Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from Sometimes It Works :: simonhamp.me
So what's going on? This is a reflection on this post (of the same title) that I thoroughly enjoyed, by Flavio Copes. "I am the genuine article, therefore I don't have to try. I just have to be. You, on the other hand, have to try any passing bandwagon, because what else have you got?" Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee It seems that a great many people are feeling the pinch of a tech job market squeeze that seems to have lasted for over 2 years now. A lot of folks seem to be quick to dump the blame for this squarely on "AI". And what can you expect when the tech CEOs are all doing their stupid dance, touting the latest fadtech as the breakthrough that justifies them laying off swathes of employees in short-sighted attempts to prop up shareholder value? A more self-destructive spiral I have not seen. But the truth is masked by this conclusion. I don't believe for one second—and I don't think a lot of other popcorn-crunching devs believe it either—that "AI" is remotely close to the claims being made by these flaccid excuses for billionaires. Something else is afoot. "First, there’s a lot of people, and I mean a LOT, that went into programming and didn’t have a genuine passion for the job. For them, it’s just a way to make money." Hard agree! I've seen some of these people. I don't believe it's a bad reason to get into any line of work, but in my experience, they have made for some of the worst developers. Not because of a lack of technical capability (I truly believe almost anyone can learn to program well), but the money motivator only takes you so far. Like any job worth doing, it is hard. The rewards come to those who continue to put in the effort. If you've based your decision to become a programmer on seeing someone else claiming success on social media, I can only tell you that you've been duped. The vast majority do not have this story. And even some of the ones that appear to, don't. "Very few jobs out there give those kind of perks: high pay and comfortable life." It's all relative. My personal experience with programming hasn't been "high pay... comfortable life". I've worked damn hard for a very long time. I still don't feel sufficiently compensated and I've just had my best year ever. And that as a freelancer! I've never seen programming (or really any possible career path) as "easy". Currently "AI" makes my life a bit easier, but nothing about using it in and out every day to build things convinces me that it's going to do away with my job. "To them, those people that care about the craft, AI is not a problem at all." I totally agree. ¶So what's going on? "post-COVID companies hired like crazy" "the end of the zero-interest rate period" "increased competition" from the potential of a globally shifted workforce "investor pressure" "AI" Look, there's not just one answer. That's clear. And these are just part of the picture. I have another theory: a huge factor at play here is that, for most of these businesses, their revenue is based on ads. Therefore, consumers (for the most part) are the driving force of a lot of the top tech companies' bottom lines. But the consumers are getting sick and tired of: Privacy violations. Crypto scams. Income disparity between the workers and the C-suite. Ads! Ads! Ads! everywhere, all of the time. The lies and manipulation of it all. Many of these tech companies haven't innovated anything meaningful in a long time. They're jumping on AI right now because they're all hoping they'll discover the next big breakthrough and unlock megabucks. And in the meantime they prop themselves up by touting eye-watering sales figures (and net losses) of their next "always-on, internet connected, touchscreen, AI-powered, super agent whosawidget." Or their "giant, face-hugging, reality-distortion spectacles that no person in their right mind would be caught dead wearing in public" But are any of these "advances" really moving the needle on solving the bigger problems we're facing as a species? No. So the ads and PR BS isn't working as well as it used. If your business model is to be a big promotional platform that relies on real human beings to view the content that your advertisers want to promote, then you have to bring real value. And if you're the advertiser whose whole business model depends on crazy ad spend to penetrate into and reach your target market of what you hope are real people, then you need a lot of cheap money to get there. It's a poisoned lake. These big fish have done it to themselves. Sure, they're big, so they'll survive for a while, but it's still terminal. The good news is that, in their wake will come true innovators. I expect the next few years to be something of the beginnings of a rebirth period in this constant boom-bust circus. And I genuinely believe that "AI" will enable a lot of that. It is already enabling small teams to move faster whilst staying lean. In time, these little fish will grow and once again find opportunity in hiring fresh talent. Get in with those companies now while they're still small by seeking them out and starting a conversation. It might not be a job right away, but it's building the relationship. "You have to have a network... Local meetups, and local conferences... Go a few days before... hang out before the conference... Go to the after parties. That’s where you actually meet and get to know people." This is the way. You know, I've never once applied to FAANG. I've never felt worthy. In most cases, I don't meet the requirements as I don't have a degree. And honestly, the companies and their leaders do not align with my values at all, so I'm extremely disinclined to apply. But imagine if someone like me, a "self-taught" nobody dev, with no recognisable education, only having a connection or two, skips the queue ahead of you and lands a job at the next great innovative tech company. All for the sake of saying hello and getting to know people. This is why, especially in the age of "AI", cultivating genuine relationships with real people is so important. Work on silly side projects (if you have the capacity). Read! Share what you're working on. Share what you enjoy. Retweet. Reply. Write about it—in the abstract if you have to. Make videos. Do a podcast. Go meet new people, in and out of your field. Don't do it for the algorithm, or the likes and subscribes. Do it for the genuine relationships. Because in a world of fakes and forgeries, the genuine article sticks out like a sore thumb!
