Great essay! Thanks for posting it. I didn't know that Kool-Aid involved points and rewards, never having seen it as a child.

The manager saying, "you've got to drink the Kool-Aid" was funny and made my day.

"The top two aren't very surprising: legal services and financial services. But then the list gets more interesting. Number 3? Auto dealers. Number 4? Consultants. Number 9 is restaurants. Number 10: Accountants. Number 13 is fabricated metal and miscellaneous manufacturing. Number 21? Dentists."

> saying it is "written by LLM" is not useful and misses the point.

It is useful to me. I see too much slop every day and would like to filter it out from my life. I appreciate the tip, and to me, that is the whole point.

> forward only the best, strongest arguments for any given position... A weak argument gives unnecessary purchase to unscrupulous haters who might use that weaker argument as a low-grade "straw man" to dismiss the whole position.

Excellent point. Thank you for writing such a cogent argument.

It is clear that the rich and powerful are making short-term decisions that are causing widespread and long-term harm. Decisions such as, AI-pilled investors demanding unsustainable productivity from companies, and CEOs in turn forcing employees to use agentic coding and laying the rest off.

Such decision-making is not new, of course, but LLM technology is helping grifters and con artists to turbo-charge it. Founders can raise money using cool demos that achieve the impossible. Investment analysts can back up their AI story with huge paper profits.

The result, as you summarized, is life and career displacement and missed opportunities for young people. It's just too abstract and diffuse of an impact to influence people with, and it also seems to be railing against the holy cow of Capitalism.

"Data centers bad!", or "AI is disrupting humanity and the end is nigh!" are much more punchy slogans.

Neki is a sharded Postgres implementation. It introduces one level of indirection between the application and the Postgres shards.

Found this from neki.dev.

For people like me who have no idea what this is, I looked it up:

DaVinci Resolve is a proprietary application for non-linear video editing, color correction, color grading, visual effects, and audio post-production. It is developed by the Australian company Blackmagic Design for macOS, Windows, iPadOS and Linux.

...

DaVinci Resolve has been used for the color grading and/or editing of feature films such as Alien: Covenant, Avatar, Best of Enemies, Deadpool 2, Jason Bourne, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, La La Land, Love & Mercy, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Prometheus, Anora, Robin Hood, Spectre, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and X-Men: Apocalypse.

(Wikipedia)

It’s the de-facto “standard” for color grading and it’s getting more and more capable for things like editing, audio mixing and VFX.

> a lot of code doesn't need to be understood

Really? I am having difficulty thinking of any examples of code that doesn't need to be understood. If it isn't understood by someone, then how is it even working?

If you mean like a library you are using, where you aren't even reading the internals or might not even have access to it, OK, but that code is stull understood by its authors, surely?

I have so many projects on my computer where it doesn't matter if I know how it works or not. Probably well over 100. I think closer to 200, depending on how you count.

They're relatively simple, they do the task they need to and then they wait until they're needed again (or not).

In the past I wrote them, then forgot how they worked, until I needed them again, relearned what I did and adapted it.

Now I just don't have to know how exactly they work, I just get an AI to read the documentation anytime I need to reuse the project and I'll query the AI to fill in the details and to make changes and I ask the AI to run the code and debug it.

Perfect use cases for today's AIs. Doesn't even require SOTA, I can run comfortably on a Sonnet 5 or a Qwen 3.8 and it'll do exactly what it needs to do without making too many mistakes.

Not all code is large corporate code bases.

Thank you for summarizing! TIL about the Falcopolis in Angola.

From the overview site:

Glass insulators were first produced in the 1850's for use with telegraph lines. As technology developed insulators were needed for telephone lines, electric power lines, and other applications. In the mid 1960's a few people began collecting these antique glass insulators. Today there are over 3,000 insulator collectors. Insulator clubs, local and national shows, and good reference books are available. Auctions of Vintage Insulators are available too.

From the article:

There’s good reason for a less-than-sunny outlook toward humanoids, experts, including Meige, argue.