I've been in awe at some news I've been reading. Because they have been very powerfully written. It is like reading a good novel - which I no longer do, between reading news, documentation, and writing (which is to say, not reading), I no longer read what I know is fiction. Too bad though - some of the books in my past have been excellent. Take William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, my favorite american sci-fi authors so far. The point is, some news and commentary are so excellently written that I feel jealous, and have an urge to write myself - even as I may or may not be good at it - just to see if anything I output can be remotely good.

Of course, what happens mostly is that I write code, not english. Computer code, ruby code, python code, that sort of thing. And my code has been pretty good - robust, performant. But maybe at this time in my career, I must pivot from writing code to writing english. This is a natural step when going from individual contributor to more managerial roles as well. English is how we communicate with other humans, and comunicating with other humans is arguably more important than giving instructions to computers.

I recently dipped my toes in twitter again - and the front page is all AI. Pretty good AI, too - videos of Trump and Maduro dancing. High-quality stable diffusion video, I can't get such high quality on my hardware, with open-source tools. And of course, the AI has to permit political content: you can't generate a dancing maduro with Midjourney, it won't permit it. It will barely draw a picture of a white person for you, you have to beg it and cajole it. And then there is a video of "everything you need to know" about AI, and "if it's the only video you ever watch" blah blah blah. Two hours long. So I watched a part of it and it's an astroturfed ad for vibestack, a new product which inserts AI into the whole workflow of product development. So it was an elaborate ad.

Still, the fundamental technologies are still there and are old. The linux kernel, the operating system (Ubuntu let's assume), bash, shell, networking, HTML, ffmpeg are still there. Accounting, taxes, budgeting, this is still how the world turns, and someone needs to know and operate this machinery for the turning of the world to continue.

Actually you don't even need AI to feel poorly about yourself. When social networking just came to be, if you remember, in the early days, it still impacted everybody adversely. Everyone still compared their normal lives to the highlight reel of someone else's. That's enough to put you in depression. Without any AI, just having to endure all the women's bottocks shoved at you on insta would make both guys and girls feel miserable.