Are companies genuinely planning their workforce requirements, or are they experimenting with how few developers they can get away with now that AI is involved?Because from where I’m standing, it increasingly feels like developers are becoming disposable resources in a giant experiment.
To be clear, I feel very bad for this author who appears to be on the receiving end of a rapidly enshittifying company (Plex, which I use regularly but am basically always expecting to fall apart at a moment's notice). However, it is clear that the author is also a user and promoter of the very technologies that put him out of work, which strikes me as very short-sighted. Nevertheless, it is a good look inside a very frustrating industry.
LLM technology is catnip to these large company structures -- it's an excuse for them to lay off huge swaths of their workforces without any extra explanation. We can simply "do it with AI", a claim that is dubious at best and is unfortunately only emboldened by rank-and-file workers endorsing this technology. Chewing off your own foot and then complaining that it's hard to walk.
In the last few months, Yen set up an email address for employees to contact if they come across anything blocking adoption of AI at Proton, so leadership can “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity;” Proton installed software on workers’ computers that track how much AI code the company is generating; and Yen said this is the last year that Proton will hire engineers at all, and instead only hire people to build things with AI.
By all appearances, Proton's CEO and CTO are both in the throes of a deep and disturbing bout of AI psychosis and it's putting a lot of people who rely on their products in danger. Diversify soon, methinks.
This stuff has seeped into the soil like a crude oil spill. There is so much viral hyperbole about what these things are capable of that is often followed by a sobering and less sexy reality. What I mourn is the loss of trust, the alienation of people with institutional knowledge and the chaotic disruption of real communities by strangers walking in like a toddler with a Glock.
The answer to this is simple: say what you mean. This will take, to some degree, courage. It may even take, I hesitate to say, some sacrifice. When I suggest this course of action to people, they inevitably say, “But it will cost me audience!” or “But what if I lose followers!” or “What if they demonetize me!” Okay, what if they do? What if they do.
Anil Dash is on the money with this one. God, I cannot stand "unalive" and "grape" and all these fucking childish neologisms and I will call you out on using them if I see you using them! Talk like a fucking adult!
And a reminder: Substack is not an email newsletter, and a Spotify show is not a podcast — they’ll be unaliving your distribution any day now.
And he's also right about this!!
Looking at my software peers in 2026 I see fatigued faces, I see frustration, and I see a lot of people looking for a way out of an industry that seems poised on the brink of collapse. LLMs are being pushed on us at every turn, most people seem at best frustrated by them, and ultimately they seem to appeal most to people who see the production of software as a purely mechanical means to an end.
Agreed.
This is very much all on brand for Meta, a company obsessed with impossible scale but completely unwilling to do absolutely any of the heavy lifting to ensure it's adhering to the most rudimentary ethical standards. This never changes because the entire company exists to coddle Mark Zuckerberg's bulbous ego, allowing him unlimited funding to cosplay as an interesting person.
Yudkowsky also claimed that his (non-profit) company was probably the only one that could make AI safely[...] It is also a pitch for people to give you total control over them, because if they do not, the world might end.
Thorough write up of (one of) the suicidal sex cults that currently runs the American government.
This industry approaches regulation in this way because it has, at its core, a millenarian death cult that worships and fears AI, believes AI will end the world, feels compelled to create AI, and at least somewhat wants to destroy AI as an entire field.
Edit: The article has been deleted. Archived version available here.
It’s just so bad, in so many different ways, on so many different levels. Trying to ignore or excuse any one of the points against it will still leave you with dozens more.
Beijing clearly had no desire to go further down the US laissez faire path where private capital accumulators would steadily more powerful. It presumably believes that the benefits of reigning in its tech industry clearly outweigh costs and risks.
A good and only-a-little-sinophobic analysis of the China 'tech crackdown', from within its timeframe (2021).
“Tech-forward” should have no place in how we think about the future. There is not a single axis. Things are not either forward or back, accelerating or retreating, primitive or modern, fast or slow. If we are having debates about who owns global compute, what AI infrastructure sits on the interconnection queue, who is paying for rate increases, who signs NDAs or negotiates the terms of data center projects, it becomes painfully obvious how shallow this framing is.
