Quick bits:

• I’m half-heartedly switching to Firefox on my iPhone. Half-heartedly, because all my open tabs are still on Safari. What do I do now?!

• I finally have my new passport. I love the new design!

• I ripped not one, but two pairs of trousers this week. On the same day. Help!

• Happy Avril 14th!

• I had a close call the other day. As we were crossing at a green pedestrian traffic light, a car drove at speed right in front of us, through the red light. Ten centimeters further, and I would’ve needed an ambulance.

  This was an exceptionally bad incident, and I think it is indicative of how traffic in Berlin is increasingly unsafe.

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Shower thoughts:

• I am too late to make it on any “30 under 30” list, but I think I should be safe for a “8 billion under 8 billion” list.

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I participated in CSS Naked Day, removing all the CSS styles from my web site for a day.

Remarkably, my un-styled web site is rather nice to use. There was only one thing I really missed: a maximum width on the main content, so that lines don’t get overly long.

Technically, I suppose I cheated a little. There are two places where I have inline style attributes that I kept to set the width and height of images. Without them, the SVG images take up all available space, making the site practically unusable. I couldn’t use width and height attributes, but I would have if I could have!

My footnote/sidenote setup proved to be troublesome with CSS disabled. Each footnote exists twice: once as a sidenote, and once as a footnote. This is not great: ideally, each footnote would have only one instance, and they’d be moved into sidenotes with CSS Anchor Positioning (read also: Eric Meyer’s Nuclear Anchored Sidenotes). Anchor position isn’t implemented in browsers yet, but as of very recently, there is the intent to ship in Blink (Chrome/Chromium), which would make it generally available in a few weeks’ time. Exciting times!

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The job search continues. Rejections are piling up.

I started my job search in earnest in January, but I was on the lookout even in December. This means that I am closing in on four months of searching. Oof.

The market for software developers sucks hard these days.

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I have had quite a string of bad luck in my recent employment. In the last three-ish years, I have achieved preciously little. This situation is creating difficulty in my ongoing job search: job interviews have the inevitable question about what my recent achievements are, and there is by far not as much as I had hoped for.

From the past few years, a handful examples of why that is:

• I spent a large amount of time rewriting a PHP system into Ruby. This wasn’t technically challenging and rather just a ton of work. Midway through, the project got cancelled.

• A project I was working on was, unbeknownst to me, at the same time being implemented by someone else, and their implementation “won.” My work got thrown away.¹¹1 In everything I do, I work in the open and I proactively communicate my progress on everything I do. I am borderline overcommunicating. I cannot find any explanation for how this situation could have happened. 

• After the cancellation of a huge project, there were far too many engineers and too little work to keep people busy. I had barely anything to do for weeks on end, and eventually got threatened with a PIP²²2 A PIP, or personal improvement plan, is a company’s way of starting the process of getting you fired, formally collecting all the evidence for the company to do so. The term “Personal Improvement Plan” is, therefore, quite a euphemism.  because of that. I left that company soon after.

• I worked for about a year on a project requested by the Product department, who failed to provide product requirements.³³3 At this company, there was the notion that the responsibility of coming up with product requirements lies with the engineers, rather than product managers. I don’t have the words to explain how broken this idea is.  I stumbled through a series of prototypes made by guessing what the product team wanted, but after a protracted period without direction, I left the project. The project was then picked up another team who started a from-scratch rewrite — with still no requirements present.

• Once, I was tasked with building a prototype for a recommendation system, but there was no data available to train a model, nor was there anything set up to collect this data. We went ahead with a bare-bones, barely usable implementation. The prototype, which was slow to implement due to overwhelming tech debt, predictably⁴⁴4 I did my dissertation on recommender systems, so I have a decent idea of what is needed to implement them properly.  performed so poorly that the project got shelved.

• After finishing up a chunk of work, my backlog was empty. Everyone else in the engineering department was too busy — borderline crunch mode — to communicate. On some days, the total lack of communication made me worry that I was working on a public holiday by accident. I tried hard, but for weeks on end, I could not find anything to work on.

The result of all of this wasted effort is that my list of recent achievements is far more meagre than I had hoped or expected. This is frustrating for myself, and has lead to (near-)burnout situations. But right now, it affects me in a different way: in job interviews, this shows as a lack of experience.

The last place where things were working rather well was SoundCloud. At the time, I thought things weren’t great there, but I had no idea it would be so much worse elsewhere. I left SoundCloud in late 2017. This means my most relevant experience is already over six years ago, an eternity in this fast-paced tech scene. I feel myself slipping away, becoming increasingly less relevant.

I am a good engineer, and can do amazing work. I know that, because I’ve done that: Nanoc, closecontact and SoundCloud are great examples of this. Anyway — Get me a job in 2024?

