It feels like we are actively living in an age of decadence. Not the notion of hedonism or the like, but actual decline.

I don’t get it: you spend all this time and effort to say you are going to be a leader, “fighter” for the needs of your constituents and when an honest to god fight comes you…show your belly and act skittish? I don’t get it.

It’s idiots all the way down. Not that I’m claiming not to be an idiot, but JFC there are even bigger idiots than me running things while other idiots think they are clever or have a point. No!!! They are just idiots! Take it from one of them: don’t think they are smart!!

The ending of US hegemonic power via self inflicted wounds is not going to lead to some utopian world. Instead it’s going to lead to a world dominated by authoritarian regimes that will be more dominant and aggressive than in the past. Seriously doubt Europe can become the new liberal pillar.

Beware of white young professional men who think they are clever and grow resentful that society isn’t rewarding them the way they think it should. They may start off left leaning but frequently fall into fascism at some point because it promises them validation.

I am going to say it loud and clear: Newsom is most likely not going to be the Democratic candidate for President in 2028. While there is a lot of support for him being tough and active against GOP overreach, his actual support is not particularly deep.

Ahem, its sparkling progressive left in these here parts!

While Rust as a language can be painful, I find that I enjoy it more than higher level languages. The pain of the language makes me feel that much more giddy when I solve something as compared to say Python or C#.

Youtube has become actively hostile to anyone who uses the site. Except for Premium users...sorta? Still pretty terrible site!

I hate that so much of my tech stack is built on tools created to suck as much money and time out of me as possible.

LLMs seem like magic because they are designed to be black box systems. The last LLM we had a deep inside look at (source code) was GPT-2. The latest frontier models? Nope! So if an AI company makes a claim, doubt. It’s the healthy thing to do.

One can be exceptionally stupid and exceptionally damaging at the same time. Stupidity is a super power of sorts, allowing a person to achieve superhuman levels of cruelty and horror.

AI is so appealing to the managerial class for the simple reason that it removes the actual labor of their job (managing people) and lets them live out their fantasy of being capable of doing it all themselves.

Low code/no code sounds like a great idea to democratize programming. And to be honest, I got no problem with it fundamentally. However these tools are seen as an excuse to not train people in best practices because it’s “meant for lay people.” And so you end up with royally borked code in the end.

Sometimes it feels apocalyptic. And then I read history and realize apocalypses happen all the time, just of varying sizes and degrees. I just hope it’s a “small” apocalypse.

Machine learning and AI, in general, can be pretty good for specific applications. In fact a lot of assistance tools are earlier forms of "AI" (spell checking, auto complete, image recognition, etc, etc). This current craze over LLM's is something strange and, at first, wasn't the worst thing.

I’ve been struggling through the Dawn or Everything. Mostly because they take a long time to get to their point early on and seem to be mostly focused on their beef with intellectual figures from the 2011-2013 and its…woof.

The fact that a good number of people who are semi literate in programming are afraid of SQL will never cease to amaze me.

I sometimes think we, as a society, want government to be entertaining and exciting while I have the opposite desire: government to be boring and competent. A "don't touch the hot stove" style of governance rather than "YOLO!" like so many people seem to like.

It's a weird world to live in right now. It feels as if a good chunk of the populace is voting in people who actively want to blow up any good policy ideas simply because...vibes, I guess?

I often remember I am old man when I remember writing html for my Geocities page when I was in high school. Back when web pages served static content, e-commerce was dodgy, and the internet was horrible but more segmented.