Last weekend, the Bay Area hosted the NBA Dunk Contest.1 Today, it will host the Humane dunk contest. We're going to get slam after slam after slam against the company after it was announced that they were acquired by HP for $116M.2 A regular person might read that headline and think, "wow, a startup sold for nine-figures – impressive." Of course, it's not impressive in this case. It's a fire sale for a company that has been under duress for months after their product, the Ai Pin, failed to catch fire in the market. Actually, that's not technically true. There was a literal risk of fire when charging the device, which led to a recall. And so you'll forgive me for sort of re-using a headline here – but this situation is much more akin to the Hindenburg disaster from which the phrase originates.

Oh, the Humane-ity

These are the demagogues, oligarchs, and literal teenage boys tearing apart our government right now. They are fueled by Silicon Valley’s dream of a monarchist network state and blood and soil white nationalism and they want to replace our money with the speculative cryptocurrencies they’re already holding, replace the country’s digital infrastructure with X, an online platform they invested in, and route all federal power to Trump, a president they’re actively bribing. They did not plan any of this in secret. They know this their moment and the coup is underway. They are serious. And every day they’re in power means more years, if not decades, of our lives that we will have to dedicate to trying to piece the country back together when they’re gone.

Musk's superteam of former iPad babies

Fat, happy and lazy, and most of all, oblivious, America's most powerful tech companies sat back and built bigger, messier models powered by sprawling data centers and billions of dollars of NVIDIA GPUs, a bacchanalia of spending that strains our energy grid and depletes our water reserves without, it appears, much consideration of whether an alternative was possible. I refuse to believe that none of these companies could've done this — which means they either chose not to, or were so utterly myopic, so excited to burn so much money and so many parts of the Earth in pursuit of further growth, that they didn't think to try.

Deep Impact

Ah, the tech industry. The same industry that once worshiped programmers now treats them like relics from an ancient civilization, like scribes who refuse to accept the printing press. Companies are convinced AI is the answer to everything, and programmers? Well, they’re just expensive, opinionated, and worst of all, human. But here’s the thing—if you think cutting programmers in favor of AI is a genius move, you might want to remember the last time a company fired all its engineers: it ended in lawsuits, product failures, and a desperate rehiring spree. But sure, go ahead. Lay them off. You’ll regret it faster than you can say "syntax error."

Tech's Dumbest Mistake: Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything

It was bad enough to have to deal with the cornucopia of threat actors when it did not include the federal government of the nation where most big tech lives. Now? What's to do? The little regulation that existed is gone or about to be. Your most sensitive data is available to some fuck who goes by the name "Big Balls". Why would anyone worry or invest in cybersecurity when you can just join Hitler Elon's Youth and grab what you want? What's stopping some really bad dudes from doing that? Nothing at all. Put on your Dark Goth Stupid MAGA hat, head to the Department of Defense, and grab some blueprints. Who's gonna stop you?

Game Over

The reason that I'm concerned is that the executive in front of me should not be using that term. They have no idea what it really means, which is fine because they aren't specialized in my area, but I am wondering why someone who requires crayon-tier technical explanations is inquiring about a niche, unsexy element of a platform they don't understand. This would be like my 96-year-old grandfather asking me about Bitcoin mining—impressive if he had arrived at the question organically, but in practice I'm already dialing the bank to report a massive theft.

Brainwash An Executive Today! — Ludicity

Of course, none of this is to deny that the tens of thousands of brilliant engineers Elon employs are accomplishing extraordinary things. He really is the greatest entrepreneur of our generation. And because of the businesses he’s built, he will likely become the world’s first trillionaire—perhaps very soon. Since the election of Donald Trump in November, Elon’s wealth has grown by around $200 billion. That’s nearly $3 billion a day (and over $100 million an hour). Such astonishing access to resources gives Elon the chance—and many would argue the responsibility—to solve enormous problems in our world.

So why spend time spreading lies on X?

The Trouble with Elon - Sam Harris

It’s a joke. At my place, we don’t innovate, we don’t develop new products for a mass market; we do lots of data entry, emails, and writing reports in SharePoint or with comments and track changes in Word. Excel spreadsheets and databases. Absolutely everything is digitized, we send auto-emails and all communication is via Teams or Mail and very rarely over phone. Documents arrive digitally. All the collaboration is already online and there is no need for an office presence. Even when you are in office, you don’t even see the people for the work since it’s all online!

the ‘return to office’ lies | ava's blog

I'm a big consumer of YouTube, and found myself manually adding videos from my YT Subscriptions into various playlists for later watching. There's no reason this should be a manual process, so I automated it - https://github.com/drewmrobson/add-video-to-youtube-playlist.

I use PlantUML for my Diagrams-As-Code solution so much that I built my own free tool to make it faster and easier to create, copy and download multiple diagrams - https://www.puml.dev/.