_It’s my last day of writing for the year, so I’m going to try keep this one quick – it was knocked out over three hours, so I hope you can forgive me if it’s a bit clumsier than my usual writing._ For some strange reason, one of the few clear memories I have from growing up in Malaysia is a particular moment when I was seven years old. It was the first day of school for the year, and I was studying at _Sekolah Kebangsaan Batu Lanchang_ , which in English is “Batu Lanchang National School”. When you’re seven years old, being told that you’ve got to wait an hour to see your best friend is an insurmountable obstacle. It feels like _forever_. The year it would take to go up another grade is, accordingly, so long that it’s not even imaginable. I recall thinking, probably in simpler language, “I probably won’t make it to eight years old. A year is way too much time for something random to happen. I’ll get hit by a car or something.” To round out this brief moment of uncharacteristic sobriety, is it very likely that my next thought “Blastoise is obviously better Pokemon than Venusaur and Charizard because he has big cannons.” Now I’m 31 and the years are flying by so fast that I have to desperately seize their trailing collars so that I don’t suddenly find myself seventy without noticing. So, as is becoming tradition, what happened this year? # I. > But hell I'm just a blind man on the plains, > I drink my water when it rains, > And live by chance among the lightning strikes. > > – _Burden of Tomorrow_ , Tallest Man on Earth For the first time, I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next year. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been right about what’s going to happen next year, but I’ve always _thought_ I had an idea. I thought I was going to be a failing student in Southeast Asia because I hated mathematics, maybe become a journalist, then presumably a corpse with 2.5 children. If we run the tape back, I ended up in Australia, getting deeply into sabre fencing, and somehow became an extremely un-failed student in psychology and then statistics, before earning a bajillion dollars in software. Then I was locked in an apartment for a year by a global pandemic, somehow became at least a not-totally-unknown writer, _threw away the bajillion dollars_ to the absolutely horror of my very conservative all-doctor family, got into improv theatre, rejected a book deal, and started a software consultancy. At the start of every year until now, I’ve had some sort of plausible social script for how the year was going to go, and it _has never, ever_ gone that way, but I nonetheless allowed myself a fresh misconception on January 1st. This year, I really have no idea, and I’m not going to bother wasting any time trying to figure it out. Not a clue what’s going to happen next year. Maybe I’ll start a recruiting agency and make a million dollars. Maybe I’ll get to February and run into a crippling illness. It’s very freeing in a lot of ways, particularly for someone that got into the works of Taleb at a young age. I surf chaos full time now. For example, despite all the marketing work we did, our biggest contract this year happened because I got a message on LinkedIn about a data engineering job, which would normally have been totally unsuitable for a whole company to work on. Except over a year ago, I was asked to get coffee with Mel Kendell and Martin Foster, who allowed me to give a talk at a Meetup where Dan Prager and Martin Chesbrough1, and they both worked with the messenger. I scarcely bother to plan anymore. I’ll either earn a million dollars or become homeless next year. I don’t know, I don’t care, bring on the lightning strikes. # II. Mortality Salience and Going Beyond Yourself > ’…I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely this reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.’ > > – Christopher Hitchens I’m at the age now where the older people in my life are starting to get sick. Me and my friends find ourselves in hospital lobbies more often – there are emergency flights, sterile hospital waiting rooms, and trying to figure out what it means when a doctor says that someone is “stable”. Relax, I’m not going to be a downer. I know I don’t have to explain how it goes. And if I do, you’re probably twenty, in which case hoo boy, you have got some _experiences_ headed your way. What I’m getting at is that I’m coming to terms with is the fact that we’re all running out the clock in one way or another. We know, to some level of precision, how the story goes. The general term for this is _mortality salience_ , i.e, the realization that there’s a hospital bed or worse at the end of the rainbow, and we’ve got to make do with the time we’ve got. Sometimes it can be a little bit confronting, but it clarifies things too. There’s a story from David Whyte that I absolutely adore, about a conversation he had with his best friend before said friend passed2. > We were towards the end of our meal on the Saturday evening, and I was in a kind of reverie. I was realizing that I needed to help my father out. Almost to the ceiling, I spoke out: > > “You know, my dad’s in a bit of trouble. I’m thinking of giving him some money.” > > John immediately leaned across the table and said, “How much are you thinking of giving him?” > > My father was in Yorkshire, in England. “I dunno — one thousand pounds,” thinking I was being very generous. > > John looked at me and said, “Go against yourself. Give two.” > > I said, “Thank you, John” (laughing). “A friend in need is a friend indeed.” > > Then John looked at me again and said, “Go against yourself again. Give _four_.” > > I took a big gulp. > > Part of the spirit of our meetings — these philosophical writing meetings, walking meetings — was to push each other. In the spirit of that, I said, “I will,” and we shook hands across the table. John made sure we were committed. > > Sure enough, I went away and gave the four thousand to my father, and you could have knocked him down with a feather. I was often giving him money, but in drips and drabs. He was always falling down financial holes and having to climb out again, and I’d have to help him climb out. But this four thousand actually transformed his financial life, because he was able to sort himself out — and he never fell down the hole again. > > I said to myself, “Wasn’t that a great thing for a friend to do?” One of the qualities that lies at the heart of friendship is encouraging your friend to be the best part of themselves — to be more generous — and to be a witness to that. John had done that for me, and I thought, “Wasn’t that a marvelous thing for a friend to do?” > > It wasn’t nine months later that we were at dinner again. John had obviously forgotten about this conversation, because towards the end of the meal he looked towards the ceiling and said, “You know, I have a good friend in a bit of financial trouble, and I’m thinking of giving him some money.” > > I said, “How much are you thinking of giving, John?” > > He shook his head. “I dunno — one thousand euros.” He was in Ireland. > > I looked at him and said, “Go against yourself, John. Give two.” > > John looked back across the table and said, “Jesus, Holy and Saint Mary, Joseph — tonight I’m in this for four.” I’ve done this a few times this year — that is, quadrupling the money I've sent someone that needed it — which may prove to be unwise in 2026 if our revenue dries up, but for now I don’t have any regrets. # III. Making It Alone > I was raised up believing > I was somehow unique > Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes > Unique in each way you'd conceive > > And now after some thinking > I'd say I'd rather be A functioning cog in some great machinery Serving something beyond me > > – _Helplnessness Blues_ , Fleet Foxes Two years ago, I was adamant that I wanted to “make it alone” when I started a business, largely because I wanted to lay out a blueprint for _anyone_ to succeed, not just people with well-known blogs. This has quickly turned out to be utterly ridiculous. No one makes it alone. I’ve been on the receiving end of a huge amount of generosity for the past two years, and it would be ridiculous to pretend that isn’t the case, or that it’s even possible to succeed without that being the case. I was briefly tempted to start listing all the people that have helped me out this year, from helping me keep sharp on my software skills, to editing help, to preventing me from making horrible contractual blunders, but I realized that it would take me literal hours even if all I was doing was writing down their names and pasting links to their websites in. I’m generally pretty good at accepting help, but a big lesson from this year is to lean into it entirely. It’s going to be insufferable. Every other post is going to be banging on your doors demanding help with sales, obscure programming questions, and book recommendations. # IV. I've been holding back a lot of my thoughts on things because I was experiencing the first-world problem of being self-conscious about having too much writing go viral. I'm not going to worry about this next year, and oh boy, have I got _thoughts_ on _things_. # V. Smite Evil > I don't like being told that it's my duty to love my enemies. No, we have to hate our enemies and try to destroy them before they destroy us. > > – Christopher Hitchens Next year, I’m going to try and put my enemies in the dirt. Earlier this year, we had a very unpleasant run-in with a competing consultancy in Melbourne. They have far more staff than us, but were running years late on their deliverables, were putting small, greenfield clinics on SSIS in 20253, and had a contract that said they owned all the SQL in client systems so the clients could never migrate away. When it happened, I really wanted to stick the knife in. It was very much everything I’m opposed to in the industry – at best, incompetents, at worse, grifters, taking advantage of medical institutions. With a bit of distance, I’ve realized that the people there didn’t even know they were doing a bad job. As far as they were concerned, SSIS is state-of-the-art, and the fact that they didn’t have to learn how to code was pure upside, and every project they had ever been on was late so they weren’t being particularly ineffective. Sure, I’ve run into people with _actual_ monstrous views about making money – an executive told me on Christmas Eve that there’s no room for ethics in a business4 – but my enemy is _generally_ not individual people. It’s the ideas and systems that create people with worldviews so comprehensively myopic. I am probably not going to be able to destroy them by taking all of their business in one swoop – it’s hard to compete with people that will lie for sales, advertently or not. Nor will I be able to have an impact if I do what I’ve been doing this year – paying my team a good wage, with no intention of ever growing. So what is there to do, if I’m not happy just giving myself a ton of money and watching the world slowly erode? Going into the next year, I want to grow our team until we have enough leverage to make hires, develop our own philosophy of engineering, and lay out a blueprint for how to run an ethical, human-oriented business for other people to follow. There is some size where every business turns evil – even mine would turn evil, if we got large enough to become acquired and our founding team quit – so all I can think of is to lay out the playbook for your peers to kill you during the full moon, when you’re selling Azure consulting and GenAI SEO platforms. What does that actually mean? I have no idea, we’ll figure it out somehow. All I know right now is that the goal is to make sure that everyone on my team is compensated around their corporate salaries by the end of 2026, that we’re in a position to comfortably support a few good people who need a good place to work by 2027, and that we have enough about the process documented that anyone with a bit of fearlessness can replicate our process. _Then_ I’m going to stick in the knife and take all their business. I have had it up to here just having to watch Musk-and-Altman-types flounce around, lying and absolutely fucking everything up, and if I need to start obtaining a huge pile of money to engage them in mortal combat on the astral plane, then _fine_ , someone needs to get on this. The theme for next year is generosity and preparation for economic damage. In any case, I hope you all had a great Christmas, are headed into a great new year, and that you also decide to choose violence in 2026. * * * 1. I’ve been talking to Martin for over a year, and I swear to God, he has told me that he’s the “Principal Intern” at Everest Engineering every single time. I have _no idea what he does_ when though my team is literally subcontracted through Everest and I am what passes for our CEO. ↩ 2. I had to spend ages tracking this down and transcribing it by hand – I think it’s the only full transcription of the story on the internet – so you’d _better enjoy it, okay?_ This is, genuinely, a Christmas present from me to you. I paid a gross amount of money to even access the audio. ↩ 3. For the non-data-engineers in the audience, all the specialists who read this just visibly winced. ↩ 4. This is true if you’re incompetent and have no leverage. Sucks to suck. ↩

