My sister-in-law sung a song in Spanish and I said, I’d love to sing a song in my native tongue but if humans heard it, their heads would explode.
May 2025
On this week’s Hard Fork there were two talking points about AI that I think are being talked about the wrong way.
At one point, someone says that in the future most of our friends will be AI because AI will listen to you better than any human friend does. Later on, they’re talking about ways for Claude to subtly report on a child’s chatbot conversations topics back to the parents, like, “your daughter has been looking into eating disorder stuff” or something.
What baffles me about this is that no one is asking the real question: Why are human beings so shitty to each other that we’d rather talk to AI than to real humans? Why are human parents so shitty that their children would rather talk to AI than have a real and close relationship with their parents? Why is it that, when faced with an AI that shows how flawed humans are and how bad they are at interpersonal relationships, do we see it as a problem with AI and not a problem with humans that we could solve if we really wanted to do so?
Instead of forcing rote memorization on children for a decade or more of their life under the guise of education, maybe we should consider teaching them interpersonal skills, and not the kind that is being taught in schools currently. We’re releasing people into the world who have no real idea how to live with other people, no idea how to talk to other people, and a deep revulsion to any sort of sincerity or vulnerability. AI is giving us an opportunity to reflect on this and instead we’re talking about how potentially dangerous it is.
Part of a series of questions that should never be asked…
“The fedora, that’s meant to be ironic, right?”
Earlier this evening, well, yesterday now, I had a role in the first degree initiation of a brother at the lodge. Being a Freemason is a very strange experience, someday I will write more about it, but for now I’ll leave it at that.
This post is really funny. This company has spent years saying web browsers are the most important thing in the world to try to sell people on an alternative web browser. Now they’re claiming loudly that, after failing to sell a web browser profitably, that web browsers are going away and they’re pivoting to building out a ChatGPT wrapper. All the while fluffing it up with the same kind of nonsense they’ve spent years churning out for their browser product.
Let me be even more clear: traditional browsers, as we know them, will die. Much in the same way that search engines and IDEs are being reimagined.
Yes, I’m going to believe that the person who is admitting that their last great revolutionary business idea (a web browser) was actually not great or revolutionary, is actually a soothsayer and is now accurately predicting that one of the, if not the, bedrock technologies that has been the primary client interface for the internet for decades, is going to die.
I’m pretty sure the web browser will outlast “The Browser Company”.
Memorial Day techno stream on the SeqTrak
My waifu now has her own Postalgic blog! How cool!
At lunch with my mom, she said it was sad that Norm from Cheers died. I said, yeah well, he was pretty old. She said, we were the same age. I said, well in that case: he was so young, he taken before his time!
My friend started a Postalgic blog. His looks a little jaundiced at the moment.
Postalgic, the app I am using to write and show this post to you right now, is now in beta. It’s a bit rough in parts of the UX but overall it is essentially feature complete.
More SeqTrak live noodling from two nights ago, forgot to post it.
Way back in 2004 when I first owned this domain, my friend at the time drew this picture of me wearing my blue Polyphonic Spree robe and I turned it into a wallpaper people could download (why would someone want this, I do not know). Anyway, since I’m a digital packrat, I still have it. Here’s to 21 (abbreviated) years of I Have Been Floated.
I’m at a McDonald’s in Tustin and everything here tastes different than my local Irvine McDonald’s. Like, literally everything. The orange juice, hash browns, eggs… maybe not the biscuit so much. Either way, weird!
Another music stream. This one went better so I saved it.
Andie was going to buy a rage against the machine shirt. But then I asked her to name any rage against the machine song. She put the shirt back.
This Reddit post on the /r/accelerate subreddit has me convinced my post from last night was me still being a step behind on how far ahead I am thinking in regard to the true impact of AI technology, if it really takes off.
I’m just going to quote it here entirely.
Why does half this sub sound like scared Boomers LARPing as accelerationists?
One of the top posts of the week on this sub—TOP POSTS—is literally titled:
"What's the actual future for coders?"
Are you fucking kidding me?
What part of "e/acc" do you not understand? You're not an accelerationist. You're a nervous office drone with a Discord addiction and a fetish for sounding edgy while desperately praying this thing doesn't eat your job too fast. You're not asking in good faith. You're LARPing. You're doomposting with extra steps.
