Weeknote #86 (20260517-20260523)

meta

I was in New York this whole week; mostly Long Island, but a little in the city proper. I went out to help Mx19 move from their first year dorm into a summer dorm, but also just to hang out with them a bit. It was good, and (of course) sad at the end. They’re doing well, and I’m proud and happy.

did

  • Sunday I mostly hung at the hotel; Mx19 was working graduation support (as part of their summer job). We had dinner together
  • Monday was moving day — but we couldn’t get into the new dorm until later in the day, so in the morning we bought a mini-fridge at Target, then got some lunch, then we moved all their stuff into the other room. It was, of course, about 25° F hotter than average on this day
  • Tuesday thru Thursday, they had training for the summer job, so I mostly worked from my hotel and then met them (and sometimes a friend of theirs) for dinner. I also had their car on a couple of the days so I did typical visiting Dad stuff like getting it detailed, and filling it up with gas
  • Thursday, after their training, Mx19, their friend, and I went to Jones Beach and walked on the boardwalk for a bit, then had dinner at a seafood place so we could introduce their friend to oysters. She liked them! Then we got caught in a pretty serious thunderstorm on the way home, and I discovered that Long Island apparently doesn’t believe in storm drains — the curb lanes were lakes, which didn’t make anything any easier
  • Friday, Mx19 and I took the train into the city and just roamed around, mostly aimlessly. We saw the Stonewall National Monument, basically on accident, several other parks, got them a NYPL library card (as a NY state college student, they’re allowed one), ate various foods, and generally had a good time. We both walked around 25,000 steps / 11 miles
  • Saturday, they dropped me at the airport in the morning, and I cried on them just a tiny bit, and then flew home. TheWife picked me up and took me home, and we watched the Timbers stink up Providence Park (again)

read

  • Unread bookmark count: 181

  • Finished Dead Lies Dreaming; started Quantum of Nightmares (this actually happened on the flight out last Saturday and properly should have been in last week’s note, but I forgot to add it…). During the week, I finished Quantum and started Season of Skulls, and then on the flight back home I finished Season and started A Conventional Boy. I just read this one for the first time in January, so I expect the re-read to go quickly

  • “The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born”

    Depressing af. Read it.

  • “The AI Layoff Bill Is Coming Due, And CTOs Are Going To Pay It Twice”

    Read that number again. Two out of three chief executives are buying a tool they cannot evaluate, cutting staff on capability claims they cannot verify and calling the result a strategy. On a conference stage, this is called vision. On a balance sheet, it is called an unfunded liability.

  • “Terraform is dead”

    I disagree with this post pretty strongly, if only because there doesn’t seem to be any point in this brave new world where a human reviews the “canonical representation” of the infrastructure. Moreover, there’s no way that “canonical representation” doesn’t end up being something that looks like HCL or CloudFormation or some coding language-like thing. Finally, the piece seems to completely miss that one of the benefits of using Terraform and equivalent tools is that they’re standardized across companies/industries/etc. I don’t understand how a bespoke translation layer turning your whiteboard diagram into some site-specific “canonical representation” (that, again, a human needs to be able to review and understard) is a step forward…

  • “Be Cool, Be Cyberpunk”

    To me, being cyberpunk is about ownership of your data and your devices. If you can’t change the software or change the hardware, do you really own it? Can you repair the device yourself, or pay a third party to do it? Can you swap components? Can you replace the firmware? Do you really own your data if it can’t be moved between systems?

  • “LLemdashes”

    The only “advancement” in generative AI, since its inception, has been in slowly getting better at fooling us into thinking its output isn’t generative AI. It is software designed to put strings in the most statistically likely order that an average human would. It is meant to trick us, at its core; an engine with “passable sentence” as its sole ideal output.

  • I got caught up on Ed Zitron’s newsletter — not going to excerpt anything, because honestly it’s getting increasingly repetitive with every issue — on the one hand, I think he’s probably largely correct about the overall economic situation of these companies and that we really are in a massive about-to-pop-at-any-minute AI bubble; on the other hand, there’s an increasingly manic “why won’t you fools just listen” vibe to the writing that kinda makes me think he needs to, like, take a month off and touch some grass…