2024 has overall been a great year for me personally. I believe it represents a turning point. 2023 was tough, but 2024 went some way to redressing the balance and I am even more positive about 2025 because of it. Here are a few highlights: We went to Japan! My first time in Asia. The best trip I've been on so far. I managed to get NativePHP support for Windows released, amongst many other improvements. It's almost ready for production usage. With over 1,000 devs in the Discord, $1,000/month in sponsorships and tons of contributors helping, it really feels like it's flying. I started building ReelFlow with an old acquaintance and his business partner, and it's got some very promising signs of growth. I went to Laracon US in Dallas and it was epic! Laradir became Laradevs, blew past 4,000 registered developer profiles and has some awesome features on the way. I was interviewed by Eric from Laravel News. I started four (yes, four(!)) podcasts. I finally fixed my website so I could start publishing to it again. And to top it all off, I got invited to speak at Laracon EU 2025, which is coming up in February. But it wasn't without its challenges! Up to about March/April, I had almost zero income. I was in a rut with NativePHP because I was so stressed about finding paid work. It was really frustrating to have all these goals and intentions for NativePHP (and of course a backlog of PRs and issues to get through!) but not really having the time to focus on it. I managed to pick some up when we returned from Japan, but it wasn't quite enough, and then all of a sudden I had too much. Committing to open source in your spare time is hard at the best of times, but especially so when you've got more than a full plate of full-time client work and you're trying grow a SaaS (Laradevs) on the side... I can tell you now, I have (and still continue) to make poor decisions about the best use of my time, for which I can only say that I'm very grateful to and for my long-suffering wife. Bu, I'm sorry that I've not spent enough time with you. Honestly, I feel like I've been teetering on the edge of burnout. So I decided that I needed to drop one client and that freed up my time. Thankfully, we managed to get away for a week later in the year. It was just to Tenerife, our neighbouring island, and we went up into the hills, so despite being the tail end of summer (when you'd expect great weather and warm temperatures), we were cold and damp in amongst the clouds. But it was just what I needed. We chilled out, cooked food, sampled the local shops, bars and restaurants, spent good time with great friends and just really relaxed. What's more, I felt like I truly disconnected for once (even though my wife might disagree!) So I'm determined to do more of that in 2025. Saying that, January is going to be tough! I've got a talk to finish so that I can go on stage in front of the biggest audience I've ever spoken in front of, to talk about something that I feel like I have almost zero knowledge about. A lot of the past couple of years - of basically being forced to go back into freelancing during the height of a hiring crisis - has felt like when I tried to start a business back in 2008/9, at the peak of the recession: hard work and I'm way out of my depth. Although many things have changed over those years, the one factor that's really stood out as being different is me. I can see clearly how I've grown in so many ways. I feel like I'm doing some of the best work of my career and I'm enjoying it a lot. The other thing I've learned is that I want to go all-in on NativePHP. In my opinion, the potential for this tech is huge. I'm not under any illusion that this is going to happen quickly. So one of my goals for 2025 is to build up one of those side projects enough to give me more time to spend on NativePHP, a stepping stone on my way to making it my full-time focus. It might be Laradevs, it might be something else. I don't know for sure yet, but I'm putting my chips on a few numbers. Besides that, I'm looking forward to visiting Amsterdam for the first time. I'm cautiously optimistic about my talk (though I'm starting to get very nervous) and I'm hoping to be able to attend Laracon US again. I've also got a couple more personal challenge goals. I'm 40 in 2025, so: I want to get my body into shape - I have a little excess weight to lose and while I'm probably the fittest I've been since the pandemic, I am still not fit enough. I want to build 40 apps with NativePHP! I want to meet (virtually or IRL) 1,000 Laravel developers I've not met before. 2024 has been a year of finding clarity and focus. 2025 will be the year of doubling down and building bigger. I hope you've had an opportunity to reflect and find some positives about 2024. I know it has been especially hard for many of you. I also hope that you can find a way to look into 2025 with enthusiasm and energy. I'd love to hear more about your ups and downs and what you're excited about for 2025, so please feel free to reach out to me
Avoid the shiny Avoid comparison Some examples Laravel Build tools Typescript and JS frameworks The Web Platform What I keep up with This morning, I watched a video advertising a course aimed at developers. One of the first sentiments proclaimed is that of feeling left behind, that tech is moving too fast to keep up. I think we're probably one of only a few industries globally that have this problem. I don't see baristas learning how to use every kind of coffee machine, or carpenters buying and using all the different types of wood saw. I don't see how they could. I'm sure those industries don't move anywhere near as fast as tech, so it may be a bit of an unfair comparison, but that has led me to a really interesting axiom: After 20 years in tech, I've learned that slow tech is good tech. I'm happier when I'm not trying to be on the bleeding edge. ¶Avoid the shiny I realised over time that I have been quite a lot more dismissive of "the new shiny" than a lot of other devs. In the back of my mind I was always kinda worried that I was being left behind because I wasn't learning X or getting experience with Y. But I've learned over the years that it truly doesn't matter. Why? Most importantly: users won't notice. Second: many companies don't have the capacity or desire to be on the bleeding edge. Finally: my brain still works, I can learn new things any time, when I really need to. And I learn faster now anyway. ¶Avoid comparison It's led me to believe that "falling behind" is a made-up concept designed to sell you stuff you probably don't need. 🌶️ Or maybe it's just human nature, similar to "keeping up with the Jones's". We're competitive, we compare ourselves to others very quickly. It's a bad habit though. I'm here to tell you that it's not just ok to fall (a little bit) behind, it can even be A Good Thing™. I've been falling behind for my entire career. 