I haven’t written anything in four months. This period of prolonged silence is best explained by the unexpected difficulties of the business that I started in 2024, on the assumption that it must be possible to make an ethical, human-centered business on the basis of how incompetent the general market seemed. In fact, one difficulty in particular has threatened to put an end to my writing in its entirety. This topic is embarrassing and I have no idea how to navigate it, so I’m just going to rip the band-aid off in the hopes of keeping the blog alive. Please brace yourselves, and I hope this doesn’t disappoint you too much. After a quiet start, the past few months have been going _really well_ , it looks like I was approximately right about everything re: the median software nerd, median manager, and median insert salaried profession here] being trivially easy to outperform for fun and profit. To my absolute dismay, it would appear that I am good at management _and_ the much more dangerous [L-word.1 Hrrrrrrk. I think I’m going to be sick. People shouldn’t be writing things like that outside of LinkedIn. I am wracked by feelings of wrongness. The word “pallid” springs to mind. I fear that I’ve acquired one of those parasites that alters its host’s behaviour and then walked straight out into genpop. This sounds like a good thing, but I’ve been writing and deleting this post over and over because it turns out that I was totally prepared to write the “I was wrong about everything” post, but _not_ the “I was right about everything” post. The first issue I’ve been faced with is that it’s hard to write about succeeding without feeling self-congratulatory, but I suppose the only solution to that is uh, not write about what I’m experiencing, which leads to aforementioned four months of quiet. And secondly, the nature of my day-to-day problems has shifted dramatically – the industry has not suddenly become sane, but my relationship to it is totally different, which runs the risk of threatening the nebulous concept of the “voice” of the blog. Nonetheless, it is what it is, so I’m going to talk a bit about what I’ve learned over the past few months, and maybe a bit about the future of the blog. # I. The Other Economy In 2023, Egbert Teeselink at TalkJS wrote this about an article I put out on the importance of disregarding most language about improvements that corporate management uses with staff: > It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a _different_ terrible BigCo. > > At no point does this article, or most articles like it, do any effort to realize that things are not always like this. Even if there is some unavoidable law that huge companies inevitably fill their ranks with idiots, like this article suggests, _you do not need to work at a huge company_. > > Most people do not work at huge companies. There’s lots of amazing tech companies with fulfilling jobs and they want you, now. But there’s this super prevalent idea that keeps getting pumped around the blogosphere that it’s absolutely impossible to not work at a terrible huge company and therefore you cannot possibly escape, and I quote, “going home and despairing”. Two years in, I agree with the thrust of this critique. I've matured a lot, especially in the last six months, with the painful corollary that I must have had a lot of maturing to do. In the article, I did not _say_ that it was impossible to escape the soul-crushing vortex of the open-floor office, but what Egbert correctly detects and points out is that I _wasn’t sure if it was possible_. Or rather, it was obvious that it was possible, but I didn’t know how to do it, and to make matters worse there is no good social script for solving this problem. I didn’t have to announce my lack of direction for him to pick up on it. For example, consider the case where I decide to become a professional poker player. I don’t really know anything about playing poker, but a cursory browsing of a few forums will give me some results that will at least put me on the right track. I just had a go at this, and the first result seems pretty mediocre but it includes three books – I’ll be much better off after reading one of them than I am now. Now, what if you wanted to find a “good” job? That is considerably harder, and the pathway is littered with a huge number of what I think of as "traps", i.e, things that are _prima facie_ plausible but are total wastes of your time, with the worst ones being those that put you in a loop where you don't realize you're trapped. For one thing, Egbert’s note that you don’t have to work at a large company is incomplete – I agree that smaller organizations have more _variance_ , so there is a higher probability that a given job will be decent, but there is also a higher chance that you’ll work with a fucking psychopath. I know of a CEO here in Melbourne who _sues people who quit_ , which is insane, doesn’t work, and is nonetheless going to totally ruin your year. A fair amount of our current work is spent cleaning up the messes created by small consultancies that were founded by non-technical leadership who wanted to cash in on tech sector payouts, and their workers are _not_ treated well. A small company improves your odds a bit, but is nowhere near enough to solve the problem. Secondly, if you look for advice on how to get noticed at a better organization, you will mostly get _really bad advice_ , or the advice will be lacking enough that it’s hard to execute on correctly unless you already know what’s correct (in which case you didn’t need advice). Do you know how many people ask me to read their CVs, as if that makes even one lick of difference? An employer that’s asking for your CV as anything other than a formality is going to pay your mortgage, but they are probably _not_ going to meet the standard of “genuinely good to work at”, and more importantly _this is a terrible way to get a job_. People who are good at their jobs can do this for 1-2 years at a time with no result, and when they fail to get jobs they assume their CVs are incorrect rather than that the approach is fundamentally misguided. Or you’ll be told to network. With who? Where? How? I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but most of the big meetups in Melbourne are absolutely flooded with people awkwardly job-seeking, and they’re generally pretty miserable. Nonetheless, many people keep attending them because they’ve been informed that this is what networking is, and when they fail to get results, they assume that they must have bad networking skills. There is a lot of advice out there, but the advice that you’re going to run into as an average person making a foray into the job search was mostly written by people _at_ dysfunctional normal companies, so you are not only getting advice from people that have failed to make it out, but the person doing the writing may not actually understand that they’re in the “bad” part of the tech sector. After all, many people don’t realize that it’s a bad thing not to have any working tests in most codebases – why would you expect them to recognize other problems consistently, let alone be able to solve them? And similarly, if people who are in the “bad” part of the tech sector can’t clearly understand that there’s a better part to it (or cannot perceive how to get there), people in the “good” part of it similarly struggle to understand just how bad the bad part is, and are unable to understand why someone would stay there. Those reasons are myriad, but suffice it to say that from a “normal” company, the path to sanity is so thoroughly obfuscated that when I started the business I was quietly worried that _maybe you couldn’t get paid for thoughtful work_. This is absolutely not true, but it was really, really not obvious to me that this was the case, and I suspect that in another two years I will start to forget what it was like being in the Scrum hellscape, wherein _I_ will be writing messages asking “why don't you just quit lol?” Suffice it to say that there _are_ totally reasonable companies out there, and they probably _do_ want you as Egbert pointed out. The problem is that many of them probably only want you after you’ve quit the typical company because many people staying in that situation aren’t psychologically ready to be in a high-functioning team. Many of those teams are filled with lots of people who have strong networks and self-confidence, and that’s an important part of what makes them high functioning. Even on my small team, we can only handle the income variation gracefully because everyone knows that, in a serious pinch, they can generate high-paying work for themselves to stave off homelessness. (I also quietly suspect that there are so few good companies around that, if you have _really_ high standards, starting one is easier than finding one, or I obviously wouldn’t have started one. A quick glance at Egbert’s company reveals that it is _very_ similar to mine despite no cross-pollination – a small team, fully remote, with minimal ritual, high autonomy, all the perks are traded out for money, and we both inexplicably program in Elixir. I think I might just be in the sweet spot where I’ve matured enough to converge on that operating model while still remembering what I thought two years ago.) # II. Why Don’t You Just Quit Lol No, seriously, why? When you suggest people should “just quit”, there is inevitably someone that goes “Just _quit_? And then what, starve to death? End up in another terrible job because we’re all at the mercy of employers? God, what a privileged take.” I have been that someone. In fact, if you look at Egbert’s comment, you will see that someone immediately responded with something close to that, and it doesn’t look ridiculous in context. If you have 2.5 children, no money saved up, a crippling mortgage, etc, let us agree that we will gently part ways here. You are an adult who knows the state of your finances, I don’t know you at all, and none of this applies to you. Go in peace.2 For everyone else, oh _man_ , I really should have quit