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Well, I run a product and a service that I make available using a fair amount of tech infrastructure now. I've been building it for a few months and we've been launched for three weeks as of today, even. Given how the tech industry is, that practically makes me an expert! This means that I'm going to take today's article to pontificate a bunch about how I came to entrepreneurship and what I think…
By contrast with this, the obscene Real underpinning the industry and the business world in 2025 isn't the Real of exploitation or of a founding act of violence but rather the Real of illegitimacy. The fundamental truth being disavowed by our leaders is that *there is no reason that they should have any of the money, power or adulation that they do*. The founding acts of robbery, seizure and…
With that in mind, it became fairly clear to me that the tech industry these days has a depth problem: as much as tech is becoming quite a bit more complex, it's also becoming shallower. Learning new things in tech these days, as often as not, simply doesn't give me the same feeling of satisfaction or achievement as learning or writing C back in the first years of my career did. Being effective in…
I suppose that when I got into the industry the good parts of it were already on the way out. Still, there was enough good there to make the effort worthwhile: brilliant writers and teachers, intellectually serious people in considerable numbers, people who treated their professions with real respect, adherents of the interesting kinds of mysticism and esoteric religion, philosophers, poets. The…
I think the worst failure mode I've ever seen is one team that maintained a "git repository" for a collection of analysis scripts that was simply a directory on a shared drive. It was technically speaking initiated as a git repository, but practically speaking it wasn't used as one: rather, the directory contained zipped copies of the code timestamped with when they were modified. There were very…
You can feel the weariness at any tech meetup you go to these days. People put a brave face on and try to pretend that they're still excited about tech, still innovating, still trying stuff... but the room feels tired more than anything. There are no new ideas in evidence, just half a hundred variants of the same conversation of how people are using AI to do... something. Even the current vogue of…
I answer reader questions: this week we have discuss how to teach people non-intuitive concepts, avoiding mediocrity, how I feel about writing fiction and the pervasive sense a lot of us have that we don't belong in the industry.
In our society, elite competition happens largely on the fields of LinkedIn. If you're a well-educated and well-to-do member of our societies who wants to compete for prestigious white-collar jobs (and most of my readers likely fall into that class, even if we sit on the margins of it: however poor and financially strained we are, it remains fundamentally impossible to actually de-educate a…
The competent LLM-using engineer will, in general, find themselves treated by management as though they're exactly as bad as the people who refuse to use LLMs at all. The engineers who push out pull request after pull request and line upon line of code without any thought given to maintainability, codebase conventions or such trifles as *whether the fucking thing works at all* are lauded, while…
The average quality of documentation available for most tech is abysmal. It's often incomplete, poorly-organised (which is to say that it's organised in ways that don't correspond to how it's likely to be used), leaves out vital information or is just plain unreadable. Even much of the documentation that makes sense in hindsight is often more or less incomprehensible in foresight until you see an…
All this is to say that I think that perhaps we were lying to ourselves when we worried about AI and its social impacts, not because we said that the technology is bad and has negative consequences (it does), but because of what we told ourselves: we criticise the technology because it's an affront to human dignity and creativity and damages our ability to create art, write or otherwise be human.
Post removed as I wrote it in a situation of complete, abject burnout
Looking at my peers, this seems like a consistent pattern: the people who get the best engineering results out of coding agents are not only *not* the boosters, they're the people who think the whole enterprise is dubious and that basically everyone who manufactures these tools is deeply morally compromised. This is a downright *weird* phenomenon: while a similar thing has happened with other…
LIMy 2025 article An essay on wank proved to be startlingly widely read. It made its way around a large part of the internet, sparked quite a lot of discussion and still garners quite a few readers, even now. It was, to my mind, not too bad an article, but as is quite often the case with the first inceptions of an idea, a bit scattershot and often not very tight argumentatively. What this is to…
In this article, I tackle the single biggest factor, to my mind, that's hampering the development of a strong tech and startup industry in this country: the absolutely execrable state of our housing market.
