seanp2k2

It won’t be the first or hundredth society to falter due to the hubris of leaders. At this point it’s just a race to see if AI or climate disaster gets us first, with the former accelerating the latter.

I've been meaning to do some data mining on how much PM2.5 differs with even a few hundred feet of elevation. I have a theory that even around Silicon Valley, living even up a little bit in the foothills would have you breathing massively cleaner air most of your life vs living in the pits of the valley. I see it all the time when I'm out there for recreation or just driving, the smoggy haze all over that just sits in the valley and the Bay. It's probably not too tough of a data processing challenge to compare the stats on Purple Air AQI sensors in reasonably close geo proximity vs elevation to get some statistically-significant data on this.

I've worked in and around datacenters for a few decades now and I've seen pretty much everything fail, but power supplies in particular do so at a higher rate than I expected. I've had one literally start smoking in my home office recently too. Luckily, it didn't damage any components, but it was pretty dramatic and abrupt -- just powered on my desktop and got nothing but a fog machine coming out of the rear fan until I yanked the power cord a few seconds later.

There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets.

I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.

I'm fully anticipating AI hardware demand to dry up once Anthropic and OpenAI start tanking financially in a few years after missing earnings and investors and banks wanting their loans paid back combined with more folks realizing that LLMs cannot achieve AGI. After that, I would hope that the demand that's driving this pricing spike will fall along with it, but I also fully expect hardware companies to be as greedy as possible, so maybe a 32TB HDD will just cost $1000 going forward and the era of "a decent gaming PC made up of the tier of components one step below TOTL costs ~$2000" we've been in since the 1990s is fully over, and it's just going to be more like $5k going forward.

AngularJS aka Angular v1 was the worst thing I've ever worked with in my career, other than all the BigCo apps I've had to touch that were using it.

Macromedia made ActionScript in 1998 and we still somehow haven't standardized on a good solution to this problem across the industry, everyone just adds ever more layers of abstraction.

Is it really this hard to make a decent GUI lib that runs on bare metal with a good-enough API and a mode to drop to drawing, moving, and applying a texture to triangles in 3 axes if that's what you need?

Leave it to PHP oldheads to continue to make dummy simple stuff that works well for decades. It's amusing to watch everyone reinvent everything every decade while the actual responsiveness of the UI that humans must interact with doesn't ever seem to get faster. Now we wait a few seconds for air vents in cars to adjust because it's all done with laggy, bloated software that was poorly-architected even though it has tens of cores and dozens of GHz of CPU and many many FLOPS of GPU behind it.

We need Wayland over Websockets.

Everything old is new again: "The SSE mechanism was first specified by Ian Hickson as part of the "WHATWG Web Applications 1.0" proposal starting in 2004.[3] In September 2006, the Opera web browser implemented the experimental technology in a feature called "Server-Sent Events""

Rob McCool is rolling in his...house. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3875/

This, and it's murky because a good chunk of that used directly by ICE will move over to power generation to power EVs -- it's not as if we're anywhere close to 100% renewable power even just for EVs here.

There's a good EIA graph about halfway down on https://www.weforum.org/stories/climate-action/us-fossil-fue... that breaks it down.

Because it'll get declined after a few attempts once it's past the limit, then your account would likely get marked for fraud. Try it and report back, but repeated method of payment failures get accounts suspended pretty reliably at any place that does CC processing, since it's also a risk to their merchant account to have a higher percentage of declined payments (ie higher fraud risk) and it's far safer for them to cut you off / blacklist you vs giving you more chances and the sure bet that they'll invoke higher merchant account / payment processor fees. If they make it to the "high risk" category, they're cooked too; Mastercard for example has MATCH that once you're added, you're considered high-risk at ANY other place you try to get CC processing going again. You can read a bit more about that here: https://docs.stripe.com/disputes/match Payment processors can fully drop merchants that have too high of a risk / too many chargebacks / too high payment failure percentages.