I don't know if it's cowardice or just midwit brain fog, but there's this creeping vibe in this sub—and all over so-called e/acc Twitter—where people are using accelerationist aesthetics to soft-launch their real question, which is:
"I'm not a doomer, but like… are we doomed? :pleading_face:"
Get the fuck out of here.
Acceleration means annihilation. It means extinction of the known. It means goodbye coders, goodbye managers, goodbye legacy institutions, goodbye biology. You're not supposed to be asking "What's the job market gonna look like?" That's what you ask your underpaid bootcamp mentor on Career Day. That's what you ask when you still think this is about GPT-4 plugins and resume tweaks.
This isn't a TED Talk. This isn't Hacker News. This is accelerationism—the full detonation of human structure. Not some polite phase shift. Not some "skills gap" or "upskilling challenge." We're not optimizing you, we're vaporizing you.
So no, the "actual" future for coders isn't some cozy AGI-collab co-pilot UBI utopia. The "actual" future is that coding doesn't exist. Jobs don't exist. You don't exist. There is no scarcity. There is no mortality. There is no fucking LinkedIn career arc. There is light. There is void. There is speed.
If you don't love that, if you're not screaming into the singularity like a starchild with a deathwish and a rocketship, then you're not e/acc. You're just another midwit in fake glasses doomscrolling job loss stats with a biomechanical skin suit on.
Take it off. Or log out. And Yeah. I DID write this with ChatGPT, as EVERYTHING should be written with.
I tried to do another music stream and I guess I was overthinking it because it totally sucked ass. I was trying to use the software for the SeqTrak to help make sure I picked good sounds and it just never worked out very well. One of my friends tuned in, too, so there was an element of pressure. Basically, I crumbled. Terrible. Embarrassing. I unpublished the stream on Twitch in my shame.
the future of software engineering work...
"brad, we assigned you four AI agents two weeks ago and we're showing that you are only utilizing them up to 80% of their capacity. your coworker ben is able to orchestrate four agents to a 95% utilization level. why do you think you're having a hard time managing four agents? you were keeping 3 agents at 100% utilization pretty consistently, we thought you were up to this challenge. you will receive one less bean in your weekly protein distribution."
In most of my time at my current job, I’ve had a work friend in Slack who I’ve been chatting with most of the work day. At first it was a fellow engineer on another team, then it became the designer on our team, and after he left, it was the new designer who replaced him. Well, that designer left the company and now I’ve got no one to chat with. I dunno why it took me about two weeks to realize this, but it’s interesting. I actually do not have a friend to talk to throughout the day, and I’ve usually had one in my life, not even related to work specifically. It’s probably for the best…
I actually came here to vent about how hard it is not to get distracted while trying to work. The internet’s call is like a siren’s song, even though most of the usual touchstones are kind of boring now. It never serves me though, it ends up feeling like I have a bunch of competing voices in my head, telling me to care about too many different things at once, and what ultimately happens is that I just sort of lock up and spend too much time contemplating when it would be better to commit to action, to keep moving one foot after another. Contemplation is fine, but it can be accomplished while still making progress.
Anyway, it’s probably for the best to not have an all-day-chat buddy because it’s really just another voice in my head, becoming a distraction, or worse, another competing viewpoint that I can’t filter out fully.
And here I am, procrastinating by writing on my micro-blog, hilarious.
I had some fun today streaming a session noodling around on my SeqTrak. I’m particularly proud of the visualizer setup. It’s several layers in OBS, at the very bottom there is MilkyMilky, a color key’d webcam of the SeqTrak, then Ealain images as an overlay on top of that. Then there’s six different waveform visualizer plugins all layered up for the really reactive elements. I don’t think MilkyMilky is actually responding to the music but it doesn’t matter, there’s enough going on that it looks really cool.
Also every now and then I find a good groove and hang out there. The stuff around the 25-30 minute mark is really good.
One of the essential problems of Mastodon, more so than other social media sites (somehow), is that people seem to expressly go on there to say the dumbest, most embarrassing shit. Like, every time.
I got a Yamaha SeqTrak the other day and it’s really cool. I just got it set up connected to my MPK mini plus and it’s kind of like having a little mini physical Ableton Live setup. Plus I can disconnect the keyboard and just carry it around and play it like an instrument. I was lying in bed earlier today just building out a little groove on it, he says, as if he knows what he’s doing.
An adult I used to look up to and admire when I was a teenager, because he had a popular blog and wrote well and everyone loved him, recently started a Substack where he’s writing again, and it’s really depressing.