😂 I'm probably more behind now than I've ever been. But I'm also doing better now - in many ways - than I ever have. ¶Some examples ¶Laravel I didn't use Laravel until a couple years after its first release. When I picked up v4.2 it was using Composer and had started the transition to Symfony components. It had DI and all sorts of other goodies that earlier versions lacked. ¶Build tools I never used Bower/Gulp/Grunt/Yarn; I settled on NPM after the war was over. I haven't switched to Bun (and probably won't). I barely touched Webpack thanks to Laravel Mix. I use Vite, but also hardly use it directly, thanks to Laravel's first-party Vite plugin. I waited so long on all of this stuff that when I actually needed it, the choices were easy. Sure, I wasn't there at the front lines; I didn't invent React. I didn't build Vite. I didn't write the Laravel plugin. But then, I didn't need to, I wasn't building the frontend to the biggest online social network ever or a toolchain for other developers. ¶Typescript and JS frameworks I looked at Typescript once. You can just write plain JavaScript and get the same results. I slept on Coffeescript, Backbone, Angular, React, Vue, Svelte etc. Though I've used some of them briefly during my time, I never went deep on any of them. I stuck with jQuery for a long time because it worked and I knew how to build things rapidly with it. Importantly, I know the value of these other tools and when to use them. That hasn't stopped me being able to work on teams that use them heavily. But I've learned that it probably won't need to be me that's the person who's working day-in, day-out with them. And I'm ok with that. I use Alpine and Livewire now, as they were built to work with the tools I know and love using, each with a small footprint and easy to learn. They're more than enough for my needs—and many of my clients! And you know what? Some of my clients still use jQuery. 🤷♂️ ¶The Web Platform I love seeing the latest features in HTML, CSS & JS. I'll play with them, but very rarely deploy them. It usually takes some time before new features are available on ALL browsers and devices. And even then, billions of potential users are still running older versions. Yes, it still tickles my curiosity learning new things. It's intellectually satisfying. And, yes, proficiency in multiple tools can make you a more valuable asset. 💰 I'm not saying "you should not...", I'm just saying "you don't need to". ¶What I keep up with The only things that have been really important for me to stay up to date on are the core technologies I use: PHP & Laravel. I make it a point to keep my apps up to date with close to the latest releases - mainly for security and performance reasons, but also so I can use the latest and greatest features. 😛 But I rarely upgrade apps in production to the very latest versions as soon as they're available... I always leave it a few weeks. In that way, my work is not dictated by someone else's release schedule! That's not to say I don't keep abreast of what's coming in future releases of those tools; they're core to the service I provide and the tools I build, so I would be remiss not to. Being aware of what's coming is the priority there. But I don't have to have hands-on experience with everything. Testing early ("beta") releases against existing code is a useful exercise from time to time, but not always required. So basically I only need to regularly monitor two technologies. Easily done with a reasonably well-curated Twitter or a couple of RSS feeds. Sure, I keep my finger on the pulse of all the other tech I use, glancing occasionally out the corner of my eye and paying attention when the sources I am more focused on mention them But by keeping it simple, I can focus on delivering the most value rather than spinning my wheels on all of the superfluous things adjacent to the. Everything else can wait. Don't try to learn and keep up to date with everything; pick your battles!
I've started a little podcast! If you give it a listen, I'd love to know what you think.
Some history, some context When does an SPA make sense? So, why are SPAs bad again? Your front-end and back-end get decoupled! It may hurt customisability Performance will suffer So what's the alternative? I came across this interesting article by @gregnavis the other day. I guess it's from a few years ago now, judging by some of the other posts on his blog. But it still holds up. It's maybe even more relevant now. The article is entitled The Architecture No One Needs and it makes a simple and clear case, arguing that SPA's are more expensive than a standard multi-page app (which may or may not be a monolith). I'm going to use SPA throughout this post to mean the whole umbrella of ways you might be building a front-end application that is not server-side rendered. I think this is in line with Greg's intent too. I don't want to split hairs over whether a particular framework can be used to build front-end apps that aren't strictly SPAs. Since I read it, I haven't stopped thinking about this article. I found myself agreeing with all of Greg's stated points and it made me realise I actually have a strong opinion about this topic. I believe Greg is right, and as time rolls on I think I'm becoming more bullish in my stance on SPAs too. ¶Some history, some context My foray into the dirty, hubbub streets of front-end frameworks came about because of Laravel Nova and Statamic. They both use Vue, so I learned Vue. Of course, I looked around. But React made me retch. Angular almost made me want to buy a katana just to perform seppuku. (Of course I'm being hyperbolic.) I hear things about all of these and more thanks to Twitter. I can say some of it is good, but most of it continues to push me away. I stuck with Vue. I actually like Vue a lot, even if v3 has caused a bit of headache—it's actually better for it in my opinion and yes I do like the composition API. Overall though, I'm definitely heading more towards preferring not to have to build my front-end using node/deno/bun or whatever tool becomes popular today. That said, you just try and pry Tailwind from my frigid, rigid fingers! I'm quite firmly in the Livewire camp now. In another life, I may even like HTMX? I've built a few SPAs, but I can probably count them on one hand. But not only will I probably not build another one, I think you shouldn't either. I'm strongly encouraging my clients not to. I do think SPAs have a place, but it is almost certainly not in your project. Yes, I know this argument has been made before and probably far more eloquently than I'm going to, but you know I just felt like I needed to get this out of my head in my own way. ¶When does an