My greatest professional accomplishment of the year: I got my exec & manager teammates saying "point positive," a term from whitewater rafting and kayaking.

Meaning: when facing hazards, point people toward where to go/what to do, rather than drawing attention to everything to avoid.

due to DRAM supply chain issues, all interns will be required to memorize as many floating point numbers as possible.

Matrix multiplication skills also a plus.

I see Google's "developer verification" surveillance as in line with the "age assurance for the kids" surveillance.

Both are clear examples of how companies with business models *predicated on data collection* who failed to moderate their platforms effectively. Meta failed with Instagram and Facebook, Google failed with the play store, etc.

And now -- rather than address the root cause -- they want to *collect more precise data*.

I was today years old when I found out LinkedIn has a chronological timeline mode*, and why LinkedIn recommends against enabling it in the settings. Because once you do, you’ll see that people aren’t talking about AI, agents and LLMs anywhere near as much as LinkedIn would have you think. My feed just went from ~90% AI hype to one with only the occasional post on the topic. Almost as if one of the companies most invested in the bubble would use a platform they own to inflate it.

(Could be that it’s an EU-only thing? I remember hearing about an EU requirement like this in the past. If so, I’m sorry if it’s not available to you. The free market will sort it out, I’m sure.)

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.