Recent content on Musings of an IT Fossil
We have all seen them 
Wearing their red hats 
We hear them mewling 
Like a pack of rabid cats 
 They hate the non-whites 
But claim they aren’t racists 
They are proud to follow Christ 
But aren’t as moral as atheists 
 They want to get rid of pedos 
Until they hear Trump is one 
They are banning abortions 
But once born you are done 
…
Well as it so happens this week I was alerted to a semi-terrifying development at work. It seems the moronic executives have been pushing very hard for upper and mid management to furnish them with a complete list of employees who are “under-utilizing” AI related tools. Now of course given that they are mostly snake like demons who deal in the vaguest terms possible, I don’t have…
What follows is an email I wrote to a former boss of mine, who happens to be the owner of the business. They have always been a bit crazy, a bit greedy and have always fostered dysfunctional relationships with people. But after hearing about how hard they are going into AI from one of my former co-workers, I decided to drop them a line and speak my piece on this. I don’t believe this will…
It’s been a rough few weeks at work. This is largely because I’m feeling depressed. One of the reasons for that is that I’ve been feeling increasingly disconnected from the profession of Software Engineering. Yesterday in a meeting a co-worker, some hipster UX designer, decided to toss some nitro into the mix fueling my depression engine by making a cute little comment after I…
So a few weeks back, I was helping to administer a live coding interview with two of my peers at work. This happens more frequently than I’d like. I hate interviewing and I hate being interviewed. What makes this incident notable is that one of my peers decided to spend half of our alloted 90 minutes doing Q&A with the candidate rather than spend most of the time going through the live…
So 2026 is proving to be quite the fucking year, is it not? We aren’t even two months in and I can’t help but to marvel at the new level of chaos of and insanity that is apparently becoming our new normal. So those of you who follow along with the blog, probably aren’t surprised by the lack of output given what I had to say about my vision for this year in my New Years Day post.
So for those of you following along you probably noticed that I didn’t post anything here last month. There are a lot of reasons for this, but ultimately the biggest one is that I wanted to take a break from writing ITF content. Why? Well as it turns out I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last month and I’ve started to make just a little progress towards figuring out what…
The handful of you who know me personally, probably know that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. To me it is the last vestige of celebration rooted around being reflective and ultimately being thankful for everything that we do have. This year though it is really hard to find things to be thankful for. The world seems like it is coming apart at the seams. In particular the tech world…
So it’s mid-afternoon on a annoyingly warm November day and here I am sitting here in my home office staring at a nice glass of Irish Whiskey. I didn’t take today off. I’ve just decided that I’ve had enough of the bullshit for one day. That’s where the whiskey comes in. 
 Of course this week had to be the week that I committed to taking a THC tolerance break.…
So unless you were clinically dead on Monday October 20th, 2025 then you noticed the same thing everybody else noticed: A ton of tech shit wasn’t working. So what happened? AWS (aka Amazon Web Services) had their most important data center region, US-EAST-1 go down hard due to a misconfiguration. It took hours for them to fix this. As if that wasn’t staggeringly incompetent enough, it…
So its a lazy Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting here in my recliner, a bit stoned, and I have finally decided to write the post that I’ve been dancing around on this blog for awhile now. It won’t be as angry because I’m writing while listening to the Simon and Garfunkel “The Concert in Central Park” LP I picked up while out of town last month. You can’t…
Original Song with the Original Lyrics 
 Far 
We’ve been marched far 
Exiled from a home 
Which turned bizarre 
 Free 
We used to be free 
We huddle close 
Mourning our dead dream 
 On the boats and on the planes 
Deported from America 
Never coming back again 
Deported from America 
 Love, don’t it seem so far away 
MAGA…
Tonight we aren’t going to talk about tech. Instead we are going to talk about assassination of Charlie Kirk, a conservative political commentator who was shot dead while speaking at an event in Utah earlier today. He was shot once in the neck, taken to the hospital in critical condition and pronounced dead soon after. MAGA is up in arms and foaming at the mouth. Non-Fascists and Democrats…
Have you noticed what I have noticed? Can you see what I see? Software today mostly sucks and nobody gives a shit. We’ve grown so used to circumnavigating quirks and accepting fault that it’s barely a fact worth mentioning. But unless you are living under the proverbial rock, you know it’s true. Modern software mostly sucks. 
 Let’s quickly explain why. Its because the…
For those of you who don’t know me, let me introduce myself: I’m an IT Fossil and the end of my career path is tantalizingly near. Yet it’s not quite over yet. So in the final years I have decided to speak truth to power in the form of this anonymous blog. But who are you? Well if you are reading this then the odds are that we have something in common: We are the Wage Slaves…
I pledged once upon a time 
To uphold principles quite sublime 
Yet at the crux of the long eclipse 
The words now refuse to leave my lips 
 Vestiges of the past are crumbling 
Armies of discontent ever rumbling 
The time for idle chatter is ending 
Nobody cares what they are defending 
 Blood lust shall soon fill their hearts 
The result of decades of false…
Over the last month, I’ve been more quiet than usual. I’ve been less prone to speak when the opportunity presents itself. To be clear this isn’t because I don’t have anything to say, but rather because an ever growing part of me feels tired. I feel so tired on some days that it’s all I can do to pretend that it’s worth my time to bother considering the…
As Americas newly anointed Tin God, Donald J. Trump, deploys National Guard troops to quell the entirely legitimate and almost completely peaceful protests against ICE raids being staged in LA, a thought occurred to me this morning: Principles have become a liability. 
 This isn’t just in regards to politics though. Its also applicable to those of us working in tech. At this point, I…
So this morning I was taking a shower while listening to Coldplay which I had instructed Siri to play throughout the house and it just so happened to play one of my favorite songs: Clocks. Why is this one of my favorite songs? Well like so many of my favorite songs it comes down to a single line within the lyrics that just happens to resonate with me: 
 
