pmg101

Appears to be a log of Peter's sneezes. Location, intensity, and a few words about that day.

Absolutely! This whole blog post is horrible.

The guy needs to get outside, touch grass, and go talk to some kids studying the classics.

I mean the answer is clearly yes! People in my family have for sure shared round logins to various things, I guess they think that's ok too

In general I take your point, but in an attempt to steelman OP:

Perhaps they're using "surrender" in its meaning of "hand over something you didn't want to hand over", "give up under duress"?

If you've ever worked with talented, but younger, colleagues, you'll see this. Something about our industry, or maybe the kind of person in it, where individual brilliance seems always to be more prioritised than collective endeavour and progress.

For software or IT folk to be doing this would be indeed worrying (and I bet some are, and I'm worried about them!)

For civilians though... They've been told it's AI, it can do stuff for them. And one thing they do is log in to stuff. I don't think they're stupid. Just that what's obvious to IT folk is simply not at all obvious to the average person. Maybe that's on us not on them?

Some people just don't have enough to do and setting up "quick chats" makes them feel busy.

I have this even on slack. I prefer text because it gives me time to thi k before responding but I think some people just don't have very good reading comprehension. Or writing skills.

So they force everything to "let's set up a chat about this".

This is the old comfort/friction/happiness dichotomy isn't it.

Each incremental reduction in friction and improvement in comfort feels good. But is the net effect happiness? I think it's anomie, in the limit.

Ok but... You aren't planning to get paid to be a software engineer? Or you are? Surely this is the way in which the futures are entwined, for most of us?

What if what we call "white collar work", for the most part sitting at a desk, interacting with a computer, isn't really the sort of work suitable for human flourishing at all?

When you think about it humans were never really well suited to such a lifestyle. Of course the transition may be bumpy but maybe the end point, of machines doing these machine-like tasks, isn't so bad for us.

What work does suit humans? Anything involving interaction with the world or other humans, perhaps.

Now you do it in your time off instead.

I'm an absolute doofus in the physical realm. No hand eye coordination of any kind. No common sense. No social skills or ability to read and understand humans.

In any other era I would have been a useless drain on society and yet I happened by an incredible stroke of luck to be born at a time when the few skills I do have perfectly aligned with a career niche. It's been a good few decades. Now I just go back to being a useless nobody but at least I have my memories and my investments.

Does this advice still hold once 99.99% of people are invested in index funds?

Maybe that's a reasonable definition of white vs blue collar worker?

If you have enough excess income that you can build wealth in assets/investments until you become financially independent and no longer dependent on selling your labour, you're white collar.

If you don't, so you're condemned to work forever (apart from state support), you're blue collar.

Sitting at a desk and pressing buttons: $1

Knowing which buttons to press: $999

To paraphrase an old meme.

If an LLM now knows which buttons to press... the $1 part of my job is not going to pay my bills

It's great. I remember bemoaning how little things had really changed between 2006 and 2016. Given that in theory software is infinitely malleable I found it depressing how it felt like we were just doing the same things. It's exciting we've finally unblocked progress and are finding amazing new ways to work, although I never would have foreseen this being the way! 2026 sure feels nothing like 2016.

Maybe I don't think it's hard because I have a blind spot. That's possible.

It's also possible that I have no blind spot and it isn't hard though.

What even is product management? Just saying what you'd like? That's like equating the person ordering their meal with the person who will create it.

Middlemarch, finally!

I'm 50% of the way through and it's good but I don't entirely see the hype. Brontë is more atmospheric, Austen funnier and more incisive, Dickens more immersive. But I've still got a way to go.

"Sometimes"? I and I think many other people have been doing exactly this for most of 2026, assuming they look at the diff/PR at all and aren't all-in on dark factories.

This is why I find the idea of the fully automated software factory a little questionable.

It is only through writing the code that I know what code to write. I do find it a productivity boost to have an LLM do the donkey work for me but I still need to read the code and think about it to know what to do next.

I personally never wanted "an EV", I just wanted a car that happened to have an electric drivetrain. So Stellantis's choice to present models with a choice of drivetrains suited me perfectly. I'm neither ashamed nor proud to drive electric, it's just a choice I made and it doesn't need to be part of my identity.

Surely one of the great dividends of being at peace is not having to live like you're at war?

I had fun playing around in Claude getting it to write 6502 assembler for the BBC Micro. It is fun to imagine what we could have built on those old machines with these new coding agents! But it is kind of hollow isn't it.

It's extremely refreshing reading good human prose isn't it! It's like when I would read a newly-written Paul Graham essay 20 years ago.

He also uses rule of three and the phrase "load-bearing", just for fun, which elicited a wry smile from me.

Thanks OP for a pleasant start to my day!

AI loves an adverb. Even the title feels AI to me.

It's worse even than that. Although I personally wouldn't pay for a bespoke hand designed piece of furniture I can at least see that it is an artisan piece and understand the rationale.

Software is all shit anyway, it just helps me get a job done. How would artisanal software even distinguish itself. Leave the visual appearance aside. I mean the functionality.

It's perhaps the most pernicious Claudism. Or just the one that gets my goat the most. Saying what something isn't, usually twice, before saying what it is. What a fucking waste of words.

Jared Diamond explores this in his book Collapse.

The core idea being that each time humanity was going to exceed the carrying capacity of its environment, we invented a new technology which increased the headroom. Obviously this ratchet only goes in one direction. The only way to go backwards is collapse.

But... It's worked so far?