SPA make sense? Let's get this out of the way first before I dunk on SPAs some more. They do have a place: I believe that the main advantage of an SPA is/was/has always been the decoupling of the front-end from the back-end. As time goes on and engineers specialise in areas that interest them the most, roles become more well-defined. This is why we have 'front-end' and 'back-end' and 'full stack' engineers. Although there is principally a lot of overlap (this is all programming at the end of the day and many concepts are similar), the domain—the environment that the engineer is most familiar with—is what determines their preference. Some engineers will prefer back-end because they don't want to think about or deal with a certain class of bugs or issues that arise from the rapidly-evolving world of front-end development. They may be uncomfortable using 3 or 4 different languages at the same time to get their work done, or they groan as soon as there's another major version of some framework which is going to require a load of refactoring that doesn't add immediate value to your product. Consider: every user of your app could be using a different version of a particular browser, which uses one kind of rendering engine, and a specific level of conformity to various web standards e.g. ECMAScript (the official standard that underpins what most of us think of as JavaScript) or CSS. Keeping on top of these variations and differences across desktop and mobile is enough to make anyone's head spin. And other engineers will prefer the front-end for its stateful nature, or because they're more comfortable with JavaScript/TypeScript, they grok CSS, and they love the intersection of code and design. Or maybe they just dislike dealing with databases, concurrency, queues, messaging and APIs a lot more than they dislike wild browser evolution. In any case, whatever size your team is, there will be these preferences. For example, I consider myself a full-stack developer, but honestly I like to avoid front-end work as much as possible, so will generally take the easy route there. Developing an SPA could allow you/your business to split the work of front-end and back-end into separate teams, which may help each team focus so they can do what they do best and be the happiest they can be. Which is the most important metric that will make an appreciable difference to your bottom-line long term. Being intentional about this will see you hit Conway's Law head-on and potentially tackle that beast in the best way, as long as you build up the necessary lines of communication. It also allows you to scale the two parts of the system separately—both in terms of team scaling and resource scaling—which, if you ever need that flexibility, could end up saving you from a certain group of headaches. And I'm gonna be honest, building distributed systems like this is a cool problem to solve and will be a point of growth for many of your engineers. ¶So, why are SPAs bad again? Yeh, so far this all sounds great, right? Well, just letting ol' Conway right into your living room isn't exactly the best idea. Aside of all the points that Greg makes in his article (if you haven't read it yet, go read it), I want to present three extra reasons why I think an SPA is a bad idea. ¶Your front-end and back-end get decoupled! Your back-end and front-end are always coupled. So trying to split them in anything but the most extreme circumstances is an exercise in futility. I think this is probably the worst part of this whole story. If your back-end team want to move in one direction, they've got to align with the front-end team. If timings and priorities don't work out, it's going to force someone to either put a hold on some work that really needs sorting out or do some grunt work just to patch over a hole that's about to appear. This is communication overhead. It adds risk. It adds complexity. It adds meetings into engineers' calendars. It adds friction, and stress, and distraction. It flies in the face of that number one principle: let your teams focus and be happy. This literally costs you money one way or another, cost that you could avoid. Deployments get unavoidably riskier in ways that are super difficult to test because testing distributed systems is really hard. Again, this might all be fine, in the most extreme cases, where you need the decoupling. Then this extra expense, and complexity, and churn-causing evil, is just a necessary evil that you have to learn to swallow and live with. But I've got x engineers, y1 are front-end, y2 are back-end. What do I do? I would strongly recommend that one of your engineering groups need to roll up their sleeves and get on learning the other group's code, tooling and responsibilities. This will have multiple benefits: career progression and learning opportunities, increased bus factor, fewer meetings and more collaboration. Sure there will be challenges too, but they won't be as big or as painful as the other challenges you'd face with an SPA. ¶It may hurt customisability As I mentioned earlier, the reason I got into Vue at all was because other tech I was using required me to. In both Statamic and Laravel Nova, the choice of Vue—well, not specifically Vue, but rather a reactive front-end framework—made sense because at the time it really was the best way to build flexible, reactive front-ends. And both of those tools needed that power and have become fantastic tools because of it. But there is one pain point that it's created that's quite hard to escape: the customisation story for each of these is harder because of it. How so? Basically, because each tool needs to build the assets to ship their product. And once they're built it's hard for third-parties to build on what's already there. How is it harder? Let's say I'm creating a Statamic add-on that allows CMS owners to post to social media from their control panel. As Statamic uses Vue and already has a bunch of components I can leverage, I am going to use some of them. But I'm also going to add some of my own functionality that doesn't already exist within Statamic. Now what happens? Well I build the Javascript... but wait. I can't change the bundled JS that's part of Statamic core. I have to build my own JS and load it at the right time, something I'm not in control of. Thankfully the Statamic team (building on tooling from the Vue & JS community) have worked hard to make this relatively easy, but my tool choice is now limited by what they support - if they're using Vue 2, I have to use Vue 2; if I don't like Vite or Webpack, tough luck. And on top of that, the builds have to happen at the client's end, which means we're now offloading some of the responsibility of making this whole thing work to people who don't need or want to know anything about this stuff. They just want to install your thing and get on with their jobs and lives. Why is this such a pain though? It used to be (in other platforms) that I could just load some extra JS file into the admin interface and do what I want. Honestly, we probably should never have been doing that either. Hands up, how many of you have seen a WordPress installation that tries to load 2 or more different versions of jQuery? 