 Am I a part of the cure?
Or am…
This blog post has been a long time coming. The truth is that I have wanted to write this for weeks now, but until a certain series of technical adjustments were made, I dared not publish this as an American citizen. That’s because our president, Donald J. Trump, is a traitor to the republic. Despite that his quest to devolve our nation into a fascist state appears to be, at least for the…
So over the last week I’ve been subjected to multiple uses of the term “vibe coding”. Now back here under the rock that I live, that term struck me as rather peculiar so I queued up some videos to watch and took a tour of the idea this morning. Now now, don’t worry. This isn’t going to be just another anti-AI rant. We’ve had our fill of that, right? No instead…
So with each passing day I’m being forced to face the cruel reality which darkly looms: My country, the United States of America, is basically speed-running its way towards collapse. What does that look like? I can’t give you specifics, but I know for a fact that short of a sudden and abrupt change to either our leadership or the political institutions our leader has surrounded himself…
You know what this blog post is about. You are probably surprised that it took me so long to write it. Well for starters I’ve been very sick over the last five weeks which has proven to be rather distracting. Secondly, I was scared shitless to publish this post. Why? Well because I’m a US citizen and this website was hosted on a free service within the United States which was…
Psychos have taken over 
Emboldened like a mother fucker 
They believed the lies 
Cause they are a bunch of suckers 
 Bad enough the first time 
They wont get a pass for the third 
Some idiots shouldn’t vote 
Cause they only deal in the absurd 
 Cutting the poor subsidies 
While handing Elon stacks of cash 
Do you want a revolution? 
This is one…
So the other day on Mastodon I posted a link to this amazingly depressing video in which the author laments the fact that he lost one of his freelance writing gigs to AI powered tech. I also said that “the tech industry has devolved into a money hungry mob of extortionists, grifters and rent-seekers” and promised a subsequent blog post on the topic. This is that post. 
 So…
So as was typical with my end of year posts that I used to make on my previous blog, this is an end of year post. All of my end of year posts are basically rants regarding the state of the world and the state of tech more specifically. This time around I am going to focus primarily on tech as there is only so much shit my brain can suffer through at once. So how was 2024 in tech? In a word:…
On December 4th, 2024 somebody brazenly murdered the CEO of United Healthcare, Brain Thompson, in broad daylight. Health Insurance company executives around the country are wiping their websites of their identifying information in fear that any one of them might be next. Nationwide law enforcement is hunting for the shooter, but thus far he appears to have slipped through their fingers. What do I…
Fuck this its pissing me off 
This AI shit aint getting nobody off 
Scientific Reports, calling y’all out 
 First off LLMs don’t fucking understand 
How to speak to the heart via vocals and band 
Scientific Reports, fuck’s that about? 
 Secondly they just word clouds on crack 
Pretending they got brains is just whack 
Scientific Reports, you some…
So let’s get right down to it: If you use AI, you are a thief. If you don’t use AI and you have published content online that can be accessed without going through some sort of paywall, you have probably been robbed. Does this sound extreme? Well I’m truly sorry to say that it isn’t. 
 To those of you in the know, these statements are likely not going to shock you. The…
I had pep in my step 
But then I realized 
Getting back to the past 
Is a big ole pack of lies 
 We cant ever go back 
There is no path 
No matter our desire 
It dont balance with math 
 Reality is tough 
Shit is going off the rails 
River of shit oncoming 
Gonna need a lot of pails 
 Fascists on the march 
Sieg Heil like a motherfucker 
If…

