Perhaps this is a cultural thing. I routinely buy gifts for friends, pay for their meals, travel and vice versa. Having more money is not some supreme objective that is more important than the people around you. Money is just a tool for enjoying life. I come from an impoverished and deprived background, spent years homeless since I was a teenager, and I still recognize that putting money before friends is a scarcity mindset.

As things industrialize further, a state's net compute flow might become a topic of campaign promises. We may later find correlations between states' access to quality compute and the educational/financial outcome of younger generations.

To be sure, my leverage and inertia with a $200/mo ChatGPT Pro subscription is already a lot higher than it is without. We're not talking about just chatbots anymore, modern agentic models represent a quantifiable increase in individual agency. Whether or not the job market implodes, I am able to make progress on things even while asleep or busy with something else. This kind of agentic capital has never been available to the working class before at scale.

States like Texas, with their independent grid, might find themselves in a favorable position in such a balkanization event, but past events have proved that ERCOT is not ready to operate a statewide power grid. I was in Texas during the '21 cold snap and it was brutal. I was using my gas stove for heat. If resources for compute suddenly became constrained, and compute was deemed a matter of security and economic survival, it would be a cutthroat environment for operators of Texas' existing 400+ data centers.

At home, I am still rocking a plain old GTX 1080 with an i7 6700k, it's still kicking ass a decade later and plays most of what I throw at it, and I have an M-Series MBP for work, though it's capable of running plenty modern titles on Ultra.

My Steam Deck absorbs the majority of my local gaming, however, even though I have to run games at lower spec. It's just an extremely convenient device and I dock it to my projector, which I run at 1080p@240Hz anyway because I prefer it over 4K@60Hz.

For things the deck can't handle though, GeForce Now rocks. If the Steam Machine doesn't become too expensive, I might snag one and a Steam Frame headset as well, and that will probably have me set through any impending breakdown in the supply chain for at least a decade. I'll probably be rocking this GTX 1080 until 2040, the way things are going.

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript/Web, Python, C, Full-stack, AI/ML

Email: hello @ bad-software dot com

GitHub: https://github.com/soulofmischief

Full-stack JavaScript-focused engineer/entrepreneur with lots of experience in building scalable single page apps in different frameworks, web3, multiplayer web games, building transformers and other networks, all sorts of things. Product-oriented, executive and leadership experience, comfortable in both autonomous and collaborative settings, capable Linux sysadmin. I know how to ship, end to end.

I've focused for several years now on agentic and generative work such as simulating networked LLM-augmented embodied agents, interface research, too much to list here but always happy to talk more over email. While the rest of the industry is just starting to latch onto agentic systems, I can offer years of experience, product insight and leadership.

Available for consulting, startups, projects, anything web or agentic.

Today, it's a kind of chaos magic wherein you summon the beast and try your best to contain him, knowing that someone will probably die in the process. Sometimes literally. It's still a force multiplier in the right hands and domain, and agentic coding is a paradigm that won't retract, at least until something better supplants it.

The problem is that few engineers actually have the discipline available to constrain these models appropriately and instead rely on a hodgepodge network of "skills" aka prompt fragments which are passed around and glued together.

I consider myself as having such discipline, being strongly architecturally-minded, user-first, etc. in both design and implementation. And I still struggle to contain the beast many days. I just got through screaming at Claude for intentionally taking a shortcut that I'd forbidden, leading to a ton of wasted time and tokens.

Sometimes I feel like I saved weeks of R&D with a single ten-minute task handed off to an agent, other times I feel like I'd get better returns playing slots in Vegas at the alarming rate Claude burns through money.

I think these APIs address real issues, but it also makes the entire stack more complex when integrated language support might be better for some features. But, keeping things separate does mean JavaScript as a language is fairly portable and backwards-compatible, if you ignore Web API support. Still, a lot of other languages feel more batteries-included and have more elegant multi-threaded async fundamentals.

Remember Microsoft Tay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)#Initial_release

If you enjoy this video, I highly recommend checking out more of their channels.

https://www.youtube.com/@standupmaths

https://www.youtube.com/@SteveMould

Tells me all I need to know. Signalling my intent to call this garbage.

It is unrealistic for many to move states or live in their ideal state, but we don't even live in the "50 different options" world anymore.

Corporate and NGO interest groups are seeing to it that your politicians and journalists are controlled from the municipal to national levels. Tribal two-party politics has reduced our world to "red" and "blue" states, and plenty authoritarian legislation has bipartisan support.

You also can't just keep playing whack-a-mole and uprooting your entire life each time a state you considered safe suddenly introduces legislation you disagree with.

Some would even argue that it isn't very patriotic to flee a community and allow it to rot instead of participating in its liberation.

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript/Web, Python, C, Full-stack, AI/ML

Email: hello @ bad-software dot com

GitHub: https://github.com/soulofmischief

Full-stack JavaScript-focused engineer/entrepreneur with lots of experience in building scalable single page apps in different frameworks, web3, multiplayer web games, building transformers and other networks, all sorts of things. Product-oriented, executive and leadership experience, comfortable in both autonomous and collaborative settings, capable Linux sysadmin. I know how to ship, end to end.

I've focused for several years now on agentic and generative work such as simulating networked LLM-augmented embodied agents, interface research, too much to list here but always happy to talk more over email. While the rest of the industry is just starting to latch onto agentic systems, I can offer years of experience, product insight and leadership.

Available for consulting, startups, projects, anything web or agentic.