Ai

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fye on’t! O Fye! ’tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this! Hamlet [Act I, Scene 2] About an hour ago (as I begin writing), I finished watching a presentation posted yesterday by two engineers from OpenAI: Black Hat USA 2026: The ‘Breaking’ News: The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident I’m still reeling from the implications. After spamming friends and family with text links to the video, I sat down away from a computer and wrote some notes in longhand, trying to gather my thoughts. ...

I lost some momentum on my bootcamp journey in recent days. Both “embers” in the flame panel have gone dim (see banner), signifying I haven’t submitted any work for two days. I had made it a point of pride that those embers were never lost. So, what’s really going on? I was, and still am, working on Chapter 5: Storage. The lessons so far: CH 5 - Lesson 2 (Goose Migrations) - Postgres SQL schema migrations CH 5 - Lesson 3 (SQLC) - Code generator from SQL commands CH 5 - Lesson 4 (Database Review) - Quick notes about dialects and a pop quiz CH 5 - Lesson 5 (Create User) - We have the SQL defined, now wire up the API handler CH 5 - Lesson 6 (Create Chirp) - CRUD operations for “chirps” (where I am now) I’d already been down the Goose and SQLC road in a previous course, so I thought I’d blast right through this part. ...

I’ve been taking a break from gainful employment, and filling the craving for tasks by doing Boot.dev courses. My bio on the site currently reads: Rusty CS masters grad from Canada, minor in psych to help understand HCI. Taking boot camp to cure 5 years confinement to OPS, and prolonged exposure to business 4GL and wishful approaches to AI. I’ll unpack the snark in other posts. Today I thought I’d say a quick thanks to Boot.dev for their work, and to offer the perspective of an aging coder and what I’m getting from the online, gamified bootcamp experience. ...

(From my hand-written notes.) Do I choose to use AI today? Efficiency for me but not for thee or society – Unknown Broligarch I find this decision to be more urgent and more difficult every day. On the one hand, not choosing to employ AI in solving a particular problem decreases the range of candidate solutions I can practically explore as a solo programmer. On the other hand, the opportunity to effortfully stretch my own organic neural net and thereby expand its future utility should not be squandered. ...