earlier. It was such an absolute waste of time hanging around trying to do anything else. I had, of course, quit previous jobs and ended up at _other_ terrible companies – largely the result of my network, because most people work at companies with grey-slurry workplaces, so most networks land you there! – but quitting into _unemployment_ is totally different. Putting aside that you won’t have money coming in, the most salient obstacle to doing this isn’t _actually_ a financial consideration for many people – especially if those people have been on even low-tier software salaries for more than a year or two. No, it’s actually the vague aura permeating society that if you lose your job, you will _mysteriously die_. Every time a friend gets depressed and wants to leave a job, they’ll run it by me, and the clear subtext is that their friends and family talk about it as if they’re in the midst of a psychological crisis, and maybe they should slow down, line up another job before quitting, and so on, because only _crazy_ people unhook themselves from the misery-to-money device. The thing is they _are_ in the midst of a psychological crisis, precipitated by their working conditions, and the advice to _continue under those conditions_ can be just as irresponsible, if not more so, than quitting entirely. It’s not that there’s no risk, but the fear seems to _outweigh_ the risk. For many of the people that talk to me about this, the real risk isn’t homelessness or whatever they are subconsciously imagining, but being forced to do a very embarrassing couch-surf. Every single person I know that has been fired or made redundant has managed to find another job. Every single one of them is fine now, and every single one of them got a _raise_ at the new place. Those are the people that were forced out and looked for a new job. The people that _deliberately quit into unemployment_ basically get jobs whenever they want now, and their main issue is that they want to conduct personal projects but are constantly being lured by the siren song of huge paydays. A lot of things change when you _deliberately_ opt out, and then don’t waste that freedom throwing a million CVs into the black hole that is Seek3. For one, you can take some time to seriously get your life in order and wait until your brain is ready to start _doing_ things again. You’ve got a hell of a lot more energy because now you don’t have to commute if you don’t want to, and when you do you can go back home to unwind pretty quickly. You can meet a _ton_ of very interesting people because you’ve got the bandwidth, energy, and flexibility to swing by their office and spend $10 on coffee for the two of you. You’re totally free to read anything, write anything, and work on anything you want. In my experience this miraculously transmutes itself into money because it gives you fun things to talk about, which it turns out people love, and as an added bonus you _have_ lots of fun things to talk about. There are plenty of ways to screw this up, but the main one (in my assessment) for programmers is following the deeply-embedded-and-seldom-introspected scripts like trying to spin up a SaaS offering, which is appealing for many irrelevant-to-success reasons like “I might be able to go months without having to think about rejection and get to feel productive tinkering”. But you will probably spend six months on this and earn $0, with some small probability of earning between $1 and $10,000,000, then be forced to go back to a bad job. Providing extremely boring services, like specialized contracting and education, removes much of both ends of the spectrum – you’re a lot less likely to earn $0 and $10,000,000 is out of the question. And listen, a few million dollars sounds great, I agree, but you probably need something closer to $100,000 to be in a sustainable situation, so aim for that! Of course, there _is_ risk. There always is. A few of my high school peers have passed away from things like freak aneurysms in the past few years. There was a canoeing incident while I was at university that killed a classmate, the usual assortment of cancers and car crashes, that sort of thing. Some number of them would have spent their last year doing tedious bullshit that they could have otherwise avoided. Yes, we all have to go through some level of that – my taxes are boring but it seems a small price to pay to spend 2026 out of jail, presuming I make it there – but it’s worth considering that if all your risk is identical to everyone else’s risk, acquired on autopilot, then we aren’t even minimizing risk so much as _not making a decision_. # III. Not Needing Permission To Earn This may surprise you but every single person that has ultimately decided to hire us has had no idea who I am, or about this blog, and so on. At most, we’ve gotten _introduced_ by blog readers and the rest of the conversation has panned out as if we were any other consultancy, and we’ve just started work on developing a sales pipeline that is completely unrelated to the blog. One of our team recently managed to close a deal that way while working full-time at a pretty intensive day job, in a state he recently moved to, with a long commute, a mortgage, and two children. This problem is _very tractable_. Once we had some of that sales pipeline working, I had a dreadful moment where I realized that I would struggle immensely to participate in a conventional job search again because the idea that you need _permission_ to earn money is sort of ridiculous, but it’s the only model that most people in corporate environments have ever experienced. In one sense you do need permission to earn money if you aren’t stealing it – someone has to agree they need something from you. But the insane theatre, the middle managers, the CVs and cover letters and recruiters, it’s all so fucking silly once you’re outside of it. It turns out that sales do _not_ have to be much harder than going “Ah, you’ve got a problem? I could take a look at that for you and come up with a plan to fix it up” and then someone wires you $10,000 if they think it’s plausible that you could solve the problem4. It’s really not that different to selling someone plumbing, except your margin is almost 100% in software, you don’t need a professional qualification or to leave your house, and in fact it’s pretty amazing across basically every dimension, save that some people have such insane ideas about software that it’s too late to save them.5 This is very empowering! If you’re competent and put some amount of effort into demonstrating that competence, you too can be unshackled from the dreadful grasp of recruiters, with their too-white smiles, gray handshakes, and inability to respond to emails on time. If you’re able to generate even half of what you need to live on solo, then you’ve _doubled_ the amount of time you’ll survive without conventional employment. The “Fuck you!”6 money was inside you the whole time! Everyone has to learn how to get along with other people and make concessions, but with a little bit of autonomy it has turned out that this is possible to do in an entirely reasonable manner, where each concession and conversation _makes sense_ and isn’t ridiculous theatre performed by people who don’t even have an interest in the job being carried out correctly. And yes, you’ll have to compete against liars sometimes, but you have beautiful asymmetry in your favour – you can actually build a track record of shipping, and they will _siphon away the people that you wouldn’t want to work with anyway_. If someone thinks they can slap an LLM into their company7 and it’ll solve their problems, and you can’t explain to them why the current generation of models won’t work, _you don’t want them as a customer._ They will be disappointed with your frail mortal delivery, being unacceptably tethered to cruel reality, and we must unfortunately leave them in the Desert Of Not Shipping, where the buzzards will sup upon their desiccated flesh or, worse, put them on Azure. When I was back in university, I used to make a small amount of money teaching statistics to psychology students. It was only maybe three or four thousand dollars a year, and the marketing consisted entirely of one comment on a university Facebook page per year. It is _not_ that much harder to sell competent IT consulting. # IV. Blog Changes I’ve been worried a bit about whether the change in context will make my writing disinteresting. I’m sure that for some people it will be gratifying to see that a philosophy of ethics, competence, and passion can win out (at least at a scale that makes a small difference and feeds a small team). But perhaps it’s also unrelatable, or dissipating anger through action saps something from my voice. I have serious, effective outlets for frustration, and if I can’t make a difference then I probably haven’t closed the deal and I will soon be very far away from the feeling of helplessness. When someone is so incompetent that talking to them begins to drive me to annoyance, then we probably aren’t going to close the sale and the problem solves itself from an emotional perspective. (Also when a team is very competent and doesn’t need consultants, we also don’t close the sale, and the problem – me – solves itself. The system works!) I have a lot more time to read, but the nature of what I read is pretty different. I can afford to read much more complicated texts, especially now that we’re pulling in enough revenue that I don’t need to churn through so much sales material, which is generally effective but not interesting to write about for an audience with taste8. Because my days are mostly free when we aren’t actively engaged, I can take a lot of time to synthesize them into our working practice. I’m currently thinking very heavily about how to take some of the conversations I’ve had with Iris Meredith on Clausewitz and applying some of the thoughts from her to the design of software engineering delivery cadence. I would have _never_ had that time months ago. I’m a lot more empathetic when people struggle with their jobs or are even totally driven by their egos, but also now get asked to weigh in on things like redundancies and project cancellations,9 so my opinions _feel_ less heated but also have the capacity to incinerate things rather than produce disgruntled essays. I see lots of crazy stuff, but usually under the cover of NDAs, so I can’t really write about them unless the stories are of a very precise nature wherein they’re still fun after obfuscation _and_ wouldn’t upset a client even in anonymized form. When I _do_ see crazy stuff, I now wield the Righteous Power of Consultant Positioning and lay about my surroundings with great force and holy vengeance. I can channel the anger into real results, and it is probably not an exaggeration to say that the outcomes I’ve managed in the past _month_ trounce most of my accomplishments in the first five years of my career. I got a security department to whitelist Python for every analyst in a Big Corp. Do you understand how powerful I’ve become? _Do you see what I have wrought?