It turns out that, in the last two decades in which I wasted one decade and then hustled for the second decade to get to the spot I am in life, this guy… stagnated. He did not progress as a person in any way, his career did not progress, his lifestyle did not progress.
When I joined his Substack he was already a year into unemployment. He’s since written about getting a job that he lost in two weeks, and despite trying to write about it like it was a valuable lesson and wasn’t really his fault deep down, it was clearly his fault.
Today he wrote a post about how his car has been stolen 3 times in the last ten months, by random shady people he’s met. In one case, he suggests he picked a random guy up from the subway station for sex and that random guy stole his car. What? Why, at 50 years old, are you hooking up with random people from subway stations? Why do you have ‘sketchy acquaintances’ in your life at all?
It’s clear to me now, this guy, for various reasons (all mental health and family trauma related) was never able to grow up past his mid-20’s. He’s a perpetually dysfunctional overgrown teenager. I really worry for him, what his life is going to look like as it really starts to fall apart, and I will be along for the ride, reading his Substack.
But I’m not going to pay for his Substack, it would feel to me like I am encouraging this behavior. I should not pay him to regale me with tales of his fucked up life. Plus, it depresses me, I don’t want to throw my money in a hole.
Update on that previous post… last night I gave Claude Code too complicated of a task and then tried valiantly to get it to rescue itself out of a huge mess and ultimately ended up throwing away $30 worth of API costs at the end of it all. I really need to remember that if Claude Code doesn’t get a feature right on the first try, just throw everything out and start over. (By ‘first try’ I mean up to ‘building the feature and one or two bug fix prompts to fix minor issues’.) Any time I push Claude Code hard to fix something it got wrong, it’s just a huge waste of time and money.
I just want to reiterate how much I love Claude Code. Really makes programming so much fun and takes the hardest parts out of it: the indecision; the difficulty of taking that first step. With Claude Code, that first step is just figuring out how to express what I want, then it figures out how to build it roughly, leaving me to dogfood and iterate on it. It’s… great! I dunno how many times I will repeat this, and I’m sorry.
Man, Clair Obscur really wallops you one at the end of Act 1. That’s all I have to say about that.
Laszlo says hello!
Still mainlining Clair Obscur. Game is really pretty, and pretty weird. I’m around level 18 and I’m exploring this sea side rocky area now. I think I’m about 12 hours into it.
Viggo says hello!
Sleigh Bells was great!
At the Sleigh Bells concert with my lodge brother Anthony. Sophie Turner opened and she was pretty wild.
Looking at him, Jesus showed love to him and said to him, “One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” But he was deeply dismayed by these words, and he went away grieving; for he was one who owned much property.
And Jesus, looking around, said to His disciples, “How hard it will be for those who are wealthy to enter the kingdom of God!”
it took years but i think i've finally figured out how to consistently trim my beard in a way that does not fuck it up
I’m supposed to be working on an AI powered search feature at work but man documentation on that stuff is boring as hell… 😴
Uh oh, Blake Lemoine syndrome is spreading like wildfire. That’s not good.
Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.”
Yeah that sounds about right for what would really hook a guy.
AI Wars: How Corporations Hijacked the Anti-AI Movement
This is a fantastic video, definitely a must watch for all of the people who will not watch it because their minds cannot be changed.
The hype got to me and I started playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 tonight. Really strong start. Really cool visuals, unique JRPG-style wacky world with kooky lore. I’m not a big fan of turned based combat but it’s got enough QTE type stuff that it stays lively, hopefully it’s not 80 hours like a normal JRPG though.
Nostalgic Gamers Only: 24/7 Chillwave & Retro Games Combo
This is my go-to work time radio station now, so good. Enjoy!
Movement speed in Oblivion is so fast, no wonder I remember mainly crouching with a bow and arrow through the entire game, it’s the only way to move at a remotely human speed. Maybe it’s because I’m an Argonian?
Anyway, has anyone done any research into what your go-to Oblivion character says about you as a person? Because there’s probably no other game in which I would voluntarily play as a stealth character. I hate stealth gameplay! But I love shooting people in the back of the head with a bow and arrow. I loves it!
I forgot to implement the teeniest, tiniest bit of functionality within a really massive project and it resulted in a customer very nearly getting charged an extra $24,300 erroneously. Whoops! Luckily, they did not get charged, just invoiced, which I was able to void. But, still, what a whopper of a bug that could have been… 😅
What is a cup but a very tall bowl?