In this article, then, I'll discuss five misconceptions that people commonly hold about trans people, with a tilt towards workforce interactions. In each section, I give a brief explainer of the misconception and why it's wrong, and then give some points for what you, as a well-meaning cis person (or a trans person privileged enough to have dodged most of this shit: they're few and far between,…
That, in short, is how friction works in war: things start out organised, prepared and informed. Then the bullets start flying, and little by little, things go wrong and start to break apart. Co-ordination breaks down, people get tired and demoralised, and eventually what started out as a well-oiled, effective machine that was more than capable of achieving objectives ends up as a tired, worn-out…
There's a malaise in the air, in the tech industry and on LinkedIn (well, there's always a malaise on LinkedIn, but this is a new variety). People of all stripes are constantly restless, constantly busy but unable to dedicate themselves to any real, substantive work. We watch the hours on the clock pass by, thinking that they're going too slowly, scrolling social media or news and waiting for the…
In dark times such as these, those of us who wish to see a better, more just world speak a lot of hope. The word in English, however, is badly overloaded: we mean a lot of different things when we say "hope". We can hope that it's sunny outside, hope that our business venture succeeds, hope that we recover from a serious illness or home that the world that we live in is fundamentally good or for…
The tech industry has extreme difficulty integrating information that doesn't have its source in an overtly rationalist process. In practice, this means that we tend to think that if you can't give a logical chain of deductions that proves that something is the case, your information is worthless. The issue with this is that day-to-day, in the tech world and outside of it, the vast bulk of the…
Finally, it's a monumental waste of potential: some of the finest minds of this generation are stuck writing open-source Rust tools because nobody's willing to employ them, and while the tools are very useful, I think we'd all benefit from having them work on larger and more ambitious projects in some of the many fields that we badly need to work on.
And now the punchline: this depersonalisation, the weird relationship to their bodily existence, inability to enjoy things and an internal void that people constantly try and fill with what they're told they should want... all of these things are very similar to the experience of gender dysphoria.
I've written my thoughts on what you, as a software professional, can do to make yourself less susceptible to being displaced by AI in our current wave of tech madness. In short, learn your tools well, build and deploy things as often as you can, don't avoid the unfashionable work and learn a field that isn't writing software.
Which raises the question: what if the people on the other side of the divide aren't more trusting, less curious, less experienced or otherwise less suited or less capable of making use of the tools? What if they're simply humanities people? Or worse, mechanical engineers?
In today's article, I write a summary of my experiences working with an LLM coding assistant for a week. Surprisingly, it's less negative than the article I expected to write. Unsurprisingly, it is still very, very negative and comes to the conclusion that LLM agents probably shouldn't be used for anything
rv is a new declarative command-line package manager for the R programming language written in Rust. Being declarative, I've found it to be far-and-away better at dependency resolution than any of the other package managers on the market, and being a command line tool rather than a tool to be called from inside an interactive R session makes it work much more agreeably with standard development…
In the last two chapters of this book we've gone through the basics of setting up a development container, building a package and writing some functions that perform basic mathematical tasks. What we've written, however, is all pretty trivial. Now, while teaching how to properly work with a truly large codebase is something that would take a book to teach in itself, we can certainly build…
As much as most of this year has been quite regrettable, my writing has been pretty successful. My main gripe going into 2025 was that my writing lacked unity and that I didn't really have a clear voice, and while I still write about quite a wide range of topics I think I'm starting to develop the outlines of a voice and a general thrust for my writing. The fact that my blog currently features…
All of these species of people, despite their wildly diverging politics, have one thing in common: they trigger the "my God, you're saying this again? You're full of shit" response. It's not that they're boring (though they absolutely are), that they won't listen to any external input (though they won't) or that they lack any level of political imagination (though they very much lack that). It's…
This chapter then aims to cover two important programming concept that software engineers use all the time but that statisticians tend not to use so much: functions and control flow. We'll cover what a function in R actually is and how it works, what good functions look like, and discuss conditionals, for loops and while loops. In the process, we'll also discuss why we organise our code as…
It is worth noting from the very beginning that a software engineer's work doesn't start with writing code, but with setting up the development environment and the tools that they need to write code effectively. Good tooling can make the difference between you writing clean, tight, maintainable code on the one hand and creating an unmaintainable abomination on the other. This entire first chapter,…
The thing is, projects don't usually fail like that: I'd be hard-pressed to think of any projects where the strategic underpinnings of the project are sound, the supporting logistics and suchlike behind the company work as expected and the project simply fails because despite all this being in place, the software engineers assigned to the project just aren't good enough. What usually sinks…
Clausewitz (and I don't think Jomini particularly disagrees with him on this point) stresses understanding the capabilities of various units and weapons systems. What this means is that while you don't need to know how a cannon was made, how to ride a horse or the fine details of sabre drill, you need to understand what a cavalry squadron can and can't do like the back of your hand. You need to…