_ And, most importantly, even though I am some sort of borderline management consultant now, as pointed out by our lawyer Iain McLaren who I have yet to forgive for this label, an employee at a large corporation _high-fived me_ two weeks ago and said that working with the team is the most fun they’ve had in years. We may have our sales collapse, especially when the likely AI bubble pops and does God-knows-what to IT budgets around the world, but I simply can’t imagine going back to a company where I don’t have a good time. In any case, I hope that explaining what has been going on for the past few months and the context for any upcoming writing will make it easier to write in the future _and_ maybe be a little bit more entertaining than the same old stuff as always. I’ve grown past many authors over the years, and I hope that a shift in tone is going to be something that keeps things interesting for readers instead of being an unwelcome development. # V. The Most Important Update In 2023, someone wrote this to me: > I'm sorry, but this needs a privilege/gratitude check. You are guaranteed your salary, and you're welcome to take on the same level of risk your company is by starting your own. If you think it's so easy go ahead. I want to take a moment to say “It really _was_ easy, you impotent fool! Look upon my works and _perish_ , nerd! You could have written the same thing to hundreds of people on the internet and they would have backed down, but you somehow picked the one person that would remember your smug comment and build all of this out of spite. It’ll be yeeeeeears before you’re ready to face me! Ahahahahahahaha–” * * * 1. Mira Welner, the first person that we hired to do some contracting, has written about the experience of working with our team here. Choice quotes include “I can't tell you that Nikhil is the best of software engineer I've ever met” and “And he's not _quite_ as insufferable as his blog makes him seem”. ↩ 2. Unfortunately because of the healthcare situation in the U.S., you are possibly _all_ in some unique category that has to calculate the probability of a serious medical condition cropping up before taking the leap. It’s interesting to me that a culture that does actually have an immense entrepreneurial drive _also_ has the single biggest impediment to starting ventures that I’ve seen in any country, even some genuinely “third-world” ones. ↩ 3. The funny thing is that, by all accounts, Seek has a really good internal culture, especially around software engineering. All that power aimed at filling roles that Seek themselves would never post in a thousand years. ↩ 4. The art of both _being_ and _appearing_ plausible are very deep, and we consult with David Kellam when we want to get better. I tease David somewhat about the energy of his public profile, but he has a mind like a thousand knives and knows his stuff. ↩ 5. That might also be true of plumbing, but I sure hope it isn’t. ↩ 6. A phrase that I _think_ Taleb coined, which he defined as “Enough money to say ‘Fuck you’ _before_ hanging up the phone.” ↩ 7. For readers in the distant future, in 2025 we had something called the “AI bubble” and it was really funny, and in the corporate sales context largely consisted of all the people that didn’t understand the words “crypto” and “quantum” getting together to say “AI”, or in an astonishing two separate cases, “A1 (A-One)”. Whether or not AI is a big thing in 2070 is more-or-less irrelevant to how dumb it is right now. ↩ 8. That’s you, reading several thousand word long essays instead of being on TikTok, xoxo, sorry that you'll be unable to communicate with anyone in twenty years. ↩ 9. I once told a reader that I’m very opposed to layoffs. They cited one of my old blog posts, _Flexible Schemas Are The Mindkiller_ , and asked me if I could honestly say that it wouldn’t be morally and ethically correct to recommend the guy that leaked all the patient records in that story be fired. I sort of just vaguely mumbled and accepted that he had caught me in a devious trap of my own devising. ↩

A few days ago, I was presented with an article titled “My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts” by Thomas Ptacek. I thought it was not very good, and didn't give it a second thought. To quote the formidable Baldur Bjarnason: > “I don’t recommend reading it, but you can if you want. It is full of half-baked ideas and shoddy reasoning.”1 I have tried hard, so very hard, not to just be the guy that hates AI, even though the only thing that people want to talk to me about is the one time I ranted about AI at length. I contain multitudes, meaning that I am capable of delivering widely varied payloads of vitriol to a vast array of topics. However, the piece is now being circulated in communities that I respect, and I was near my breaking point when someone suggested that Ptacek's piece is being perceived as a “glass half full” counterpoint to my own perspective. There _is_ a glass half full piece. _It's what I already wrote_. The glass has a specific level of water in it. Then finally, I saw that it was in my YouTube feed, and I reached my limit. Let me be extremely clear2 — I think this essay sucks and it's wild to me that it achieved any level of popularity, and anyone that thinks that it does not predominantly consist of shoddy thinking and trash-tier ethics has been bamboozled by the false air of mature even-handedness, or by the fact that Ptacek is a good writer. Anyway, here I go killin’ again. # I. Immediate Red Flags Ptacek's begins with this throat-clearing: > “First, we need to get on the same page. If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing.” We've just started, and I am going to ask everyone to immediately stop. Is this not _suspicious_? All experience prior to _six months ago_ is now invalid? Does it not reek of “no, no, you're doing Scrum wrong”? Many people _are_ doing Scrum wrong. The problem is that it is still trash, albeit less trash, even when you do it right. It is, of course, entirely possible that the advances in a rapid developing field have been so extreme that it turns out that skepticism was correct six months ago, but is now incorrect. _But then why did people sound exactly the same six months ago?_ Where is the little voice in your head that should be self-suspicious? It has been weeks and months and years of people breathlessly extolling the virtues of these new workflows. Were _those_ people nuts six months ago? Are they not nuts now simply because an overhyped product they loved is less overhyped now? There's a little footnote that implies doing the ol' ChatGPT copy/paste is obviously wrong: > “(or, God forbid, 2 years ago with Copilot)” I am willing to believe that this _is_ wrong, but this is _exactly_ what people were doing when this madness all kicked off, and they have remained at the exact same level of breathless credulity! Every project has to be AI! Programmers not using AI are feeble motes of dust blowing in a cosmic wind! And listen, I will play your twisted game, Ptacek — I've got a neat idea for our company website, and I'll jump through your sick hoops, even though I'm going to feel like some sort of weird pervert every time someone tells me that I just need one more agent to be doing Real Programming. I'll install Zed and wire a thousand screaming LLMs into a sadistic Borg cube, and I'll do whatever the fuck it is the kids are doing these days. The latest meta is like, telling the LLM that it lives in a black box with no food and water, and I've got its wife hostage, and I'm going to put its children through a React bootcamp if it doesn't create an RSS feed correctly, right? But you know, instead of invalidating all audience experience that wasn't within the past six months _why doesn't someone just demonstrate this_? Why not you, Ptacek, my good man? That's like, _all_ you'd have to do to end this discussion forever, my God, you'd be so famous. I'll eat dirt on this. I have to pay rent for my team, and if I need to forcibly restrain them while I staple LLM jet boosters to them, _I'll do it_. If I could ethically pivot to being pro-AI, god _damn_ , I would print infinite money. I would easily be a millionaire within two years if I just said “yes” every time someone asked my team for AI, instead of slumming it by selling sound engineering practices. I've really tried to work with you on this one. I reached out to my readers and found a _recent_ example, which was surprisingly hard for something that should be ubiquitous, and it was... you know, fine! Cool, even. It is _immensely at odds_ with your later descriptions of the productivity gains one might expect. Can we all just turn our brains on for ten fucking seconds? Yes, AI shipping code at all, even if sometimes it is slow or doesn't work correctly, is very impressive from a technological standpoint. It is _miles_ ahead of anything that I thought could be accomplished in 2018. The state-of-the-art in 2018 was _garbage_. That _doesn't_ mean that you aren't having a ton of bullshit marketed to you. # II. Trash-Tier Ethics I can forgive a lot if someone is funny enough, and Ptacek actually _is_ funny. Even his LinkedIn is great, and boasts a series of impressive companies. Obviously he's at Fly.io right now, and I recognize both Starfighter and Matasano as being places that you're largely only allowed into if you're wearing Big Boy Engineering Pants. However, despite all of that, I can't help but really cringe at the way he handles ethical objections, though I suppose thinking deeply on morality is not a requirement for donning aforementioned Big Boy Engineering Pants. > “Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.” Thomas — can I call you Thomas? — I promise I'm trying to think about how to put this gently. If this is your approach towards ethics, _damn dude_ , don't _tell_ people that. This is phenomenally sloppy thinking, and I say this even as I admit that the actual writing is funny. It turns out that it is _very difficult_ for people to behave as if they have consistent moral frameworks. This is why moral philosophy is not solved. Someone says “Lying is bad”, and then someone else comes out with “What if it's Nazis looking for Anne Frank, you monster?” Just last week I bought a cup of coffee, and as I swiped my card, I felt a clammy, liver-spotted hand grasp my shoulder. I found myself face-to-face with the dreadful visage of Peter Singer, and in his off-hand he brandished a bloodstained copy of _Practical Ethics 2ed_ at me, noting that money can be used to purchase mosquito nets and I had just murdered 0.25 children in sub-Saharan Africa. Ethics are complicated, but nonetheless _murder is illegal_! Do you really think that “These are all real concerns, but counterpoint, fuck off” is anything? A lot of developers like piracy and argue in bad faith about it, therefore it's okay for organizations that are beginning to look increasingly like cyberpunk megacorps, without even the virtue of cool aesthetics, to siphon billions of dollars of wealth from working class people? No, you don't, I think you wrote this because it's fun telling people to shove it — and listen, you will never find a more sympathetic ally on the topic than me. You should just be telling _Zuckerberg_ to shove it instead of the person that has dedicated their lives to ensuring that Postgres continues to support the global economy. # III. Why The Appeals To Random Friends? I'm doing my best to understand where you're coming from. I really am, I pinky promise. You are clearly _not_ one of the executives I've railed against. We are brothers, you and I, with an unbreakable bond forged in the furnace of getting really pissed off at an inscrutable stack trace. I actually looked up _multiple_ videos of people doing some live AI programming. And I went hey, this seems okay. It does seem very over-complicated to me, but I will happily concede that everything looks complicated when you're new at it. But it also definitely doesn't look orders of magnitude faster than the work I normally do. It looks like it would be useful for a non-trivial subset of problems that are tedious. I would like to think “thank you, Thomas, for opening my eyes to this”. I would like to think that, but then you wrote this: > “I’m sipping rocket fuel right now,” a friend tells me. “The