Sorry, no, you shouldn't just handwave away bad behavior just because it's common. That's ridiculous.
If big corporations do things that are unethical, they should be called out, even if they're common. Saying "well everyone's doing it", isn't a good excuse to do things that are unethical.
It's not "naive" to point out the lies that OpenAI told to get to the point that they are now. They were claiming to be a non-profit for awhile, they grew in popularity based in part on that early good-will, and now they are a for-profit company looking to IPO into one of the most valuable corporations on the planet. That's a weird thing. That's a thing that seems to be kind of antithetical to their initial purpose. People should point that out.
One person wrote books like JRR Tolkien. His name was JRR Tolkien, and those books are widely celebrated by millions of people as classics.
I don’t have any issue with people using an engine like Godot or Unity or RPG Maker or Unreal or anything else, but I do think that there can be value in “owning the entire stack” of a project, even if that means “reinventing the wheel”.
When I do a project involving HTTP, I could reach for Rails or something, it’s a valid enough and I certainly have done that plenty of times, but I often will work with a lower level protocol. Depending on the language I will use a more simple HTTP server thing like Axum with Rust, and other times I will go full epoll/Selector with a raw socket.
I do this for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that I can build my own framework that works in a way that I think and I don’t pull in a bunch of extra crap I don’t need. I can optimize the “hot paths” of my particular project without worrying about a one-size-fits-all you get for generic frameworks, I don’t have to worry as much about leaky abstractions, and I am intimately familiar with a much larger percentage of the codebase.
Tolkien was exceptional and dedicated his entire life to it. 99.99+% of all people do not possess such a combination of talent and focus and therefore end up having to use “shortcuts”.
I have no fucking clue. It's been kind of depressing me. Software and cartoon trivia are basically the only things I'm good at. No one wants to pay me for cartoon trivia and AI can do that better than me anyway, so the only thing that I really have for a potential career is software.
For my entire career, only being good at software wasn't really an issue, but now I am wondering if I need to try and go back to university to study something else that can't be automated as easily, but I don't even know where to start.
I don't really feel like it's a "bad" thing; I've said for a long time if a job can be automated, then it should be automated. I still do believe that, even if I am probably on the losing end of that in the not-too-distant future.
I think I am reasonably good at software, and I think I write code that's still a bit better than what Claude does. In fact, I suspect that will actually be true for quite awhile, but the problem is that "writing code 20% better" isn't exactly a selling point when my competition is $100/month and takes like 1/20th the time. Most software, even before AI, wasn't optimal and was kind of shitty, and good engineers were still always replaceable with shittier cheaper ones if it was economically viable.
I tend to land on my feet for this stuff, so I still think I'll be ok; I know how to use the tools and there will still need to be some humans who understand how this shit works, so I'm not worried about becoming homeless or anything. What I'm mostly worried about is that I won't ever have fun at work anymore. I liked solving problems, I liked thinking of clever solutions to avoid a mutex or increase concurrency, I liked figuring out how to squeeze a few percent more performance out of my given limitations. It's something I'm good at, and it's basically the only way to get decent money while doing math.
Since the ceiling for writing software has been significantly lowered, I think eventually the cushy yuppie status of software is going to shrink.
IIRC, Dave Grohl actually gave a lot of shit to Metallica, claiming that it would be one thing if this were some indie band selling cassettes having their music stolen, but it's another when multi-millionaires are crying that they aren't getting extra money.
I'm 35, I very suddenly got tinnitus about a year ago. Like, I remember one day I didn't have it, and when I woke up the next morning I did. I went to an ENT hoping that it would be an earwax impaction or something, but nope. I got a hearing test, thinking maybe I'm getting older and it's a side effect of that, but nope, my hearing was actually slightly better than average for someone my age. I got an MRI thinking it might be a tumor but nope, no tumors in my head that the MRI could see [1]. At this point I think the medical consensus for my tinnitus is "shrug".
Mine fortunately isn't that bad; it's in my left ear, and about 95% of the time I can ignore it. It sounds almost exactly like the high-pitch squeal that CRTs make when you have them on without any input. The biggest thing for me now is that I can't really deal with "silence" anymore. I pretty much always have YouTube running, or some music playing, or some audio of rainstorms of thunderstorms going, because otherwise the squeal can be maddening. Fortunately, in 2026 it's never been easier to find a nearly infinite supply of ambient noise, so I can deal with it.
I'm extremely lucky that it doesn't appear to have disrupted my sleep much. I know some people have had their tinnitus ruin their sleep and I am in the happy few where that isn't an issue. I can go to sleep with the noise in my left ear and it doesn't take much longer than it did before I got the tinnitus.
I'd much rather it not be there, and I was really hoping it would go away after a few months, but after a year I suspect that it's something I am just going to have to live with for the rest of my life. I'm 35 now, and hopefully I got another fifty years or so left, so for the large majority of my life it's just going to be something I'm stuck with. I've just kind of come to terms with it.
[1] I mean, in net it's probably good that there aren't observable tumors in my head. At least I don't think I have brain cancer.
I've been doing a lot of Forth lately; it's a kind of weird language, and it makes your brain think in a way that is very different than basically any other language out there. It allows you to work at effectively any of level of code, and allows you to easily "lift" low level code into high level.
I've been on/off developing a Forth for the NES. It mostly works, but it's still pretty buggy and I'm still learning how the PPU works so graphics will often get corrupted for things that are non-trivial, but even despite that, I was flabbergasted at how easy it was to get a Forth built for it, and even the decent performance I've been able to get when I compile it.
I don't know that I have much desire to write Forth on modern hardware, but I am still glad I learned it just so I can work at a lower level in a high-ish level language, and I do think that "learning to think in Forth" is a skill that is something most developers should do.
When it was just asking ChatGPT questions it was fine, I was having fun, I was able to unblock myself when I got non-trivial errors much quicker, and I still felt like I was learning stuff.
With Codex or Claude Code, it feels like I'm stuck LARPing as a middle manager instead of actually solving problems. Sometimes I literally just copy stuff from my assigned ticket into Claude and tell it to do that, I awkwardly wait for a bit, test it out to see if it's good enough, and make my pull request. It's honestly kind of demoralizing.
I suppose this is just the cost of progress; I'm sure there were people that loved raising and breeding horses but that's not an excuse to stop building cars.
I loved being able to figure out interesting solutions to software problems and hacking on them until something worked, and my willingness to do the math beforehand would occasionally give me an edge. Instead, now all I do is sit and wait while I'm cuckolded out of my work, and questioning why I bothered finishing my masters degree if the expectation now is to ship slop code lazily written by AI in a few minutes.
It was a good ride while it lasted; I got almost fifteen years of being paid to do my favorite thing. I should count my blessings that it lasted that long, though I'm a little jealous of people born fifteen years earlier who would be retiring now with their Silicon Valley shares. Instead, I get to sit here contemplating whether or not I can even salvage my career for the next five years (or if I need to make a radical pivot).
No, I'm in my mid 30's. Unless I win the lottery (which seems unlikely considering I don't buy lottery tickets), or I managed to get some obscenely lucky with shares at a startup, I realistically will need to work for at least twenty more years before retiring.
