Challenging fate with goodwill (and a holiday sale)

Over the 2025 holiday season, the ebook editions of The Intelligence Illusion: Why generative models are bad for business and Out of the Software Crisis: Systems-thinking for software projects will be on sale for only €25 EUR (a €10 EUR discount).

Buy The Intelligence Illusion: Why generative models are bad for business for €35 €25 EUR

Buy Out of the Software Crisis: Systems-thinking for software projects for €35 €25 EUR

When I post on social media, regret isn’t that unusual an emotion. Most of the time it’s momentary and near-immediate. I regret my poor impulse control. Or, I worry about a silly statement getting reposted into a strange audience that might take it too seriously. Sometimes my anger gets the better of me.

Sometimes I’m not angry enough in the post, and people foolishly mistake patience for approval.

Very, very occasionally that regret hits you, months later. Something poorly thought-out gets noticed and you have to go and post something like: “yeah, that was super dumb, I’m sorry. Won’t do that again.”

But for the first time I’ve had a social media post simmer into regret – like a pot of aromatic ingredients that first cooks into a tasty stew but later stews into something outright bilious. Vile, even.

Not because of what I wrote or the sentiment I expressed, but because it would become a reminder of something I’d lost.

It was originally a note of joy, of a habit that helps you see a larger world. Something fun.

I’ll let you in on a secret: I love sporadically updated weblogs. I subscribe to over 1200 feeds and most of them are sporadic or even technically “inactive”. Months often pass between updates

It means that every post published was important to the writer

Back in the days of snail mail, letters that began with “It’s been a while since I last wrote to you” were the ones people cherished the most

You don’t need to post every day or even every week to have a blog that matters

Following a large number of sporadically updated blogs – my “it’s been a while since” reads – is a habit I’ve had since the very first days of RSS. I’ve exported and imported the OPML of the feeds I follow for over two decades, collecting an ad hoc community of strangers to read.

Very, very few of them post daily. A few are weekly or monthly. Most of them only publish a few times a year. Every now and then a blog blips back into existence after years of silence for a single blog post.

Going through my feed reader and picking out things to read has been my morning routine since my PhD days, over twenty years ago.

That routine today is during my morning coffee, but for the longest time it was the moment I had my strong lapsang souchong tea, no milk, no sugar, and the two are so strongly associated in my mind that I can smell the smoky aroma of the tea when I’m reading my feeds.

But the smell has been fading.

The feeds have always skewed tech. People in publishing and comics fell out of the blog habit early on. Most of those who have the patience to keep a weblog for years even if they update it only a few times tend to work in tech. Many of them are programmers of varying stripes.

A lot of web developers.

It first began with a few inactive blogs that surged to life again.

This happens regularly when a domain lapses and gets taken over by spammers. All of a sudden a stale tech blog begins to post about online gambling sites or affiliate marketing. Or, starts to publish dozens of posts in Chinese every day.

It happens. You unsubscribe and move on.

But these were clearly the same blog, same blogger, just more active.

And more bland.

Suddenly they were fond of “AI”.

Like mold on a damp wall, “AI” boosterism has spread one by one throughout my “it’s been a while” reads.

They don’t all start spewing slop. Some stay the same in tone and style, except the topic is now all “AI is great” all the time.

Gone is any hint of talk about design, problem-solving, making, or creating. It’s all about how to shunt things off onto the “robot”.

Some of them have to use it at work and are just making the most of it, but even those end up recruited into tech’s latest glorious vision of the future.

Reading my feeds used to make me feel like I was a part of a community. It was a counterweight to the big corporate, “dev-rel” slant that filled much of the programming, coding, and software dev web.

“People like me outnumber people like them.”

Not any more.

I’ve been watching my field leave me for something that makes worse software, is ethically compromised at it’s very foundation, environmentally suspect at best, and is an integral part of the right-wing political project to reshape our society.

And many of them seem happy about it.

English has the idiom “to tempt fate”, implying that hubris can tempt or provoke destiny into turning against you.

The Icelandic version is “storka örlögunum” or “to challenge fate”, implying a defiance that challenges the fates directly, practically demanding that they teach you a lesson.

I guess there’s defiance in celebrating a decades old faith in the long tail of the field of software development.

That long tail is still there, just much smaller. Much of it is people writing about wanting to get out of tech – a desire to work in an industry that isn’t actively trying to destroy society. A few continue to write about solid work and practices, but they are the exceptions now. A few in publishing, comics, and the like have been returning to blogging. They call it a “newsletter”, but it has reverse-chronological archives and an RSS feed, which means it’s just a genre of blog.

It’s not all bad, but the fount of unpredictable joy that was seeing a random dev in the middle of the US suddenly write a blog post about some esoteric database problem is all but gone.

I feel a bit abandoned and it’s genuinely difficult to try and maintain some positivity about the industry at the moment, even as other fields seem to be drawing together in opposition to the tech takeover of their industries.

I don’t know how long this bubble will last, or if any of them will return from the “AI” weeds after it pops, but I do know that it’s taken much of the fun out of opening my feed reader, getting momentarily reminded of the smoky smell of lapsang souchong, and swiping through a series of oddball blog posts about curiosities and edge cases.

I don’t know what will happen, how this will evolve, but I am disappointed.

For the first time in years I’m thinking of truly cleaning house and weeding my feed list of the ad hoc tech community of strangers that used to dominate it.

Again, just a reminder that for the 2025 holiday season, the ebook editions of The Intelligence Illusion: Why generative models are bad for business and Out of the Software Crisis: Systems-thinking for software projects will be on sale for only €25 EUR (a €10 EUR discount).

Buy The Intelligence Illusion: Why generative models are bad for business for €35 €25 EUR

Buy Out of the Software Crisis: Systems-thinking for software projects for €35 €25 EUR