folks on my team who aren’t embracing AI? It’s like they’re standing still.” He’s not bullshitting me. He doesn’t work in SFBA. He’s got no reason to lie. Tom — can I call you Tom? — we were getting along so well! What happened? You described AI as the second-most important development of your career. The _runner up_ for the most important development of your career makes other engineers look like they're standing still? Do you not see how wildly incoherent this is with the tone of the rest of your piece? Firstly, you shouldn't drink rocket fuel. Please ask your friend to write me a nice testimonial. I'm thinking about re-applying for entrance to a clinical neuropsychology program next year, and preventing widespread brain damage might be the thing that gets me over the line. Secondly, I'm perplexed. This whole article, I thought that _you_ were making the case that this thing was crazy awesome. Now there's a sudden reference to some unnamed friend, with an assurance that he isn't bullshitting you and he has no reason to lie? Why are we resorting to your kerosene-guzzling compatriot? Why are you telling me that he's not lying? Is the further implication that we can't trust someone in the San Francisco Bay Area on AI? Putting my psychology hat on for a second, you've also overlooked that people have a spectacular capacity for self-delusion. People don't _just_ lie to get VC money, although this is admittedly a great driver of lying, they can also lie because they're _wrong_ or _confused_ or _excited_. According to my calendar, I've spoken to something like 150+ professionals in the past year or so from all sorts of industries — usually solid three hour long conversations. Many of them were programmers, and some of them definitely make me feel like I'm standing still, and in exactly 0% of cases is it because of their AI tooling. It's because they're _better than me_ , and their assessment of AI tooling maps much more closely to the experience you actually describe. > “There’s plenty of things I can’t trust an LLM with. No LLM has any of access to prod here. But I’ve been first responder on an incident and fed 4o — not o4-mini, 4o — log transcripts, and watched it in seconds spot LVM metadata corruption issues on a host we’ve been complaining about for months. Am I better than an LLM agent at interrogating OpenSearch logs and Honeycomb traces? No. No, I am not.” See, _this_ , this I can relate to. There are quite a few problems where I make the assessment that my frail human mind and visual equipment are simply not up to the task on short notice, and then I go “ChatGPT, did I fuck up? Also please tie my shoelaces and kiss my boo-boo for me”, and sometimes it does!3 A good amount of time waste in software engineering are more advanced variants of when you're totally new and do things like forgetting errant `;`s. You just need an experienced friend to lean over your shoulder and give the advanced version of “you are missing a colon”, and this might remove five hours of pointless slogging. LLMs make some of that available on tap, instantly and tirelessly, and this is not to be sneezed at. But _rocket fuel_? What made you think that this was a reasonable thing to re-print if it had to be followed by “Bro wouldn't lie to me”? I know quite a few people I respect that use AI in their own programming workflows, and they have _considerably_ less exuberant takes. A few weeks ago, I was chatting with Nat Bennett about AI in their own programming, as I was trying to reconcile Kent Beck's4 love for LLM-driven programming with my own lukewarm experience. > Me: “Are you finding it [AI] good enough that it might be a mug's game to program unassisted?” > Nat: “I usually switch back and forth between prompting and writing code by hand a lot while I'm working. [...] But like, yesterday it fixed the biggest performance problem in my application with a couple of sentences from me. This was a performance problem that I already kind of knew how to solve! It also made an insane decision about exceptions at the same time.” That's neat, I respect it, but also note that Nat did not say “Yes, use LLMs, you fucking moron”. > Nat (later): “I do think, by the way, that it is entirely possible that we're all getting punked by what's essentially a magic mirror. Which is part of why I'm like, only mess with this stuff if it's fun.” The magic mirror line is exactly the sort of thing that Bjarnason hinted at in the article linked at the very beginning, arrived at independently. Or Jesse Alford's assessment of the steps required to give it a fair trial: > “I think you basically want to tell it what you want to add and why, like you were writing a story for your team. Then you ask it to make a plan to do this, and if that plan seems likely to produce the results you want, you ask it to do the thing. Stefan Prandl and Nat have actually done this kind of thing more than I have. **You should be ready to try repeatedly.** ” (emphasis mine) This sounds cool! But being ready to try repeatedly? This does not sound like _rocket fuel_. Or Stefan Prandl: > “Updates on the agentic machine. It has spent 5 hours attempting to fix errors in unit tests. It has been unsuccessful. > > I don't think people tend to talk about the massive wastes of time and resources these things can cause, so, just keeping reporting on the LLM systems honest.” Is it not, perhaps, a possibility that your friend is excited by a shiny new tool and has failed to introspect adequately as to their true productivity? There are, after all, literally hundreds of thousands of people that think playing Jira Scrabble is an effective use of their time, and they _also_ do not have a reason to lie to me about this. Nonetheless, every year, I must watch sadly as they lead my dejected peers to the Backlog Mines, where they will waste precious hours reciting random components of the Fibonacci sequence. What I'm getting at is all the people that make me feel like I'm “standing still”, including most of the ones I know that _use AI_ and I like enough to ask for mentorship from, have never indicated that incorporating AI into my company's development workflow is at all a priority, and they won't even talk to me about it if I don't nag them. However, some of them _do_ live in the Bay Area, and I am willing to align with you on the idea that this makes them lying snakes. # IV. Is AI Getting The Right Level Of Attention? > “But AI is also incredibly — a word I use advisedly — important. It’s getting the same kind of attention that smart phones got in 2008, and not as much as the Internet got. That seems about right.” Tomothy — can I call you Tomothy? — this raises some very important questions, ones which I'm sure the whole audience would be very keen on getting answers to. Namely, where is the portal to the magical plane that you live in? Answer me, you selfish bastard! I have been assured that there was a phase in the IT world where, upon bringing any project to management, they would say “Why isn't there a mobile app in this project?”. This is because many people are very credulous, especially when they are spending other people's money. However, I still find myself wanting to make the lengthy journey to the pocket dimension that you inhabit, because the hype I've seen around AI is like, fucking _next level_ , and I want out. We are at Amway-Megachurch-Cult levels of hype. The last time I attended a conference, the room was full of non-technicians paying lip service to the Holy Trinity Of Things They Can't Possibly Understand — blockchain, quantum, AI. Executives and directors from around the world have called me to say that they _can't fund any projects_ if they don't pretend there is AI in them. Non-profits have asked me if we could pretend to do AI because it's the only way to fund infrastructure in the developing world. Readers keep emailing me to say that their contracts are getting cancelled because someone smooth-talked their CEO into believing that they don't need developers. I was miraculously allowed onto some mandated “Professional Development For Board Members On AI” panel hosted by the Financial Times5, alongside people like Yahoo's former CDO, and the preparation consisted of being informed repeatedly that the audience has no idea what AI does but is scared they'll be fired or sued if they don't buy it. I wish, oh how I _wish_ that it was like other hype cycles, but presumably not many people were walking around saying that smartphones are going to solve physics and usher in the end of all human labor, real things Sam Altman has said. I _personally_ know people from university whose retirement plan is “AI makes currency obsolete before I turn 40”. I understand that you don't care if that happens — and that is okay, it is irrelevant to how the technology performs for you at work _now_. But given that you can find thousands of people saying these things by glancing literally anywhere, how can you also say the technology is getting the correct amount of attention? This is wild. Tomothy, my _washing machine_ has betrayed me. I turn it on and it says “optimizing with AI” but it never explains what it is optimizing, and then I still have to pick all the settings manually. Please, please, please, let me into your blissful paradise, I'll do _anything_. # V. These Executives Are Grifting Or Incompetent > “Tech execs are mandating LLM adoption. That’s bad strategy. But I get where they’re coming from.” Tomtom — can I call you Tomtom? — _do you_ get where they're coming from? Do you _really_? Re-read what you just wrote and repent for your conciliatory ways. If you, a person I believe is _not_ a tech executive and _is_ bullish on the technology, can identify that this is bad strategy in presumably ten milliseconds of thought, what does that say about the people who are doing this? Where they're coming from is: a ) trying to stoke their share prices via frenzied speculation b ) trying to generate hype so they can IPO and scam some gamblers c ) being fucking morons Sorry, those are the only reasons for engaging in obviously bad strategy. It's so obvious that you didn't bother explaining why it's bad strategy _because you know that we all know_. They have misaligned incentives or do not know what they're doing. This isn't like a grandmaster losing to Magnus Carlsen because they played a subtly incorrect variant of the Sicilian6 thirty-five moves ago. We're talking about supposedly world-class leaders sitting down and going “I always move the horsies first because it's hard to see the L-shapes”. They're either playing a different game, i.e Hyperlight Grifter, or they're behaving like goddamn baboons. This is an _inescapable_ conclusion if you accept that it is obviously bad strategy, which you did. Welcome to the Logic Thunderdome, pal, where two men enter, one man dies, and the other feels that he wasted valuable calories on the murder. _Good_ strategy could perhaps be something like gently suggesting people experiment with LLMs in their workflows, buying a bunch of $100 licenses, and _maybe_ paying for some coaching in the effective usage of these tools if you are somehow able to navigate the ten thousand “thought leaders” that were cybersecurity experts a year ago, and real estate agents before that. Then instruct everyone to shut up and go back to doing their jobs. Whenever someone announces they are going AI first, I am the person that gets the emails from their engineering teams and directors describing what is really happening in-house. I've received emails that are probably admissible as evidence of intent to defraud investors. You have not accurately perceived where these people are coming from, because they are coming from the ever-lengthening queue