Shouldn't society have a clever name for people playing these roles by now? Something catchy, insulting and based on truth might help call this out easier. I would throw influencers in there too, they are writing/video-loggin/podcasting for the same money outcome.

There's a carbon filter inside the fridge, they cost about $50 to replace. For any drinking water I usually use the fridge.

Funny thought - what if we had filters on our computers, digital filters, that needed cleaning. Oh we kind of do! Its cookies and tracing pixels and digital footprints. You should clean those out too.

I see upper mgmt the same as middle mgmt. What is your distinction between the two? Budget control? They are both in the middle of the organization and are sort of generic jobs in a way.

That feeling is what's addictive. To use the video game analogy, if you could skip the grindy elements of repeating a boss fight over and over and just get more chances at the rare loot you probably would. Some call this a cheese, the community finds a cheesy way to defeat the boss easily so you do that and its a 5 min fight vs. 30. That's what AI is helping with: the grindy elements of coding.

I think you can still reach burnout (both in games and software) even if the grindy parts are getting automated. You can certainly ignore AI and hand code but statistically speaking you will probably be "left behind" from your peers.

Does your employer incentivize contributions individually and can you advance with this pace of work? If there are financial incentives it might make sense to put in extra effort. If your employer is in more of "its a marathon, not a sprint" mode and your contributions are to the greater good then put down the work at the end of the day and find something else to do. Set aside AI and ask yourself if its worth it putting in 2 extra hours per day.

I don't think it matters what industry it is, you get an organization large enough and some humans start exhibiting these behaviors, they often rise up in leadership ranks.

Have you ever read the Ribbonfarm series about organizational/management theory tied to The Office?[0] Its worth a read or a refresh. It might even be cathartic reading for your partner after an event like this.

[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/series/the-gervais-principle/

With the advent of AI, people are probably thinking its easy to clone services like this and many others. Sure a 1.0 might be easy to stand up but you've got to now patch it, maintain it, extend it, integrate more tools into it, and keep it running better than github. People may joke/sneer at uptime metrics but when internal tools at a software company are down or worse, buggy and causing issues with delivery, its more painful than checking a status page to see when its back.

Most web applications have RDBMS behind them (aka CRUD apps) so any data from client submitted to server using a text protocol (HTTP) needs to go through validation and casting to the data types of the RDBMS columns. In my opinion there are fewer trade-offs with doing server side programming of the view and more tools available today like hotwire/turbo, liveview, etc. to make it easier.

There are simply too many platforms for native app development to come back and replace web apps in any measurable percentage.

Also the people making decisions on their products (or any "enterprise" SaaS for that matter) aren't the ones stuck using it.

There was an interview with Jay Leno I saw recently and he was talking about his NBC deal where he was going to be getting $30mil/year but they had to cut staff to do that so he decided to cut his own pay/raise to keep staff. That type of move by someone at the top is rare or never happens with CEOs. I think Nintendo might be the only case I can think of where I heard something like that happening. That type of move evokes an "all in it together" type of team vs. a clear delineation of CEO/executives and employees.

The melodrama is performative because they have to maintain the mask/facade that they are "teammates".

A lot of software engineers make a lot of money in the US from very right/center leaning companies. Its hard to have an honest opinion on political topics like AI data centers, government funding towards AI/tech companies, etc. when some element of those are tied to your career. Even indirectly - funding up across the industry helps everyone out in the industry (same can be said for layoffs, it impacts the industry too).

A corollary might be commercial airline pilots. It might be hard for them to be environmentalists because of the pollution jets create, but they might love aviation so much that they are blinded to the detrimental things their career may contribute to the environment. Engineers loving programming and computing so much that they turn a blind eye towards massive build outs of data centers.

Its called cognitive dissonance.

Buy a server or rent a VPS. Take the cost of either of the Apple options and divide by 36 months and get the biggest server you can for that monthly price.

The dot com boom can be thought of as ecommerce which enabled investing in a lot of silly ideas at the time. A key technology that underpinned it all and won out was search. Every ecommerce site felt like they needed search, there were search engine companies, lots of competition across google, yahoo, etc.

An interesting lens to put on AI and the current stock market is that the software will be commoditized, its an eventuality. Its trending towards being able to run LLMs locally and get decent output. Decent is subjective but output similar to Q4 of 2025 models is when we started seeing more consistently usable output.

I believe that will a potential the inflection point for a bubble bursting the stock market: local or DIY LLMs producing "good enough" output and companies publicly backing away from enterprise contracts, lowering their AI spend if they can find cheaper ways to do it.

Good on Intercom for getting acquired.

If we're seeing larger consolidation/acquisitions happen, does that mean the hype train has hit a key station?

Now I'm waiting for these ideas to collide and once the hoopla about AI hits a lull, everyone's going to go re-invent parsing the DOM, again and we'll see lots of new AI generated JS frameworks.

I think Apple can't find their voice since Steve Jobs passed/stopped doing the presentations. Thats why it feels inauthentic. I imagine its also hard to really feel "best (iphone|ipad|macos|etc) yet" when they are debuting features that existed elsewhere for a while. Its just a massive disconnect from anyone but fans. The same could be said for innovative features, whats left to innovate on smart phones?

In some ways both things are like having to be the person coming on after an amazing presentation or comic or musical act. How do you follow it?

If what you're creating isn't shippable to a customer/user then really scrutinize it. Things like AI skills, AI task loops, etc. those are all throw-away artifacts, the equivalent of Jira tickets. If you can get AI to help delivery without them, do that. The AI lab companies want you to use tokens but if you can automate something without AI in the mix, since you're experienced I assume you know shell scripting, automation concepts, etc., then automate it to work without token use. This is especially if you are doing something solo - your process and workflow can change on a whim so the least amount of overhead is going to keep you lean and focused on shipping software.

I do wonder if any of these three companies are using AI to do their accounting and bookkeeping. What happens when there are AI hallucinations affecting those outcomes?

A major reason for the waiting period before being added to indices is to see 4 quarters of results, accounting practices, and all the fine print on those SEC filings. All sorts of other ETFs and mutual funds index off the indexes so the market will not have the waiting time to ascertain if these companies balance sheets and accounting practices are filled with bullshit.

Is it possible that one of these IPO's would be like a Global Crossing or Enron having an IPO during the dot com timeframe and would being auto-included into indexes be a good idea? Certainly not. I'm not claiming any of these companies are cooking their books or committing fraud, etc. only pointing out that there was a reason for the waiting period and part of that reason is seeing results held up to accounting standards.