On Taylor Lorenz, AI, the Right, and the tech industry. Of course, I disagree on one point put forth in the article: There is a future vision of tech-collaborative socialism, and it is ("as much as you may not like it") the People's Republic of China.
Upon reflection, I've come to believe that quality software is not about how many features something has or how quickly it is built but rather how cared for it is by the designers, developers, and product people who work on it. There's an ineffable aspect to my favorite pieces of software where I don't think of it is as feature matrix but rather as an interface made by a human for humans that's a joy to use. And when you build software with AI, it leads to worse software.
Well-written and sobering. I know I always say this but it is ridiculous how common this feeling is within tech. I feel like I am having conversations like this on a nearly daily basis. It's fucking rough out here
Should I just let things slide? Would I become known as a “difficult” coworker for pushing back on AI use? Does any of it really matter? Does anyone really care?
Brutal and all-too-familiar.
The world is full of people who insist that "AI is changing everything" but who – when pressed – have to admit that what they mean is that they're pretty sure that AI will change everything. Eventually. After we allow it to consume all the planet's energy, carbon, water and financial resources.
Maybe.
It’s one thing to hate software, but that hate takes on new dimensions when you have to use it for your job. To choose software and have it fail is unfortunate; to be chained to it for sustenance and be unable to walk away is torture. Because of this, I have nothing but hatred for Adobe. They are one of tech’s greatest villains, the software has gotten worse to use, and if you don’t like it fuck you there’s the door.
LastPass users are once again being warned about stolen personal data, though this time the breach happened through one of the company’s outside partners.
Boy am I glad I got off of LastPass and onto 1Password last year, lol.
"The last couple of years at Xbox have been quite messy, people start openly questioning Game Pass and saying it's cannibalizing sales," Schreier continued, referencing the hundreds of millions of dollars reportedly lost by putting Call of Duty in the subscription. "What might be good for the Game Pass folks may not be so good for the studios and revenue brought in for individual games."
Game Pass (and broader 'game subscription' models in general) are, in this dev's opinion, awful and parasitic and poisonous. In the metaphor of a 'race to the bottom' on pricing, for all intents and purposes they are the bottom. There is no cheaper option, which means that studios are not generating ongoing money which means that studios are actively putting themselves in danger by taking these Game Pass deals, which they also cannot afford not to do.
It's long past the time that we should be criticizing these models, and criticizing them extremely harshly, for what they are doing to the already-difficult games market.
Some Chinese module makers are turning their backs on the big three RAM suppliers.
Economist-brained take I know but I do think it's kind of inevitable that manufacturers will figure out eventually that Chinese-made computer hardware does the job just fine. And hopefully that means that RAM/HDD/SSD prices can start going down again, because good lord.
A final Community thing is that over the past five or so years, Mozilla has been turning away from its powerhouse, the Community. I have no idea why, but I can say that it's a top down decision. At some point, some folk at a high level decided that Mozilla got to where it did on it's own. It did not.
Good rumination on leaving Mozilla from a now-former Mozilla employee.
With the backdrop of South Korea’s ascent into an information society, we present a rare firsthand account of Asadal’s design mall—and thus a huge part of “Frutiger Aero”—straight from one of its sources.
Fascinating interview with a figure prominent in graphic design in the early 2000s, in what we'd call the "Frutiger Aero" design space. Unfortunately he's entirely AI-brained now, but there's some really fascinating tidbits about the tech world in East Asia around the turn of the century.
Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p with FSR3 Quality and frame generation averaged 88 fps, compared with 232 fps on an RTX 4060 and 243 fps on Intel's Arc B580. Black Myth: Wukong reached 56 fps, while Forza Horizon 5 managed 48 fps on the Low preset.
Really strange framing on this article where the bottom line is that it offers 3060-level quality for $450, which in this current hardware market is perfectly good.