This. Without a massive cultural shake-up and turnover of upper management, why would expect them to behave any differently when they've been rewarded so heavily for this behavior in the past? Meta is ultimately an advertising and data brokerage company -- they make money selling and leveraging user data and behavior and are "bound" by fiduciary duty.

Honestly, I wish the tech community would do a better job identifying the actual individuals who are making these decisions instead of associating them with the brand they're under at the moment, because it's not THAT many people. Like, if you look at only the 100 tech sector companies included in the $NDXT index, how many individuals hold a VP or above title there, and how difficult would it be to trace key decisions at different times made at different companies to the individuals holding those positions there plus board membership and major shareholder identities (with the caveat of known unknowns here) and make a sort of ethical index and trace that along their careers with company moves, promotions, board appointments, shareholder decisions, etc? Go a step further and link that to financial performance and I'm sure folks at quant firms are already ten steps ahead of where I'm going with this, but I care less about profiting off of this data and more about surfacing it to show that it's people and more specifically, specific individuals driving these decisions.

Maybe they’ll use AI to help build it in record time, then the AI the first one powers will be used to shorten the timeline even further on nth projects /s

Who else right now is making competing models that are roughly as capable? Now factor in hardware availability / future delivery contracts and capital requirements for building datacenters and running new training. If you're trying to compete and lease all that with VC money or loans, good luck actually competing.

>The more AI causes productivity increases, the less and less number of workers will be needed. This will heat up the job market even more and bring salaries down.

>Net effect of this productivity increase: less consumption by the masses, even though you may be producing more good and much more efficiently.

Big tech companies can't even create login flows and account recovery flows that work for everyone yet. There are countless stories of folks losing access to business Instagram accounts that get hacked, Google support from a human to fix a problem that is outside of their help articles is non-existent, etc etc. There's still so much "low-hanging fruit" IMO that isn't particularly fun or exciting to fix, but ask your average non-tech friend or family member what they think of the Facebook + Instagram security settings pages / sites / desktop-only settings.

Who is going to pay for all of these subscriptions that will power this GDP increase when average purchasing power of those outside of the top ~10% of earners is decreasing YoY? We're headed toward food and water shortages next to sprawling datacenters, not shared societal prosperity and a healthy middle class.

And yet the job everyone loves to hate, the humble "burger flipper", continues to resist automation yet command minimum wage labor rates. This future of either being a CEO of a company consisting primarily of AI agents building some monthly subscription-based solution to some trivial digital chores OR manual labor that isn't [yet] fiscally viable to automate seems quite bleak. We'd also need a ton of robot technicians and manufacturing that the US has neither the educational and training institutions to support nor the will of the population to fill. Given the ongoing war on immigration, visas, and foreign-made hardware, if this continues, good luck.

>The bottleneck has moved from producing a thing that works to knowing that the thing was the right thing to build

I would argue that that's been the case for quite some time before AI. As an example, what innovative amazing world-changing products have Google or Meta launched in the past decade with their very high numbers of very talented and highly-compensated engineers? The issue with most big tech companies are leadership, strategy, and product direction. I'm not saying that they don't make any profits, just that they probably aren't "building [the right thing]".

AI for product development and management would be far more impactful than automating rote coding tasks / building React UIs that mirror API structures IMO.

Another term for it is "accountability laundering" https://fortune.com/2026/03/05/mobile-world-congress-account...

It's the norm at Big Tech these days. Directors and VPs take all the glory if it goes well while ICs, team leads, and people managers get all of the blame if it doesn't. When the charlatans get exposed, they bounce on to the next company with their charlatan friends. Rinse and repeat while swapping RSUs for index funds, retire with >$10m before 50. If we stopped allowing this to work in our industry, it wouldn't be such a common thing. Unfortunately, with how everything is these days, these people are getting hired on vibes and bravado.

...or something that runs CGI commands. Bash scripts are like the glue of the internet, and many of them are poorly-written. Tons of stuff still runs on PHP or relies on little Python cron jobs behind the scenes. A lot of the way this stuff works depends on being able to chain vulns together...an unescaped query to a database that gets piped to a nightly cron job to sync or backup something becomes an attack vector.

