I finished in 2026 is Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States by Albert O. Hirschman.

the celebrated future of knowledge work

2026-02-28T00:00:00Z

Hey Claude, I need to build a bridge.

b2b saas is not my passion

2026-03-16T00:00:00Z

all pleasant tech interviews are alike; each unpleasant tech interview is unpleasant in its own way.

review: friendly fire

2026-07-23T00:00:00Z

On 14 April 1994, two United States F-15s shot down two United States Blackhawk helicopters in the clear skies of northern Iraq while both flights were controlled by the same AWACS. How could this have happened? Scott Snook wrote a book about it. I read that book.

review: images of organization

2026-07-25T00:00:00Z

I typically dispose of books once I've read them. (To little free libraries or used bookstores, not the trash.) I'm not a rereader, so books become pure clutter. The rare exceptions are books that I either find personally meaningful or books that have impressed me enough to become reference materials. Images of Organization is both.

robo-delp

2026-08-16T00:00:00Z

less than a week before the 2002 school year was scheduled to start, an advanced placement biology teacher quit. she was only one of two. at the time, california suffered from an apocalyptic teacher shortage, so the administerial scambling to avoid the ire of berkeley's affluent and motivated parents was legendary.

enter: robo-delp.

slaphappy

2026-10-18T00:00:00Z

look, the game is simple: low card slaps high card.

atom support

2026-11-08T00:00:00Z

i just added an Atom feed. or at least i think i did!