bondolo

Tomorrow (October 28th) is the 1 year anniversary of being laid off from the Amazon Devices team. Nearly all of the senior people on my team were laid off at the same time as part of the "pivot to AI" strategy. Hurray for "commitment to accessibility".

This outcome for their years of squandered effort honestly doesn't surprise me as, other than the Graviton/Trainium work, the Amazon efforts were scattershot, half-baked and underinvested. Only the Siri team is more pathetic than the Alexa team. Well maybe Co-pilot stands between those two somewhere.

The news that Bioware is being shut down hurts more than similar news for other studios. I knew Ray and Greg from university and played ADnD and various Avalon Hill war games with them in the 80s. Ah the days and nights spent on the 6th floor of the UofA Administrative Services building. They were passionate guys who built ground breaking games (Ok, so some of them were rough…) and created an amazing team.

I remember debating with Ray why dying in games like Paranoia and Call of Cthulhu could be "fun". As I recall he didn't see the point but to each their own.

Thanks private equity for dismembering the carcass of everything you acquire!

There are two projects working on Tribal Trouble, mine which is a pure technology modernization and refactoring of the original game, and a community supported version that is publishing the game for free on Steam. The community version is using my modern port as a base but has done major work to add lots of other features and value add as well as building an active community.

GLFW has had no active maintainers for a couple years and has poor support for Wayland, Windows ARM64 and current MacOS. It is my understanding that the former GLFW maintainers want to just wind it down and not allow any new maintainers even if volunteers were available.

The LWJGL team recommended a couple of months that projects not use GLFW or move to SDL3 when convenient.

For several decades relatives of mine always swept out their trucks after transporting cattle salt blocks or alfalfa bales on the same quiet narrow S shaped section of roadway in the bush about a mile from the house at the back of the property. Amazing how almost every year someone managed to shoot a deer there in the fall.

Early in my career I read "Peopleware" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Between that book Brooks' "Mythical Man Month" and Humphrey's "Managing the Software Process" it seemed that there was hope for the software industry learning some necessary lessons and growing to become a true engineering discipline. Nope. Never happened. The industry standard, despite improvements in some areas, is still a farcical shitshow with little beyond lipservice to process, predictability or proper self-evaluation. I can only describe agile, as it is practised, more of a coping mechanism than an actual methodology. Indeed the methodology is embodied mostly in the infrastructure; issue tracking, version control, code review, continuous integration with as little methodology glue between them as required to produce output.

Modern first and second tier software management seems less professional, is contributing less and is generally worse than it was twenty years ago. The quality of the engineering and program managers, their training and commitment to their craft seems really low and is not generally valued. On average team level software management has gotten worse rather than better and, given what is expected and how it is valued, this shouldn't be much of a surprise. It is truly disappointing that what could have been a valuable and productivity enhancing role became so useless.

Things aren't going to change for the better though until the dust settles somewhat on the role of AI in software and systems development and we start again to consider how software should be developed in the 21st century. Maybe it is possible that with AI doing most of the low-level work that the focus will change to building and maintaining architecture and systems. Many programmers might become more like traditional engineers doing a lot more systems work than they do today and continuing to solve problems. Lord knows though it won't be today's software management doing this work; they have nothing in the way of skills to offer to the problem.

And yet, for some reason, it is impossible to stop spam calls and texts.

Just one more thing that is being destroyed. There are thousands more that you aren't hearing about. If it exists then it must be destroyed. The intention is nothing less than to make rebuilding impossible. If you still have illusions that the US government has not been taken over by a death cult yearning for the apocalypse then you need to put down your phone and look at the scale of what is happening. Legality means nothing; they are doing everything they can to ensure that there will be no institutions left to hold them accountable.

Negligent doesn't begin to describe their behaviour.

Oh, I am doing a lot more than just hacking code. I am also cooking, gardening, reading, writing, travelling, brewing and distilling, swimming, volunteering, …

It was a mix of mystical philosophy and transhumanism and he does think that "the world is on the edge of a breakthrough" but he sees it as emergent. It is not something he is personal creating just something he believes is imminent and he is one of the first people to recognise it.

I had a conversation the other day at a birthday party with my friend's neighbour from the building. The fellow is a semi-retired (FIRE) single guy. We started with a basic conversation but then he started talking about what he interested in and it became almost unintelligible. I kept having to ask him to explain what he was talking about but was increasingly unsuccessful as he continued. Sure enough though, he described that he spent significant time talking with "AIs" as he called them. He spends many hours a day chatting with ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini (and I think at least one other LLM). I couldn't help thinking "Dude, you have fucked up your brain." His insular behaviour and the feedback loop he has been getting from excessive interaction with LLMs has isolated him and I can't help but think that will only get worse for him. I am glad he was at the party and getting some interaction with humans. I expect that this type of "hikikomori" isolation will become even more common as LLMs continue to improve and become more pervasive. We are are likely to see this become a significant social problem in the next decade.

I have similar issues over the years on various devices and it has always been frustrating to determine the cause. Power management in general is so inscrutable. I wish there was a tool which let me go back through recent history, even just since the last 100% charge, and tell me why my machine was not sleeping or idling and what was consuming power. Apple has added some energy tools over the years but has never offered tools to explain system behaviour.