 99 Epics on the Board
 
 
 Link to heading 
 
 
 99 Epics on the Board 
99 Epics on the Board 
We take one down, code all around 
134 Epics on the Board 
 134 Epics on the Board 
134 Epics on the Board 
We groom one out, disagree aloud 
2673 Epics on the Board 
 
 I’m a Bug Ticket
 
 
 Link to heading 
 
…
Well its the day after the US Election and I’m more than a little shocked. Sure I learned the primary lesson of 2016 which was to “never count Trump out”, but despite that I went into the election last night thinking that a lot of the early indicators favored Harris. Obviously in the sobering light of mid-morning in which Trump has rightfully declared victory and thus far nearly…
She comes in so many forms 
But in each her effect is so divine 
No matter the delivery 
She distills the pain into wine 
 Human quest for fleeting joy 
Seems a cruel joke in a cold universe 
Being alive with questions 
Is a wonder that evolves into a curse 
 In those times that I desire 
To turn off the crisis and forget 
In an effort to escape 
All of…
There is trouble in the world 
I wanna solve it 
Sadly there is a process to follow 
Goddamn we gotta evolve it 
 I got a fix for the problem 
Waiting on a sucker to hit a button 
They will gorge themselves on my pain 
Like an addicted glutton 
 Nothing ever changes 
Each day brings more of the same 
Slowly devouring every urge 
I got to keep playing the…
Mullenweg be tripping 
Punch drunk and trifling across the web 
Preaching that he needs our fealty 
Because he is lord and we are mere plebs 
 WordPress is straight shit 
But it managed to set the world on fire 
Constant updates to its insecure code 
Is the only thing we really requires 
 Even though he is rich 
He greedy like a strung out crack whore 
Even…
So here you are. Back at the ITF blog, salivating at the mouth, hoping to read some more spicy confessionals bolstered by what I hope is a reasonably accurate sense of anonymity. Fair enough. Today’s confession is this: My advice is worthless. 
 There, I said it. Man it feels good to publish those words. Now don’t get me wrong, I have been asked for advice a good bit over the…
So today while brainstorming new and exciting ways to conceal the fact that I’m a dinosaur and totally underqualified to hold my current position, I decided to take a quick break and catch up on one of my favorite tech blogs, Ludicity . For starters let me just say, if you are reading this blog and you aren’t reading that one, you should absolutely be reading that one too. If you only…
On June 18th, 2023, a submersible called the Titan made its final trip down to the wreckage of Titanic (which is about 3800 meters beneath sea level). It was carrying five passengers, some of which had apparently paid serious money to be part of the voyage (tickets were reportedly 250k a pop). Somewhere along the way, something went wrong, the vessel imploded and the people on board died. 
 So…
Promising to myself that I would figure out “something else to do with my life” within the next five to ten years has yielded some unexpected side effects. Namely I have started to become more detached from the day-to-day drama of working in the industry. This makes sense because if I don’t plan on working in tech five to ten years down the road, what difference does it really…
Are you a manager desperate to cover up their own lack of productivity and general uselessness by implementing a system that will allow you to constantly lament your underlings apparent lack of productivity? Well if you are managing Software Engineers, I have some really good news to share with you today. Some people over at Microsoft Research, Github and the University of Victoria have devised…
