Generative AI will probably make blogs better. Have you ever searched for something on Google and found the first one, two, or three blog posts to be utter nonsense? That's because these blog posts have been optimized not for human consumption, but rather to entertain the search engine ranking algorithms. People have figured out the right buzzwords to include in headings, how to game backlinks, and research keywords to write up blog posts about things they know nothing about. Pleasing these bots means raking in the views—and ad revenue (or product referrals, sales leads, etc.). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may have been the single worst thing that happened to the web. Every year it seems like search results get worse than the previous. The streets of the internet are littered with SEO junk. But now, we may have an escape from this SEO hellscape: generative AI! Think about it: if AI-generated search results (or even direct use of AI chat interfaces) subsumes web search as a primary way to look up information, there will be no more motivation to crank out SEO-driven content. These kinds of articles will fade into obscurity as the only purpose for their existence (monetization) is gone. Perhaps we will be left with the blogosphere of old with webrings and RSS (not that these things went away but they're certainly not mainstream anymore). This, anyways, is my hope. No more blogging to entertain the robots. Just writing stuff you want to write and share with other like-minded folks online.

I write this blog because I enjoy writing. Some people enjoy reading what I write, which makes me feel really great! Recently, I took down a post and stopped writing for a few months because I didn't love the reaction I was getting on social media sites like Reddit and Hacker News. On these social networks, there seems to be an epidemic of "gotcha" commenters, contrarians, and know-it-alls. No matter what you post, you can be sure that folks will come with their sharpest pitchforks to try to skewer you. I'm not sure exactly what it is about those two websites in particular. I suspect it's the gamification of the comment system (more upvotes = more points = dopamine hit). Unfortunately, it seems the easiest way to win points on these sites is to tear down the original content. At any rate, I really don't enjoy bad faith Internet comments and I have a decent-enough following outside of these social networks that I don't really have to endure them. Some might argue I need thicker skin. I don't think that's really true: your experience on the Internet is what you make of it. You don't have to participate in parts of it if you don't want. Also, I know many of you reading this post (likely RSS subscribers at this point) came from Reddit or Hacker News in the first place. I don't mean to insult you or suggest by any means that everyone, or even the majority of users, on these sites are acting in bad faith. Still, I have taken a page from Tom MacWright's playbook and decided to add a bit of javascript to my website that helpfully redirects users from these two sites elsewhere: try { const bannedReferrers = [/news\.ycombinator\.com/i, /reddit\.com/i]; if (document.referrer) { const ref = new URL(document.referrer); if (bannedReferrers.some((r) => r.test(ref.host))) { window.location.href = "https://google.com/"; } } } catch (e) {} After implementing this redirect, I feel a lot more energized to write! I'm no longer worried about having to endlessly caveat my work for fear of getting bludgeoned on social media. I'm writing what I want to write and, if for those of you here to join me, I say thank you!

Here we go again: I'm so tired of crypto web3 LLMs. I'm positive there are wonderful applications for LLMs. The ChatGPT web UI seems great for summarizing information from various online sources (as long as you're willing to verify the things that you learn). But a lot fo the "AI businesses" coming out right now are just lightweight wrappers around ChatGPT. It's lazy and unhelpful. Probably the worst offenders are in the content marketing space. We didn't know how lucky we were back in the "This one weird trick for saving money" days. Now, rather than a human writing that junk, we have every article sounding like the writing voice equivalent of the dad from Cocomelon. Here's an approximate technical diagram of how these businesses work: Part 1 is what I like to call the "bilking process." Basically, you put up a flashy landing page promising content generation in exchange for a monthly subscription fee (or discounted annual fee, of course!). No more paying pesky writers! Once the husk of a company has secured the bag, part 2, the "bullshit process," kicks in. Customers provide their niches and the service happily passes queries over to the ChatGPT (or similar) API. Customers are rewarded with stinky garbage articles that sound like they're being narrated by HAL on Prozac in return. Success! I suppose we should have expected as much. With every new tech trend comes a deluge of tech investors trying to find the next great thing. And when this happens, it's a gold rush every time. I will say I'm more optimistic about "AI" (aka machine learning, aka statistics). There are going to be some pretty cool applications of this tech eventually—but your ChatGPT wrapper ain't it.

I have noticed a trend in a handful of products I've worked on at big tech companies. I have friends at other big tech companies that have noticed a similar trend: The products are kind of crummy. Here are some experiences that I have often encountered: the UI is flakey and/or unintuitive there is a lot of cruft in the codebase that has never been cleaned up bugs that have "acceptable" workarounds that never get fixed packages/dependencies are badly out of date the developer experience is crummy (bad build times, easily breakable processes) One of the reasons I have found for these issues is that we simply aren't investing enough time to increase product quality: we have poorly or nonexistent quality metrics, invest minimally in testing infrastructure (and actually writing tests), and don't invest in improving the inner loop. But why is this? My experience has been that quality is simply a hard sell in bigh tech. Let's first talk about something that's an easy sell right now: AI everything. Why is this an easy sell? Well, Microsoft could announce they put ChatGPT in a toaster and their stock price would jump $5/share. The sad truth is that big tech is hyper-focused on doing the things that make their stock prices go up in the short-term. It's hard to make this connection with quality initiatives. If your software is slightly less shitty, the stock price won't jump next week. So instead of being able to sell the obvious benefit of shiny new features, you need to have an Engineering Manager willing to risk having lower impact for the sake of having a better product. Even if there is broad consensus in your team, group, org that these quality improvements are necessary, there's a point up the corporate hierarchy where it simply doesn't matter to them. Certainly not as much as shipping some feature to great fanfare. Part of a bigger strategy? # Cory Doctorow has said some interesting things about enshittification in big tech: "enshittification is a three-stage process: first, surpluses are allocated to users until they are locked in. Then they are withdrawn and given to business-customers until they are locked in. Then all the value is harvested for the company's shareholders, leaving just enough residual value in the service to keep both end-users and business-customers glued to the platform." At a macro level, it's possible this is the strategy: hook users initially, make them dependent on your product, and then cram in superficial features that make the stock go up but don't offer real value, and keep the customers simply because they really have no choice but to use your product (an enterprise Office 365 customer probably isn't switching anytime soon). This does seem to have been a good strategy in the short-term: look at Microsoft's stock ever since they started cranking out AI everything. But how can the quality corner-cutting work long-term? I hope the hubris will backfire # Something will have to give. Big tech products can't just keep getting shittier—can they? I'd like to think some smaller competitors will come eat their lunch, but I'm not sure. Hopefully we're not all too entrenched in the big tech ecosystem for this to happen.