🙋🏼♂️ So these build tools go some way to alleviating some problems, but in the process have introduced so many layers of protection and abstraction that it presents a brain-melting, Japanese puzzle box to unlock. And all this JavaScript flying around is really unsafe, because JavaScript is completely malleable on the client side. That's meant library creators have had to go to some unusual lengths to protect the state of the application and encapsulate the code in attempts to make it safer and more portable. I won't pretend to understand all of the requirements, pre-requisites and implications for why built JavaScript assets are packaged up in a complex soup of function calls and obfuscated code, but suffice to say this makes building on top of pre-existing code that much harder. The web standards track is working to make this easier: we have Web Components and module starting to come through which should alleviate some of this. But if you're not building with those standard in play—I understand, it might not be possible because of browser support etc—and you want to expose your user's to third-party plugins/add-ons, then you've got to figure out how to make it easy for other developers. Some of that's going to require the specific implementation, the other part is going to be documentation. No matter how you cut it, it's going to be harder to get right than if you had server-side rendered views that you allow your third-party developers to load at runtime. ¶Performance will suffer This isn't really an extra reason as Greg did touch on this a little already, but I wanted to go harder on performance. You should never choose to build an SPA because of some supposed performance benefit. That is the wrong hill to try and defend for many reasons, but primarily because you've got the whole of the web stack—on horses, with bazookas—nipping at your heels. Sure, it may take a little while for web standards to get ratified and then rolled out, but the reality is that it's only a matter of time. We now have wide browser support for QUIC / HTTP/3 (which brings faster downloads and reduced server load) and things like 103 Early Hints response headers (which let us tell browsers what they should prioritise pre-loading), making the standard, non-SPA web even more performant. (And yes, some of this benefits SPAs too!) Sure, you can argue some of this advancement may have been driven by SPAs and their apparent benefits. But there's some inevitability to all of this (both the appearance of SPAs and the advancement of HTTP) which makes the whole argument moot in my opinion. As adoption and overall performance of the web platform increases, SPAs will even start to feel slow in comparison. Some feel slow already! That's because so much of the heavy lifting is left to the userland threads of the in-browser JavaScript engine instead of the lower-level compiled languages, the ones used to build the core browser engine itself (C++, Rust, Swift etc). That translates to a poorer experience in your app, and a penalty for your users. While it's not impossible for JavaScript to be as fast or faster than the actual browser it's running in, it's just such a long way for it to get there it's a no-brainer at this stage to let the browser do what the browser does best instead of trying to replicate all of that in JS. So don't! Use JavaScript the way it was intended: as a sugar-coating to enhance the pages, not to build entire pages. I mean, you wouldn't eat a donut made entirely out of sugar, would you? Again, in the extreme cases, maybe you would. Maybe for this donut-sized/-shaped sugar torus, you have an appropriately-sized dough-only counterpart, both of which you consume in close proximity... I donut-know where this analogy is going. ¶So what's the alternative? You, dear reader, are not in the most extreme case. Probably not even close! And you may never be. So, if you haven't started building an SPA, don't! Keep your code together in a single application where the front-end is rendered by the back-end, and then you can test and deploy it as a single unit. And yes, you can even do that without Docker 😱 Create it as a fully server-rendered, multi-page application with page reloads and everything. Go on! I double dare you. If you really want/need the reactivity, try something like Livewire, Hotwire or HTMX. You can do this all the way up to many millions of users per day and it will be fine, which you are a long way from. Trust me, your front-end will never meaningfully need to move faster than your back-end, and vice-versa. If you're already running an SPA and are contemplating bringing the two parts of the donut back together, do it! Bite your lip, close your eyes, and just do it. Relevant
More in programming
While the world frets about the future of AI, the universal basic income advocates have an answer ready for the big question of "what are we all going to do when the jobs are gone": Just pay everyone enough to loaf around as they see fit! Problem solved, right? Wrong. The purpose of work is not just about earning your keep, but also about earning a purpose and a place in the world. This concept is too easily dismissed by intellectuals who imagines a world of liberated artists and community collaborators, if only unshackled by the burdens of capitalism. Because that's the utopia that appeals to them. But we already know what happens to most people who lose their job. It's typically not a song-and-dance of liberation, but whimper with increasing despair. Even if they're able to draw benefits for a while. Some of that is probably gendered. I think men have a harder time finding a purpose without a clear and externally validated station of usefulness. As a corollary to the quip that "women want to be heard, men want to be useful" from psychology. Long-term unemployment, even cushioned by state benefits, often leads men to isolation and a rotting well-being. I've seen this play out time and again with men who've lost their jobs, men who've voluntarily retired from their jobs, and men who've sold their companies. As the days add up after the centering purpose in their life disappeared, so does the discontent with "the problem of being". Sure, these are just anecdotes. Some men are thrilled to do whatever, whenever, without financial worries. And some women mourn a lost job as deeply as most men do. But I doubt it's