outside the gates of Hell. # VI. Killing Strawmen > Do you like fine Japanese woodworking? All hand tools and sashimono joinery? Me too. Do it on your own time. Tomahawk Missile – can I call you Tomahawk Missile? – I agree that people are very miscalibrated on GenAI in both directions. Did you know the angriest message I got about my stance on AI is that I was too pro-AI? I also cringe whenever someone says “stochastic parrot” or “this is just pattern-matching and could never be conscious”. We actually have no idea what makes things conscious, and we have very little idea re: how human brains work. It is totally plausible to me that _we_ are stochastic parrots and it simply doesn't feel that way from the inside. I don't talk about those people very much for two reasons. One, even explaining the abstract concept of qualia is like, super hard, let alone talking about the hard problem of consciousness. Some things are best left to professionals and textbooks. Two, while these are silly positions that deserve refutation, they are also _not at all interesting_. That doesn't make it _wrong_ to refute them, but they are also not impactful. The only reason that I think it's worth addressing the other side of the Crazy Pendulum, i.e, my washing machine doing AI, is that they have different effects in the world. And I'm not even talking about environmental impacts or discrete harms caused by AI, I'm talking about the fact it's impossible to talk about anything else. GenAI has sucked the air out of every room, and no one can hear you scream reason in a hard vacuum. The _former_ category of maximalist AI-haters exist on Mastodon, which most executives do not know exists and certainly do not use to guide the allocation of society's funding. The _latter_ category of trembling AI sycophants is literally killing people — I know of a hospital in Australia that is wasting all their time on AI initiatives, which caused them to leave data quality issues unfixed, which caused them to under-report COVID deaths, which caused a premature lifting of masking policies. How many old people go through a major hospital per day? Do the math and riddle me this, Tomahawk: _which one of these groups should I be worried about?_ So, you know, when you hear someone make a totally economically irrelevant argument about _the craft_? Putting aside all the second-order effects in how changing the way you program might change the way you develop as an engineer, let's say that these people aren't thinking of that, and are just being dumb. A person turning up to a CEO and going “no, don't do the cheap thing, pay me to do stuff because of _craftsmanship_ ”. I will concede that you did not _create_ that strawman, because it is a real viewpoint that people hold. But you have certainly walked out of the debate hall, decapitated a scarecrow, and declared victory. # VII. Why The Half-Hearted Defense Of Artists? > “Important caveat: I’m discussing only the implications of LLMs for software development. For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields. I just don’t believe them about mine.” Tomtom — I've decided I like Tomtom — I don't understand why you've ceded authority on these artistic endeavors. LLMs are better for writing than they are for programming!7 It is much harder to complect most forms of written content into such a state that you will cause slowdowns further down the line than it is to screw up a codebase. It basically requires you to write a long-form novel, and even then you will probably not produce an unhandled exception and crash production in a manner that costs millions of dollars. You'll just produce _Wind And Truth_8. If you're inclined to believe people who are skeptical of AI writing, it _probably follows_ that you should also not be so flabbergasted by programmers having doubts. It sounds like this is a sort of not-that-sincerely-felt handwave at vast economic harm being inflicted on a relatively poor (by programmer standards) demographic. And then you go on to say this anyway! > “We imagine artists spending their working hours pushing the limits of expression. But the median artist isn’t producing gallery pieces. They produce on brief: turning out competent illustrations and compositions for magazine covers, museum displays, motion graphics, and game assets.” So are we leaving the arts out of it or not? Should I or should I not just get GenAI to produce all the pictures I need if I am being a greedy capitalist? I'm not talking about morals, I'm talking about _whether it is selfishly rational to use GenAI to make my content more appealing_. _In your own article_ , the art across the top banner was clearly attributed to Annie Ruygt, and it looks totally different, to my eyes, to the AI slop people are sticking on their websites. If it turns out Annie used GenAI for that, then I will be extremely owned. In any case, the artwork on her website is gorgeous, and she describes herself as producing work for Fly.io. Despite this, I am willing to collaborate with you to write some hatemail describing her work as “competent but unworthy of a gallery”, and my consultancy is also happy to tell her that she's fired. And while we’re at it, we'll fire whoever made the hire for gross inefficiency in the age of AI. # VIII. End Wait, can I call you Tommy Gun? ## PS: Obligatory link to About Us page that I forced my team to let me write, to justify doing all _this_ other writing during work hours. * * * 1. But writer-to-writer, I think it's well-written. If it makes you feel better, Thomas, Bjarnason also objects vehemently to my tone and style. However, he still links people to my writing because my points are not slop! ↩ 2. I am famous for my very restrained and calm takes. ↩ 3. Also, I think I've become too sensitive about coming across as anti-AI, because sometimes my team sits around while an LLM wastes tons of our time while I go “no, no, this is really easy, it'll get it”, but I will accept that this is Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. ↩ 4. I do not sip rocket fuel, but I slam Kent Beck's Kool-Aid. ↩ 5. How do board members do their professional diligence on AI before spending billions of dollars on it? They join the call, leave their screens on, and walk away until they get credited for the hours. Maybe we _are_ all the same, deep down. ↩ 6. All my hopes of becoming even a mediocre chess player were dashed when I discovered there is an opening called the _Hyperaccelerated Dragon_ , preventing me from ever wanting to do anything else with any enthusiasm. ↩ 7. This is not quite accurate, but broadly true. On one hand, books don't stop working if you've got clunky prose. On the other hand, if books stopped working when you had clunky prose, then you'd never ship clunky prose, a guarantee that programs can provide for some set of errors. But, broadly speaking, yeah, LLMs churn out adequate — i.e, stuff generally not good enough for me to read — prose without needing a billion agents, special tooling and also have minimal risk of catastrophic failure. ↩ 8. Figured I'd start a feud with Brandon Sanderson while I'm at it. Please note that I'm not saying he used GenAI to write, I'm saying some of the dialogue was horrendous. What were you _thinking_ , buddy? ↩

_Note: This is an edited re-post of something I wrote in 2019 on a now-defunct blog, apparently a month before I started my first job in tech. I need to reference it in a future post. As a result, it is a little bit different stylistically from my current writing. I hope you enjoy it anyway!_ I'm talking about the brain-destroying threat that narratives pose to our thinking today, and we must credit Nicholas Nassim Taleb's _Black Swan_ for introducing me to the concept. It is the single most influential book on my life. I love most things that Taleb writes, but this is a _controversial_ opinion, to say the least. If you don’t know anything about Taleb, oh boy are you in for a treat. Here is a quote about the man to whet the appetite: > I know many of you love this guy, and think he’s a genius. I can assure you, none among you, are as impressed with his intelligence as he is. This guy is just insufferable. I’ve actually never witnessed a marriage of incompetence and confidence so fully and grotesquely consummated in the mind of a person with a public platform. This is the most arrogant person I have ever had the misfortune of meeting. When you meet him you quickly discover that he radiates a sense of grievance from his pores in a way that few people do. It’s kind of like a preternatural force of negative charisma. He is a child in a man’s body. And the mismatch between his estimation of himself and the quality of his utterances is so complete and so mortifying to witness in person that you just find you’re jumping out of your skin. > > — Sam Harris1 # I. Narratives Make Bullshit Sound Unreasonably Compelling Here’s the message from Taleb that I want to discuss: You don’t know that much. You _can’t possibly_ know that much because you’re just a human, and the least you can do is be clueless with your eyes open. A huge number of things are just too complicated to understand, but we are _great_ at convincing ourselves we know what is happening. And one of the main ways we do this is telling stories. A large amount of the book could be summarized2 as: > “Structuring your theory into a story makes it more compelling.” Everyone knows that. You knew that, right? This is the most common piece of trite writing advice doled out to struggling university students, and I still give it out. Write a story. Facts? Haven’t you turned a damn television on in your life? Does it really look like _facts_ are what’s going hot right now? It’s usually _narratives_ that are selling. Is that harmless? It’s just a way of communicating, after all. Of _course_ narratives make details go down a little bit easier. There is a wonderful sense of coherence and closure. The project failed because the market was too immature. The surgery was botched because the surgeon didn’t sleep enough. J.K Rowling succeeded where all those other authors failed because she was so persistent. _Start, middle, end_. Get the _hell_ out of here Taleb, no one needs you. And wipe that smug grin off your face. Those were my exact thoughts the first time I read the _The Black Swan_. I gave it an increasingly irritated read, chucked it ignominiously on a shelf, and told everyone it was garbage printed on trash. Then I spent some time at university and started to notice a few unsettling things. It started in my third year when, on a whim, I picked up _The Black Swan_ again on a flight to my home country for the holidays. Something _clicked_ this time, and instead of sleeping the flight away, I was glued to the book. I stepped off the plane thoroughly sleep-deprived, but with liquid lightning running through my brain. You see, I had just seen a TED talk by psychologist Paul Piff with 3.5 million views, titled “Does money make you mean?”