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Occasionally, I meet people who believe generative AI will replace all creativity. They say this in a way that makes it sound inevitable — as if, for example, it is an indisputable fact that in the future, people won’t be making movies and writing books anymore; only AI will.

I detest this notion, for several reasons.

Problem 1: Soul. Generative AI can spit out massive amounts of “content.” It could probably vomit entire new movie franchises on a daily basis. But the “content” has become meaningless at that point. It is quantity over quality.

As consumers, we need quality. We want genuine experiences, stories based on lived human experience, and AI cannot deliver those. AI-generated content has no soul. What passes for “artificial intelligence” has no intelligence. AI does not understand anything. Critically, it has no understanding of emotion. AI can fake it, but we humans see through the hollow façade very quickly.

But could that change in the near future? Not really, and that brings me to the second point.

Problem 2: Hype and lies. The hype around AI is enormous. On par with the industrial revolution, some say. Super-human artificial intelligence is around the corner, I’ve heard. These are statements of the delusional. The hype machine is at full power, and this machine is controlled by the people building these technologies. They fuel the hype because it is in their own interest; they do so for their own gain.

A lot of it is lies. Even the name itself — artificial intelligence — is a lie. The hype has blinded us to the truth.

This hype is so large that when the AI bubble inevitable pops, the impact will be felt on the economy. But the people that will suffer from this won’t be the ones that have cashed out on the hype.

Problem 3: Intellectual property theft. This argument has been made over and over again, but generative AI produces work based on the labor of others, without payment or even attribution. This — and this should be blatantly obvious — is deeply unethical.

Problem 4: Worker exploitation. The people who benefit from generative AI are not consumers, not the creators, and not the people using these AI tools. The people who benefit are the ones who already have the capital, and who will exploit others to increase that capital.

Technology is so often used as a means of oppression. At a former employer, we were told to incorporate AI in our day-to-day work, or get used to twelve-hour working days.

Problem 5: An ecological nightmare. AI models are incredibly expensive and inefficient to run. They are obscenely power-hungry. This technology fuels the climate crisis.

This is not an exhaustive list.

Will generative AI play a process in creative work in the future? Undoubtably. To what extent, though, remains to be seen. We have a choice in the tools we use, and we must refuse to use tools that bring harm to ourselves and others.

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The five-session short-story course, which is now wrapped up, left me unsatisfied. I can attribute this almost entirely to it being an online course, rather than in person. I can conclusively say that online courses really don’t work for me.

In online courses, the social aspect is mostly missing. There is barely time before and after to casually chat. I really, really missed that aspect.

The other day, I joined a “write together” online writing session. Here too, I found the social aspect missing. Being in a session with a hundred other anonymous, faceless beings filled me with sadness. I think I’ll stick to my physical Shut Up & Write get-togethers.

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The instructor of the short story course asked us what our favorite short stories were. I came up with this list:

• L’Alchimista (N. K. Jemisin, 2004)
• The Landlady (Roald Dahl, 1959)
• The Pond (Patricia Highsmith, 1971)
• The Music of Erich Zann (H. P. Lovecraft, 1921)
• A School Story (M. R. James, 1911)
• The Repairer of Reputations (Robert W. Chambers, 1895)
• The Fall of the House of Usher (Edgar Allan Poe, 1840)

It’s all horror(-adjacent), with the exception of L’Alchimista.

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Entertainment:

• I’ve finished Attack Surface.⁵⁵5 Cory Doctorow, Attack surface (New York, NY: Tom Doherty Associates, 2021).  It is bigger than I anticipated: north of 140 000 words, which puts it well above regular novel length. It is definitely a good book (as evidenced by me finishing it), though a little slow at times (not surprising given the length). I definitely plan on picking up other Doctorow books.

• I picked up The Left Hand Of Darkness.⁶⁶6 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace Books, 2019).  It’s my first Ursula K. Le Guin book!

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Links:

• Yanis Varoufakis’s would-be speech at the Palestine Congress in Berlin: An important message, because the German government is complicit in the war crimes being carried out by Israel.

• When Your Favorite Creator Turns Out to Be Pro-Israel (Jessie Gender)

• Why Does I Get Capitalised? (Name Explain): i see

Entertainment links:

• My 36 Inch King Dick Wrecks Locks! (LockPickingLawyer’s): Oh, how could I have missed LockPickingLawyer’s traditional April Fools video?!

• The Making of Pentiment (Noclip/Obsidian): Pentiment is an amazing game, and this making-of documentary is very much worth it.

• Dog of Wisdom III (Joe): Another entry in the series! It’s been a very long time.

Tech links:

• Twitter’s Clumsy Pivot to X.com Is a Gift to Phishers (Brian Krebs)

• Texas will use computers to grade written answers on this year’s STAAR tests (Keaton Peters for The Texas Tribune): This is a terrible idea.