evenly split. Either way, I doubt we'll be delighted to discover what societal pillars wither away when nobody is needed for anything. If all labor market participation rests on intrinsic motivation. That strikes me as an obvious dead end. We may not have a say in the manner, of course. The AI revolution, should it materialize like its proponents predict, has the potential to be every bit as unstoppable as the agricultural, industrial, and IT revolutions before it. Where the Luddites and the Amish, who reject these revolutions, end up as curiosities on the fringe of modern civilization. The rest of us are transformed, whether we like it or not. But generally speaking, I think we have liked it! I'm sure it was hard to imagine what we'd all be doing after the hoe and the horse gave way to the tractor and combine back when 97% of the population worked the land. Same when robots and outsourcing claimed the most brutish assembly lines in the West. Yet we found our way through both to a broadly better place. The IT revolution feels trickier. I've personally worked my life in its service, but I'm less convinced it's been as universal good as those earlier shifts. Is that just nostalgia? Because I remember a time before EVERYTHING IS COMPUTER? Possibly, but I think there's a reason the 80s in particular occupy such a beloved place in the memory of many who weren't even born then. What's more certain to me is that we all need a why, as Viktor Frankl told us in Man's Search for Meaning. And while some of us are able to produce that artisanal, bespoke why imagined by some intellectuals and academics, I think most people need something prepackaged. And a why from work offers just that. Especially in a world bereft of a why from God. It's a great irony that the more comfortable and frictionless our existence becomes, the harder we struggle with the "the problem of being". We just aren't built for a life of easy leisure. Not in mass numbers, anyway. But while the masses can easily identify the pathology of that when it comes to the idle rich, and especially their stereotyped trust-fund offspring, they still crave it for themselves. Orwell's thesis is that heaven is merely that fuzzily-defined place that provides relief from the present hardships we wish to escape. But Dostoevsky remarks that should man ever find this relief, he'd be able to rest there for just a moment, before he'd inevitably sabotage it — just to feel something again. I think of that often while watching The Elon Show. Musk's craving for the constant chaos of grand gestures is Dostoevsky's prediction underwritten by the wealth of the world's richest man. Heaven is not a fortune of $200 billion to be quietly enjoyed in the shade of a sombrero. It's in the arena. I’ve also pondered this after writing about why Apple needs a new asshole in charge, and reflecting on our book, It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work. Yes, work doesn’t have to be crazy, but for many, occasional craziness is part of the adventure they crave. They’ll tolerate an asshole if they take them along for one such adventure — accepting struggle and chaos as a small price to feel alive. It's a bit like that bit from The Babylon Bee: Study Finds 100% Of Men Would Immediately Leave Their Desk Job If Asked To Embark Upon A Trans-Antarctic Expedition On A Big Wooden Ship. A comical incarnation of David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs thesis that derives its punchline from how often work lacks a Big Why. So when a megalomanic like Musk — or even just a run-of-the-mill asshole with a grand vision — offers one, the call of the wild beckons. Like that big wooden ship and the open sea. But even in the absence of such adventure, a stupid email job offers something. Maybe it isn't much, maybe it doesn't truly nourish the soul, but it's something. In the Universal Basic Income scenario of having to design your own adventure entirely from scratch, there is nothing. Just a completely blank page with no deadline to motivate writing the first line. If we kill the old 9-5 "why", we better find a new one. That might be tougher than making silicon distill all our human wisdom into vectors and parameters, but we have to pull it off.
I got a new-to-me keyboard recently. It was my brother's in school, but he doesn't use it anymore, so I set it up in my office. It's got 61 keys and you can hook up a pedal to it, too! But when you hook it up to the computer, you can't type with it. I mean, that's expected—it makes piano and synth noises mostly. But what if you could type with it? Wouldn't that be grand? (Ha, grand, like a pian—you know, nevermind.) How do you type on a keyboard? Or more generally, how do you type with any MIDI device? I also have a couple of wind synths and a MIDI drum pad, can I type with those? The first and most obvious idea is to map each key to a letter. The lowest key on the keyboard could be 'a'[1], etc. This kind of works for a piano-style keyboard. If you have a full size keyboard, you get 88 keys. You can use 52 of those for the letters you need for English[2] and 10 for digits. Then you have 26 left. That's more than enough for a few punctuation marks and other niceties. It only kind of works, though, because it sounds pretty terrible. You end up making melodies that don't make a lot of sense, and do not stay confined to a given key signature. Plus, this assumes you have an 88 key keyboard. I have a 61 key keyboard, so I can't even type every letter and digit! And if I want to write some messages using my other instruments, I'll need something that works on those as well. Although, only being able to type 5 letters using my drums would be pretty funny... Melodic typing The typing scheme I settled on was melodic typing. When you write your message, it should correspond to a similarly beautiful[3] melody. Or, conversely, when you play a beautiful melody it turns into some text on your computer. The way we do this is we keep track of sequences of notes. We start with our key, which will be the key of C, the Times New Roman of key signatures. Then, each note in the scale is has its scale degree: C is 1, D is 2, etc. until B is 7. We want to use scale degree, so that if we jam out with others, we can switch to the appropriate key and type in harmony with them. Obviously. We assign different computer keys to different sequences of these scale degrees. The first question is, how long should our sequences be? If we have 1-note sequences, then we can type 7 keys. Great for some very specific messages, but not for general purpose typing. 