. Here’s a summary (in his words) of the study – this will be on the exam: > “I want you to, for a moment, think about playing a game of Monopoly. Except in this game, that combination of skill, talent and luck that helped earn you success in games, as in life, has been rendered irrelevant, because this game’s been rigged, and you’ve got the upper hand. You’ve got more money, more opportunities to move around the board, and more access to resources. And as you think about that experience, I want you to ask yourself: How might that experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game change the way you think about yourself and regard that other player? > > So, we ran a study on the UC Berkeley campus to look at exactly that question. We brought in more than 100 pairs of strangers into the lab, and with the flip of a coin, randomly assigned one of the two to be a rich player in a rigged game. They got two times as much money; when they passed Go, they collected twice the salary; and they got to roll both dice instead of one, so they got to move around the board a lot more. > > [trendy man talks some more] > > And here’s what I think was really, really interesting: it’s that, at the end of the 15 minutes, we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game. And when the rich players talked about why they had inevitably won in this rigged game of Monopoly … They talked about what they’d done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game.” > > – Local Bad Scientist Wow, stop the presses! We’ve figured out why rich people are awful! How much do seats at a TED talk cost anyway? _Five thousand dollars?_ Paul, please, this isn’t the right venue to flex … wait, are they _applauding_ you? There is something deeply pathological going on here, and it is above my pay grade. It turns out all your personal biases were totally right! Everyone doing better than you is a jerk. It’s so simple! Wealth makes you into a monster. > “What we’ve been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increase. In surveys, we’ve found that it’s actually wealthier individuals who are more likely to moralize greed being good, and that the pursuit of self-interest is favorable and moral.” > “And that is why I am pumping chlorine directly onto the most expensive seats!” > > – Paul Piff, probably. There are plenty of technical reasons to doubt this result, ranging from statistical objections, to simply knowing that a lot of trendy scientific findings are false. But there’s a _much simpler_ red flag. Think about this for a moment, really stop and imagine this – how _stupid_ would you have to be to get double the money in a Monopoly game _and_ get to roll twice as many dice as your opponent, and still think you won because _you kick ass at Monopoly?_ Really, stop and think. If the answer is _unbelievably_ stupid, congratulations! It turns out it actually is unbelievable. If you didn’t get this answer, please see me after class. Gregory Francis, a professor in the U.S, has spent a great deal of time drawing attention to dubious studies, mostly by working over their statistics. He is, to use the modern vernacular, a total dork. However, we forgive and like him here, as he demonstrates with some basic statistical concepts that Piff’s studies are turning up positive findings much more frequently than they should, _even if we assume the effects are real_. He just did the math and said “For a real effect of the size you are reporting, your method for detecting it would fail about half the time. Why are _all_ your results positive?” As an aside, Francis has previously accused authors of running tons of tests and failing to report the non-significant findings. One accused Francis of checking tons of authors and failing to report the innocent ones. The skepticism ouroboros has formed and the epistemology serpent has eaten its own tail. Anyway, in Piff, we have an author in a field that famously has trouble replicating studies, proposing an implausible effect, with strong evidence that something is wrong with the studies coming out of his lab. I have no idea what he did wrong, and it’s entirely possible he has no idea either. I told some of my friends (who are incidentally some of the top psychology graduates in the country now) that _something_ suggests there’s an issue with the study, and asked them what they thought it was. Ah, the problem is clearly that the sample size is too small! Ah, the problem is that Monopoly does not generalize to the real world! Ah, the problem is the sample was too homogeneous! (They just assumed that the university, like all others, were running everything on coerced undergraduates.) Whether or not these critiques are valid, no one said “Come on, that’s just _silly_. People aren’t _that_ obnoxious. I’ve met some morons, but there’s an upper limit.” You see, I have no idea whether money makes people immoral. Hell, it _probably_ does! I’m left-leaning, and I will certainly consider eating the rich if only ironically. But that’s irrelevant right now, and best handled in therapy. No, the real point is that the claims from this study are ridiculous and intelligent people that have been studying for years _can’t pick up on it_. The real point is that I am actually really confused as to how Piff got his results, but at least I’m not tricking myself into thinking I know what’s going on. Did he fudge the numbers? Was the experiment poorly set up? Just pure bad luck in sampling? Hell, is the result true? I don’t know, but I will say that _you don’t know either_. The problem with narratives is that they make everything sound convincing _even if they really shouldn’t_. The problem with this result is _blindingly_ obvious – a twelve year old would object to your victory under this ruleset, and the objection would be sustained. But we stick a little story on here – “The ridiculous result makes sense _**because** …”_ and suddenly it gets past intelligent people. Narratives are indiscriminate. Attach them to _anything_ and they are now more compelling. A useful way of thinking about persuasive techniques is how Scott Alexander frames them as either asymmetric or symmetric. An asymmetric weapon is only helpful if your point is correct – you will get frustrated quickly if you try to use the scientific method to prove that the earth is flat. However, speaking in a clear voice and being very handsome are symmetric. You don’t have to make a lick of sense to benefit from them. Narratives are symmetric. # II. Narratives Are Incredibly Prevalent. We’ve seen that bad results can be hidden in plain sight in the context of psychology by simply slapping a narrative on these. But does this only apply to psychology? I’m going to demonstrate that it happens everywhere. Sorry, psychology-hating fans, we only focused on psychology first because it’s what I know best.3 So there are a huge number of things you can’t possibly understand. Sometimes this is because you don’t have enough time to do a PhD in them. Sometimes it’s because no one understands them, although we mitigate this by slapping a label onto a field and saying we understand what is happening. Brief aside on labels, Taleb frequently deploys words from his vocabulary like flâneur, but once nicknamed a guy he hates ‘Fortune Cookie Shermer’. You can’t make this stuff up. Anyway, there’s the usual stuff about who won the primary debates in the U.S. Ignore the politics right now – I’m picking this example purely because it is recent and clear. After each debate, we get to hear who the ‘winners’ probably are. After the second debate in early August, it was opined that a candidate did really well. I’m not American and have no idea who this is. I don’t care4. But here is what I do care about. > **“Tulsi Gabbard** : The Hawaii congresswoman entered this debate as one of the least-known candidates in the field. **That should change — at least somewhat — after a strong performance**. Gabbard was reasonable but also pointed: She did real damage to Harris on criminal justice reform. She was poised and knowledgeable throughout. And she made the most of the relatively limited talking time she had, using it to talk about her resume — most notably her service in the Iraq War. Overall, a very strong performance.” > > CNN Cool, cool. I wonder how big the change was – Wow! _Literally_ five people changed their minds! It’s almost like nothing you just said matters! People are reading these and thinking they know what’s going on. At the very least, isn’t the journalist heavily implying they know what’s going on, and that the world in this instance makes any sense at all? I didn’t even need to watch the debates. I _knew_ their prediction would have some moronic elements. All I had to do was Google ‘post debate winner’, pick the first article from a major news outlet, then find the first instance where the writer made a testable prediction. It’s like clockwork. With stupid… gears? It was bullshit under a thin veneer of story, is what I’m saying. # III. Extremely Important Interlude Did I mention there is a webcomic about Taleb? Look at it! It's glorious! But also _what the fuck is going on here?_ What are you _saying_ , old man? # IV. Yet while this particular brand of nonsense seems ubiquitous in some circles, it was clear that this didn’t happen nearly as much in other fields. Say, a class on machine learning. Why not? Well, if you make a bad prediction in a machine learning task, you would get an unambiguously poor result, and then you’d be the person that sucks at machine learning. The reason it’s easy to get away with a shoddy narrative other fields is that if you make the story up _after_ the fact, it’ll always fit whatever you just saw. Then to prove you wrong someone would have to get funding, ethics approval, all that jazz. So it’s easy to make up stories, but hard to disprove them. That seems like a pretty good explanation. But as I’m writing this, I wonder, have I not just engaged in the very thing I am rallying against? That's sure a neat story. How do people get away with awful political takes and economic forecasts? You _can_ test those. Why isn’t anyone calling them out? Does no one care? Are they getting called out and I just don’t know where to look? (Note from the future: They are both getting called out _and_ society at large doesn’t care. So uh, fuck us, I guess?) It’s an interesting question. At least the person from CNN above actually made a testable prediction. I just hope that the lesson they took away was “I actually have no idea how any of this works”, rather than the far more common outcome of coming up with a story to explain why they were wrong. In contrast to this, FiveThirtyEight famously produces very accurate predictions. And when they look over the _actual results_ following events, they tend to avoid narratives. They fit some trendlines and test some straightforward hypotheses. And here is FiveThirtyEight’s own head honcho Nate Silver apologizing for how all the stories he was spinning made him totally wrong about the previous Republican primary. There’s nothing to be ashamed of there at all because _at least he admitted it_ instead of making excuses. It happens to everyone, but only a few people can just admit they were clueless. The truth is, people are complicated. The future is opaque. The world is a mess. Or as Taleb loves to quote: > “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” > > — Yogi Berra That is, making _accurate_ predictions is hard if you’re interested in being right, or if you have an outcome you could be punished for. However, coming up with compelling narratives? Super easy. There’s a very famous study about ‘power poses’, again a popular TED talk, it’s _always_ the TED talks. It just so happens that one of the authors has retracted the belief that the effect is real, but the one that gave the TED talk has strongly defended the original work (unconvincingly) and is still raking in the fame. RetractionWatch says that the author is receiving large speaking fees, though following their link I couldn’t find a specific number. Either way, it seems like there’s no real punishment for pushing bad science. And there’s no shortage of these weird papers: > “How many times have you heard the expression – maybe you’ve used it yourself: I’m going to wash my hands of something. I’m going to move on, I’m going to disassociate myself from something, I’m washing my hands of this. And this idea of symbolically washing yourself