It's hard to see the path forward from this nadir, but Le Guin offers some words of hope:

> We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

The tech right would convince us we only need robot-remixed content, and that the future is slop all the way down. We have to prove them wrong.

It's staggering to consider how many resources we've diverted from people who could use them into building this novelty.

If ever there was a sign of a society of decadence in decline, it's that the most powerful person on earth is free to create toys like this exclusively for others in the ruling class.

To parody it, all you have to do is substitute clearly stupid theses for the plausible seeming theses that they normally use.

Instead of reading like pretentious horse shit, it suddenly reads like biting satire.

One of the major problems with "DEI" as used in the vernacular is that people have trouble agreeing on the meaning of the term.

This results in partisans inventing their own fantastical definitions of it, which they use as bogeymen to encourage misogyny or race baiting.

Return to office (or tacking on an in person requirement to a posting) is just one sign that the market has shifted in favor of capital and away from labor. That's driven by AI reducing the value of developers.

This is an easy thing to say when you've got money in the bank and some kind of health insurance that isn't tied to your employer.

The act of delegation to chance is the decision.

I've watched the robots become better/faster software developers than I ever was over the last year. I've got a lifetime of esoteric knowledge that's completely obsolete now. I can ask robots to do things, but so can any other random person.

What, exactly, do you think we are going to be prompting these things to do? And why would anybody pay us to do that, rather than just prompt them directly?

This feels like cope to me. So much of what "knowledge workers" do at all falls into a few buckets: we shuffle data around, we serve ads, or we provide tooling for those who do those things.

When the car came, the buggy drivers were screwed, but there were ultimately more cars (and hence work for people who supported them) than there could ever have been buggies.

What does AI give us "more" of, exactly? It makes everything simpler, and thus requiring fewer "knowledge workers" to plumb things in. After all, the need to shuffle data around is finite.

I would describe the experience as... passable. Historically it was quite glitchy but recent OS updates have improved it. The biggest issues resolve around apps which do not scale their UIs correctly.

We're only a few persistent widgets and a better persistent storage story away from this possibility.

I really recall leading up to and shortly after the election the vibe here was decidedly pro-Trump. The tech right was ascendant, posts glazing Elon and other administration cronies were the rule, and criticisms were flagged/dead almost immediately.

I agree with the GP post that some of Drew's observations seem off today, but I think it's a relatively recent development. It seems to me that only in the past 6 months has a permission structure arisen that criticism of this administration has become accepted here.

By all means keep your eyes open outside of your org, but it's increasingly hard to even get a resume seen by a human on the other side of the hiring process.

If you have a good reputation on your current team, that places you above external candidates as you look to move up in your organization. Don't ignore that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship#Modern_vessels

Maybe a "better" source is the NY Post article [1]. The information itself isn't really news - it's even largely available on wikipedia [2] [3] - but the fact that it's hitting mainstream-adjacent news outlets is novel.

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3mvom4b4dn...

[1] https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-doomsayers-wild-li...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aella_(writer)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community

I had a colleague tell me "it's not vibe coding when a programmer does it."

I fully believe there's still value in understanding the internals of software and the patterns developers use to structure it, but I do wonder for how much longer any of this knowledge will be more than of academic interest.

Pretty ironic then that here, Mozilla is specifically labeling their "we send it all to the cloud" service as "private."

I certainly agree that this option would be nice to have, but running firefox without an ad blocker on the modern web will ALREADY spin up my fans just rendering all the garbage, and I have a decent laptop.

You can't expect the median Firefox-running device to be able to run a capable enough local model effectively.