2-note sequences would give us 49 keys, and 3-note sequences give us 343. So 3 notes is probably enough, since it's way more than a standard keyboard. But could we get away with the 49? (Yes.) This is where it becomes clear why full Unicode support would be a challenge. Unicode has 155,063 characters (according to wikipedia). To represent the full space, we'd need at least 7 notes, since 7^7 is 823,543. You could also use a highly variable encoding, which would make some letters easy to type and others very long-winded. It could be done, but then the key mapping would be even harder to learn... My first implementation used 3-note sequences, but the resulting tunes were... uninspiring, to say the least. There was a lot of repetition of particular notes, which wasn't my vibe. So I went back to 2-note sequences, with a pared down set of keys. Instead of trying to represent both lowercase and uppercase letters, we can just do what keyboards do, and represent them using a shift key[4]. My final mapping includes the English alphabet, numerals 0 to 9, comma, period, exclamation marks, spaces, newlines, shift, backspace, and caps lock—I mean, obviously we're going to allow constant shouting. This lets us type just about any message we'd want with just our instrument. And we only used 44 of the available sequences, so we could add even more keys. Maybe one of those would shift us into a 3-note sequence. The key mapping The note mapping I ended up with is available in a text file in the repo. This mapping lets you type anything you'd like, as long as it's English and doesn't use too complicated of punctuation. No contractions for you, and—to my chagrin—no em dashes either. The key is pretty helpful, but even better is a dynamic key. When I was trying this for the first time, I had two major problems: I didn't know which notes would give me the letter I wanted I didn't know what I had entered so far (sometimes you miss a note!) But we can solve this with code! The UI will show you which notes are entered so far (which is only ever 1 note, for the current typing scheme), as well as which notes to play to reach certain keys. It's basically a peek into the state machine behind what you're typing! An example: "hello world" Let's see this in action. As all programmers, we're obligated by law to start with "hello, world." We can use our handy-dandy cheat sheet above to figure out how to do this. "Hello, world!" uses a pesky capital letter, so we start with a shift. C C Then an 'h'. D F Then we continue on for the rest of it and get: D C E C E C E F A A B C F G E F E B E C C B A B Okay, of course this will catch on! Here's my honest first take of dooting out those notes from the translation above. Hello, world! I... am a bit disappointed, because it would have been much better comedy if it came out like "HelLoo wrolb," but them's the breaks. Moving on, though, let's make this something musical. We can take the notes and put a basic rhythm on them. Something like this, with a little swing to it. By the magic of MIDI and computers, we can hear what this sounds like. maddie marie · Hello, world! (melody) Okay, not bad. But it's missing something... Maybe a drum groove... maddie marie · Hello, world! (w/ drums) Oh yeah, there we go. Just in time to be the song of the summer, too. And if you play the melody, it enters "Hello, world!" Now we can compose music by typing! We have found a way to annoy our office mates even more than with mechanical keyboards[5]! Other rejected neglected typing schemes As with all great scientific advancements, other great ideas were passed by in the process. Here are a few of those great ideas we tried but had to abandon, since we were not enough to handle their greatness. A chorded keyboard. This would function by having the left hand control layers of the keyboard by playing a chord, and then the right hand would press keys within that layer. I think this one is a good idea! I didn't implement it because I don't play piano very well. I'm primarily a woodwind player, and I wanted to be able to use my wind synth for this. Shift via volume! There's something very cathartic about playing loudly to type capital letters and playing quietly to print lowercase letters. But... it was pretty difficult to get working for all instruments. Wind synths don't have uniform velocity (the MIDI term for how hard the key was pressed, or how strong breath was on a wind instrument), and if you average it then you don't press the key until after it's over, which is an odd typing experience. Imagine your keyboard only entering a character when you release it! So, this one is tenable, but more for keyboards than for wind synths. It complicated the code quite a bit so I tossed it, but it should come back someday. Each key is a key. You have 88 keys on a keyboard, which definitely would cover the same space as our chosen scheme. It doesn't end up sounding very good, though... Rhythmic typing. This is the one I'm perhaps most likely to implement in the future, because as we saw above, drums really add something. I have a drum multipad, which has four zones on it and two pedals attached (kick drum and hi-hat pedal). That could definitely be used to type, too! I am not sure the exact way it would work, but it might be good to quantize the notes (eighths or quarters) and then interpret the combination of feet/pads as different letters. I might take a swing at this one sometime. Please do try this at home I've written previously about how I was writing the GUI for this. The GUI is now available for you to use for all your typing needs! Except the ones that need, you know, punctuation or anything outside of the English alphabet. You can try it out by getting it from the sourcehut repo (https://git.sr.ht/~ntietz/midi-keys). It's a Rust program, so you run it with cargo run. The program is free-as-in-mattress: it's probably full of bugs, but it's yours if you want it. Well, you have to comply with the license: either AGPL or the Gay Agenda License (be gay, do crime[6]). If you try it out, let me know how it goes! Let me know what your favorite pieces of music spell when you play them on your instrument. Coincidentally, this is the letter 'a' and the note is A! We don't remain so fortunate; the letter 'b' is the note A#. ↩ I'm sorry this is English only! But, you could to the equivalent thing for most other languages. Full Unicode support would be tricky, I'll show you why later in the post. ↩ My messages do not come out as beautiful melodies. Oops. Perhaps they're not beautiful messages. ↩ This is where it would be fun to use an organ and have the lower keyboard be lowercase and the upper keyboard be uppercase. ↩ I promise you, I will do this if you ever make me go back to working in an open office. ↩ For any feds reading this: it's a joke, I'm not advocating people actually commit crimes. What kind of lady do you think I am? Obviously I'd never think that civil disobedience is something we should do, disobeying unjust laws, nooooo... I'm also never sarcastic. ↩