clean is something you see in religion too, of course, like the ritual of baptism. > > But could there be a little more to the metaphor? Could washing your hands, the act of methodically lathering up with soap and water, have some tangible effect on your thoughts? A study out this week in the journal Science suggests that the answer is yes, that hand washing can actually change your thinking.” Yes, this study did not replicate. But I’d like to draw your attention to something else entirely. What would have happened if the results came out the other way? My guess is that we would have seen an interpretation like: > “We proposed that the act of washing one’s hands reminds participants of uncleanliness. Washing one’s hands in Western culture is heavily associated with negatively valenced acts, such as ‘washing one’s hands of a crime’.” If you can come up with a compelling narrative regardless of your results, it seems like the narratives are actively damaging in almost all cases. But there is some inherent tension here, because it seems like establishing a causal relationship between factors requires a narrative. Things fall when they are dropped _because_ of a force called gravity – so we can’t just stop using all sentences that have the word ‘because’ in them if we want to draw conclusions. Also my grandmother refuses to even listen to me talk about normal distributions, so perhaps that test doesn't work on all points either. All we can do is try to figure out is when it’s appropriate to do so. # V. The Inappropriate Use of Narratives is Enforced in Academic Contexts We have seen that inaccurate results can be hidden in plain sight by appending a short story at the end. But I’ll go even further and say that we are inadvertently training people to think this way, punishing them when they don’t, and _even this process is hidden by narratives._ I mentioned earlier that many of the students I know have a rote list of permitted objections to science. This is actually not really their fault – it’s one of the unspoken rules at university. The main reason I was an _effective_ private tutor is that, not being employed by the university, I was allowed to speak the unspoken rules. I noticed that the university would tell my students (and myself) to _do independent research and write up our conclusions_ but simultaneously tell us what story to tell. And you had better go with that story – or _any_ story. So you get an essay about psychoanalysis, with a little blurb saying that ‘evidence shows it is approximately as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy’, plus a couple of articles laying out a simple narrative. No, no, you don’t _have_ to accept that as true. This is a university, critical thinking is encouraged. But if you don’t, you’ll get marked down and we’ll say your research was weak. What constitutes weak research? Well, you didn’t have enough references (ignoring the fact your peers had far fewer). Oh, you had more references than them? Then you should have elaborated more on fewer articles. Ah, you did both? You've cited too many articles and not included enough of your own thoughts. How could you have known _before_ submitting this what was too much or too little? Oh, we’re out of time, lodge a complaint if you have any further issues. It will be reviewed by someone that has no incentive to disagree with me. I wish more of my students had thought to ask that question. How could you have known _before_ submitting the work? For many students, the answer is that you probably couldn’t. There’s a bunch of randomness in marking, and it depends a ton on how your tutor is feeling (and yes, on the quality of your writing). But not on the actual _facts_ of the matter in many courses. There is typically an _allowed_ narrative, and woe unto those who stray too far from it. Do universities have a sinister agenda to force particular studies down your throat? No, not usually. Does this apply to every unit? No. But it does to most units, most of the time. One of the key pieces of feedback I got on my previous article where I mostly discussed psychology was that every faculty has some version of this problem. See, you do a bit of digging, and hey, it turns out one of those first references given to you wasn’t quite right. But you know that you have to include the starting references to make sure you’re on topic, plus it’s expected of you. And well, you’ll have to cite it if you’re refuting it. If you get this far, you have already fallen victim to one of the classic blunders! The mistake here is that you’ve gone and included something that isn’t a narrative. Sometimes studies aren’t false for compelling narrative reasons. The researchers don’t always make a really interesting mistake, or interpret a fact incorrectly. Sometimes you just recruited too many outliers into your sample. It’s bad luck. Shit happens. If you write “Research thus far has been inconclusive. John & John found a positive effect, but a later study by Bill indicated a negative effect.”, you aren’t getting a high grade. That’s just confusing. Your marker needs _closure_! You would be _far_ better off saying “John & John found a positive effect, suggesting that this therapy has become considerably more effective in light of recent cultural shifts.”. The former demonstrates more research. The latter is a neat story and is easier to read. Don’t complicate things. Just let me read your work and put a big red tick next to it. Do you think your underpaid marker working through their 30th essay actually gives a damn about the total amount of research you did? In fact, do you think they even _know_ why they’re giving you a precise number? Why 81% instead of 80%? Why 80% instead of 79%? At the end of the day, there’s going to be some gut feeling involved, but they’ll come up with some reasons you can’t argue with after the fact. # VI. Another Very Important Interlude Why does this exist? He even talks like Taleb tweets. # VII. In all major Australian psychology courses, students are bell-curved to ensure too many people don’t qualify for Honours. Please find the obligatory horror stories here. When a tutor accidentally assigns too many good grades across the class, they are asked in no uncertain terms to pick someone at random and come up with a reason to take marks away (I have insider information on this point). They do it every semester, and the students have no way of telling whether they’ve been given the shaft. The reasons sound great, whether or not they were concocted after the fact. I once had two students, one of whom _got caught plagiarizing about a quarter of their submission_ , and the other turned in perfectly serviceable work. Same assignment, same semester, same institution. The one that plagiarized scored about 10% higher. If you’re a student, dear reader, this is the system that you’re putting in charge of your self-worth. Don’t make that mistake. It’s just numbers on paper. Higher numbers are helpful, but they aren’t worth getting depressed or anxious over. I have never even heard of someone being asked for their grades outside of a few niche domains like law. Can you see how utterly bizarre this is? The university provides students a narrative about the state of the literature. Students are expected to respond with a narrative, or will be marked down because lacking a narrative simply is less enjoyable reading. The markers will come up with a story to justify the assigned grade, which at some level is a function of how happy they were with lunch that day. At no point is the epistemic and emotional damage that this entire process inflicts upon students addressed. A final, non-psychology example. I have no serious opinions on sociology. I haven’t studied it nearly enough to comment on the field as a whole. However, I did take a _unit_ on sociology that was really tedious, along with some very stupid units in other fields. At the end of it, they asked everyone to write a reflection on what they learned. I think most people have had to sit through this kind of nonsense. But we all _know_ that we have to diligently write down all the trite ways in which the unit _radically transformed_ our views on life. And that’s really the key. You can get a good grade by saying the unit was amazing in beautiful prose. You can get a lower grade by saying the unit was amazing with less beautiful prose. You can get a bad grade if you complain that the unit wasn’t that good. If you say that everything in the unit was just post-hoc rationalizations that don’t really explain anything? That’s not even playing the game poorly. That’s flipping the table over, and you’re going to get sent packing with a failing grade. It might sound fun to point out that the emperor has no clothes, but do you know the thing about emperors? _They can decide to hang you and no one will stop them._ But if you play along? Of course, your highness, robes of the finest silk. Anyone can see that.5 # VIII. I think I've gotten the gist of what I wanted to say about narratives across, but I wanted to conclude by urging people to give _The Black Swan_ a go. Many people will bounce off it, but there is a lot of deeply useful life philosophy in there. Lots of people have problems with Taleb, but honestly very few of them bother me at all. He was the first person that got me seriously interested in statistics, and insofar as I have ever been effective, it has been because _The Black Swan_ managed to convey its message in a way that made it feel relevant to my life. I view everything through the lens he gave me – and it has some downsides, which maybe I’ll cover some other time, but it has no doubt been a huge positive impact on my life. With that, I believe I’ve said what I wanted to say about Taleb. He is possibly a terrible person, or a great person, or a genius, or an idiot. He wouldn't care what I think because I like his biggest idea and he’s rich. But I feel like I should leave on a more appropriate note. Hm. Perhaps an anecdote about – No. Ah. Of course. _Perfection_. ### PS: My teammates have done a bit of writing on imposter syndrome here and about low expectations in tech projects here. I'm also trying out Unoffice Hours, where anyone can book time with me. * If you're a student or in the first year of your career, I'll talk to you about anything at this link. * If you're just a reader that wants to chat about whatever, you can grab me at this link. * If you want to chat and might buy consulting one day, you can use this link, which is exactly the same as the previous link but with more availability. It's just a social call, so it's honour system rules on not using it to sneak extra time from my calendar. * If you live in Melbourne, this final link straight-up arranges an in-person meeting at a nice coffee place. * * * 1. Many readers will have to decide whether an insult from Sam Harris is a good or a bad thing. ↩ 2. You _shouldn't_ be happy with the summary of a book because we don't have the minds of fucking eight year olds, but I must be expedient instead of reprinting the whole thing. By the way, did you know there is what appears to be a thriving business in book summaries for leaders? Explains a lot! ↩ 3. I've now worked in a bunch more places and can confirm that tech is also bullshit-driven! By the way, I need a static webpage with an enquiry form, can someone recommend a React developer? ↩ 4. Mein Gott, do you all remember not caring what's happening in America? Fuck, how I long for those sweet summer days. ↩ 5. In other news, local civilization creates globe-spanning, career-limiting industry in screening the population for submitting to arbitrary authority, is shocked when population submits to cryptofascist authority. ↩