Despite what an awful lot of us like to think, social capability isn't a monolith: there is no one body of skills, knowledge and innate traits that makes you "good at social stuff": rather, there's a whole blob of different things, some innate, some learned formally, some trained and some that you just learn with bitter experience, none of which are universally applicable and all of which can be…
This raises so many questions. Does Bluesky have a communications team (apparently not)? Why do so many of the Bluesky staff treat their (very queer, very trans, very liberal) userbase with open contempt? Why are they so attached to having bigots on their platform? And does this perhaps indicate that a fair part of the Bluesky staff have fascist sympathies (unclear, but we would do well to assume…
This captures well the uncomfortable, slightly disorienting feeling that wank creates when you're subjected to it, wherein you're expected to speak about and think about the statement as though it says what it facially does, but also not push too hard or at all, because challenging the factuality or other face-value elements of the statement is a personal attack on the person saying it and their…
A household can be resilient for a while. We, being clever and capable, have been able to be resilient and keep trying to improve our situation for a very long while. But there are only so many reserves that we can have, and once you've exhausted enough of them, you start damaging your ability to be human trying to keep everything together and barely surviving. I'm starting to feel the damage, and…
It's fair to say that the tech industry at the moment is not in a good place. Software engineers tend to be detached, demotivated and unwilling to care much about the work they're doing beyond their paycheck. Code quality is poor on the whole, made worse by the current spate of vibe coding and whatever other febrile ideas come out of Sam Altman's brain. Much of the software that we write is either…
The rockets, the bigotry, the LLMs, the AI cults, all of this... in the end, it all comes down to death. The billionaires want death, all while outwardly expressing an extreme fear of it. What they fear, though they cannot admit it, even to themselves, is that they die while the rest of us keep living. They're so solipsistic in their outlook that they cannot countenance a world without them in it,…
When the first and most important skill for survival in a society is persuading some very wealthy, very stupid people, it completely fucks the whole incentive structure of the global economy. Certainly, it starts off fine: you just have to tune your communications to the people you're targeting a bit more, pander a little more, be a little more corporate. But that, of course, has a reinforcing…
In short, there are three major avenues of opposition to the tech industry: the vulgar, the horny and the threatening, mapping to attacks on the tech industry's luminaries from below, horizontally and from above. These are, the three cardinal virtues of resistance to the tech industry's evil and stupidity, and they're what I aim to examine here today.
The common ideological kernel of all of this behaviour is a deeply embedded trope in anglosphere societies: a contempt for materiality, or the idea that the material world that we eat, sleep, drink, fuck and die in is somehow beneath the notice or the care of sufficiently important people.
The last article I published was by far the most popular one I have written so far. It hass been shared far and wide, and we are currently creeping up on almost ten thousand hits, which are still niche blog numbers, but also not nothing. It was in fact so popular that I encountered performance issues, and while previously that might be something I could have ignored, the level of readership I am…
The only reason that LLMs took root in the first place was because our societies in the anglosphere have already developed cultures solely devoted to gaining status and keeping up the appearance of doing things rather than actually doing them. All other values, increasingly including even the accumulation of wealth (while this is still very much a thing that people pursue, wealth is increasingly…
And of course, in the end, LLMs are themselves an example of this: something new, shiny and capable, but nonetheless something that doesn't fit into systems or meet real needs. They're a beautifully forged sword that was presented to a society that didn't need swords, and is now being jammed into random pieces of machinery because after all "it's an important part and if we don't use them in our…
Well, a large part of it is CV-driven development, I'll not lie: I need to write thought leadership pieces demonstrating my skill with all aspects of technology and especially infrastructure and DevOps, and these days, that means you have to understand containers. As I've discovered in the course of this, container technology is *really good* for developer experience and makes a lot of tasks so…
Which raises the question: given these struggles and the precarious position I exist in, why did I think this was the best use of my time? And why do so many trans women in similar positions also think so? Why, in short, do we keep learning how to do stuff with tech at a high level even when it doesn't seem economically valuable or worth it?
Given that this is the case, erstwhile critics of DEI policies from a broadly leftish perspective need a new synthesis for how to talk about DEI practices that captures the good things they were doing. What were they doing right that means that we're now missing the existence of a lot of these programs? Why did the whole thing fall apart so dramatically given that it was doing useful stuff? And…
The fact, however, is that for a lot of us who've mastered something hard, this kind of experience of bringing unconscious knowledge consciously into the forefront of one's mind by *having it pointed out to you* by a teacher whom you trust is absolutely a thing that happens: often quite a lot.
My life, at least inasmuch as I've tried to live it this way, has been an exercise in acting "as if." I act as if hiring processes and the way in which people decide whom to do business with aren't deeply, deeply bigoted and transphobic. I act as if I can write what I like on my personal blog without it negatively affecting my employment prospects in many places. I act as though people care about…