Depends on what you have access to / what's misconfigured.

They scraped everything on Stackoverflow, likely IRC logs from Freenode, and every book written in the modern era courtesy of Sci-Hub / Library Genesis / Anna's Archive / Z Library.

RIP Aaron Swartz, they're generating trillions in shareholder value from the spiritual successors to the work they were going to imprison you for.

jQuery is still useful too. May you never work in heathcare / government / defense where you need to support legacy browsers far past their expiration date.

You have to be very good at pretending to land director and above roles, though.

Possibly nothing, possibly you'd get blacklisted and they'd share that with other companies in ways in which you'd never know or have any recourse https://fortune.com/2025/03/27/meta-block-list-hiring-employ...

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-block-lists-affect-your-...

https://medium.com/@ossiana.tepfenhart/the-no-hire-list-is-r...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...

As if you would ever be afforded an audience in the first place.

And thanks to a secret interpretation of Section 702 by FISA courts, so can the FBI https://www.cato.org/blog/fisa-reauthorization-fear-mongerin...

https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/think-before-you-post-p...

https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/fbi-can-neither-confir...

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/2/headlines/trump_direc...

https://www.levernews.com/are-you-on-the-fbis-new-watch-list...

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-12-11/justice-de...

You already do and your consent is part of your employment. Check your employee handbook, search for things like "data privacy" and understand how https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf applies in the modern world, especially around AI. TL;DR companies can do whatever they want with your work / observe you and you have no real meaningful recourse.

Most companies just don't have a reason to look through the computer they're letting you use to do your job. Don't give them a reason.

Maximizing shareholder value by observing you doing job in the pursuit of replacing you with a very small shell script is a great reason that they've just discovered.

Get your own laptop, pay for your own cellphone, use your own internet service, etc. If you create anything of value on their property or with their property or during times they're paying you in any capacity, expect them to use it for profit.

>I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.

You don't need to "give" them anything -- they already have everything they need due to basically anything you do, especially at work, especially while using company equipment, being legally considered "works made for hire" https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html + https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf

Here's how a refusal to them doing whatever they think would maximize shareholder value with any of your output or data they collect from your company computer would actually go down: the company would do something you didn't like, you'd try to complain about it, HR would listen and document everything. In the best-possible case, they'd let you personally opt out. More likely, since you're likely very easy to replace in their minds, they'd refer you to their data privacy clauses in their acceptable usage policy section of the employee handbook, maybe reference the notice sent out to everyone about how they're doing this, then fire you for performance reasons a few months later. You'd be given an NDA and a very average severance, then you could choose to try to hire a lawyer (who would take at least a third of any pre-tax settlement amount) and fight them, in which case they'd settle for more or less the same as the severance package (and keep in mind both that and any court settlement are both taxable income, so you're not getting a windfall in any case), or you'd just sign the NDA and take the severance with no admission of wrongdoing on their part and no legal recourse.

Large companies employ entire orgs of lawyers who specialize in these matters, and it is literally their job to protect the company, not the employees, from lawsuits like this. Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course. Welcome to America, land of the free for corporations which are legally people, just ones with infinite lives who cannot be arrested / imprisoned but can make legal decisions but cannot be subpoenaed. See eg https://www.theverge.com/policy/886348/meta-glasses-ice-doxx... for how the C-suite thinks about this type of thing.

Follow eg https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-75-organization... to see what actually happens.

More on how "work for hire" applies in a legal sense:

https://www.brookskushman.com/insights/innovations-at-work-w...

https://outsidegc.com/blog/common-misconceptions-about-the-w...

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/work_made_for_hire

https://crownllp.com/blog/what-is-a-work-for-hire/

But at the moment it’s so exciting to see if we’re headed more for a Waterworld-esque dystopia or something more similar to Neuromancer / The Matrix. I guess it’ll depend on the rates at which the global economy collapses as a result of AI and WW3 vs climate change, exacerbated of course by the inevitable global thermonuclear war.