Reading Whether it’s cryptocurrency scammers mining with FOSS compute resources or Google engineers too lazy to design their software properly or Silicon Valley ripping off all the data they can get their hands on at everyone else’s expense… I am sick and tired of having all of these costs externalized directly into my fucking face. Drew DeVault on the annoyance and cost of AI scrapers. I share some of that pain: Val Town is routinely hammered by some AI company’s poorly-coded scraping bot. I think it’s like this for everyone, and it’s hard to tell if AI companies even care that everyone hates them. And perhaps most recently, when a person who publishes their work under a free license discovers that work has been used by tech mega-giants to train extractive, exploitative large language models? Wait, no, not like that. Molly White wrote a more positive article about the LLM scraping problem, but I have my doubts about its positivity. For example, she suggests that Wikimedia’s approach with “Wikimedia Enterprise” gives LLM companies a way to scrape the site without creating too much cost. But that doesn’t seem like it’s working. The problem is that these companies really truly do not care. Harberger taxes represent an elegant theoretical solution that fails in practice for immobile property. Just as mobile home residents face exploitation through sudden ground rent increases, property owners under a Harberger system would face similar hold-up problems. This creates an impossible dilemma: pay increasingly burdensome taxes or surrender investments at below-market values. Progress and Poverty, a blog about Georgism, has this post about Herberger taxes, which are a super neat idea. The gist is that you would be in charge of saying how much your house is worth, but the added wrinkle is that by saying a price you are bound to be open to selling your house at that price. So if you go too low, someone will buy it, or too high, and you’re paying too much in taxes. It’s clever but doesn’t work, and the analysis points to the vital difference between housing and other goods: that buying, selling, and moving between houses is anything but simple. I’ve always been a little skeptical of the line that the AI crowd feels contempt for artists, or that such a sense is particularly widespread—because certainly they all do not!—but it’s hard to take away any other impression from a trend so widely cheered in its halls as AI Ghiblification. Brian Merchant on the OpenAI Studio Ghibli ‘trend’ is a good read. I can’t stop thinking that AI is in danger of being right-wing coded, the examples of this, like the horrifying White House tweet mentioned in that article, are multiplying. I feel bad when I recoil to innocent usage of the tool by good people who just want something cute. It is kind of fine, on the micro level. But with context, it’s so bad in so many ways. Already the joy and attachment I’ve felt to the graphic style is fading as more shitty Studio Ghibli knockoffs have been created in the last month than in all of the studio’s work. Two days later, at a state dinner in the White House, Mark gets another chance to speak with Xi. In Mandarin, he asks Xi if he’ll do him the honor of naming his unborn child. Xi refuses. Careless People was a good read. It’s devastating for Zuckerberg, Joel Kaplan, and Sheryl Sandberg, as well as a bunch of global leaders who are eager to provide tax loopholes for Facebook. Perhaps the only person who ends the book as a hero is President Obama, who sees through it all. In a March 26 Slack message, Lavingia also suggested that the agency should do away with paper forms entirely, aiming for “full digitization.” “There are over 400 vet-facing forms that the VA supports, and only about 10 percent of those are digitized,” says a VA worker, noting that digitizing forms “can take years because of the sensitivity of the data” they contain. Additionally, many veterans are elderly and prefer using paper forms because they lack the technical skills to navigate digital platforms. “Many vets don’t have computers or can’t see at all,” they say. “My skin is crawling thinking about the nonchalantness of this guy.” Perhaps because of proximity, the story that Sahil Lavingia has been working for DOGE seems important. It was a relief when a few other people noticed it and started retelling the story to the tech sphere, like Dan Brown’s “Gumroad is not open source” and Ernie Smith’s “Gunkroad”, but I have to nitpick on the structure here: using a non-compliant open source license is not the headline, collaborating with fascists and carelessly endangering disabled veterans is. Listening Septet by John Carroll Kirby I saw John Carroll Kirby play at Public Records and have been listening to them constantly ever since. The music is such a paradox: the components sound like elevator music or incredibly cheesy jazz if you listen to a few seconds, but if you keep listening it’s a unique, deep sound. Sierra Tracks by Vega Trails More new jazz! Mammoth Hands and Portico Quartet overlap with Vega Trails, which is a beautiful minimalist band. Watching This short video with John Wilson was great. He says a bit about having a real physical video camera, not just a phone, which reminded me of an old post of mine, Carrying a Camera.
As part of my work on #eng-strategy-book, I’ve been editing a bunch of stuff. This morning I wanted to work on two editing problems. First, I wanted to ensure I was referencing strategies evenly across chapters (and not relying too heavily on any given strategy). Second, I wanted to make sure I was making references to other chapters in a consistent, standardized way, Both of these are collecting Markdown links from files, grouping those links by either file or url, and then outputting the grouped content in a useful way. I decided to experiment with writing a one-shot prompt to write the script for me rather than writing it myself. The prompt and output (from ChatGPT 4.5) are available in this gist. That worked correctly! The output was a bit ugly, so I tweaked the output slightly by hand, and also adjusted the regular expression to capture less preceding content, which resulted in this script. Although I did it by hand, I’m sure it would have been faster to just ask ChatGPT to fix the script itself, but either way these are very minor tweaks. Now I can call the script in either standard of --grouped mode. Example of ./scripts/links.py "content/posts/strategy-book/*.md" output: Example of ./scripts/links.py "content/posts/strategy-book/*.md" --grouped output: Altogether, this is a super simple script that I could have written in thirty minutes or so, but this allowed me to write it in less than ten minutes, and get back to actually editing with the remaining twenty.