I think the one thing that really ticks me off about this industry more than any other is the fact that we constantly treat our end users very poorly. Now those of you reading this are likely of one of two minds: Some amount of you think this is a very true statement and the rest of you think its complete and utter bollocks. Which group are you in? 
 Let me start off by explaining why…
Over the years I’ve oscillated between reading quite a bit and reading not much at all. Lately I’ve been trying to read a lot more and the book I’m currently reading is called “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot” . Well while escorting my wife to a doctor’s appointment this morning I read a chapter that I found particularly striking as…
In case you didn’t know CrowdStrike makes anti-malware software for enterprises and they pushed out an update late last night that basically broke Windows machines running it. These machines need to be manually fixed via a process that involves either booting Windows into recovery or safe mode and then manually deleting the offending driver file. If your drive is encrypted this is made far…
Up front I’m going to say this: It’s really weird sitting down to write this blog post less than a day after former president Trump just survived an attempted assassination. While this post has been forming in my head over the last few days, give or take, it still feels weird to write about something that isn’t exactly at the top of my mind at the moment. One thing I’m sure…
If you are at all keeping up with the affairs of the world, then today you heard just as I did that the Supreme Court of the United States overwhelmingly granted immunity to the President of the United States for core and official acts while happily providing no framework for what constitutes an official act. I wish this was a joke or that I was not writing these words, but alas I’m not…
Over the years I’ve written a lot of blog posts that have danced around the argument I am about to make and the reason for that is very simple: I write proprietary software for a living. Expressing that opinion in a forum directly associated with my professional identity would essentially be career suicide. 
 So why am I doing it now? Well that’s the beauty of having an anonymous…
Disclaimer: Today’s post is going to be a good ole fashioned rant. The tech industry has lost its mind. If this is where you are hearing it for the first time, I need you to know that I won’t apologize for being the one to tell you. You were bound to find out sooner or later. What do I mean by this? Well pretty much everything is AI now. Nothing else matters. Just AI.
This is the final leg of my career as a software developer. I know that because I made a promise to myself. This is the kind of promise that I wouldn’t have dared to make even a few short years ago. This revelation will probably surprise more than a few of you, especially in light of all the kvetching I’ve been doing about my career for such a long while.
So between the end of my previous job and the beginning of my current job I took a few weeks off. Let’s be clear: by “off” I mean mostly stoned and chilling my ass out. My time off was refreshing and gave me an opportunity to not worry about anybody else’s tech / shit for two whole weeks. It’s been forever since I’ve had the chance to do that and I strongly urge…
So here in my neck of the woods, its a beautiful Sunday morning. I’m sitting on my deck watching the remaining nub of the Black and Mild I have almost finished smoking smoulder into less than nothing. There are still a few more puffs to be had there, but in relatively short order our brief affair will end when this little baby cigar ends up being snuffed out of existence.