The rise of Whatever

They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though. That’s management, a fairly different job. I’m not interested in managing. I’m certainly not interested in managing this bizarre polite lying daydream machine.

This is where I am right now. They are pushing AI hard at work, even shaming people that haven't signed up for copilot. They brought in some MS rep to tell us how the future of work was going to be wrangling AI agents. This is not the future that I want.

i was very lucky that my introduction to software engineering came from a mentor who cared intensely about their work. but i dropped out of the IT industry after i never met someone like that again.

i never even went to secondary, but across several jobs i was having to teach my colleagues (compsci degrees) basic computer literacy skills. the moment they had to leave their IDE, they were lost. they had not even a basic understanding of version control systems. zero curiosity. they frequently broke their git repos and couldn't fix it. they didn't give a single fuck about the theory of what they were doing for 72 hours a week; what they were voluntarily choosing to do for 72 hours a week on 30 hour contracts. they hardly even cared about the practise.

LLMs completely ruined these people. they started using it for everything: responding to Slack messages, writing emails, writing code, doing code review… and when it was found out at my last company that i was the only one stubbornly refusing to use LLMs for anything, i was put on a fucking PIP and told it was company policy to use 'labour saving technology.' despite the fact that my code had the fewest defects, ignoring how frequently i was misled into doing something i wasn't even supposed to do because the fucking task requirements were ALSO WRITTEN WITH AN LLM [THAT MADE SHIT UP]. but it was my fault for 'not checking first' (??????).

i will never touch a computer for money ever fucking again.

aside: reading this while listening to clipping. was an experience

This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.

"Content"... is Whatever.

I was going to make a comment on the Stubsack thread about how it kind of ticks me off how "content creator" has permeated its way so deep into the vernacular. I can forgive it when it's used as a clumsy term to talk about creative workers across multiple media, but something like a video essayist calling another video essayist a content creator just gives me the ick. Have some pride and solidarity in your art form, for fuck's sake.

I think that "Whatever", or maybe content(derisive) is yet another valuable bridging concept that connects the different threads of how we got here. If "Business Idiots* are the 'who' and "the Rot Economy/Shareholder Supremacy" is the 'why' then "contentification" or "Whateverization" is a huge part of the "how".

Side sneer: the table-saw quote comes from this skeet by Simon W. I've concluded that Simon doesn't know much about the practice of woodworking, even though he seems to have looked up the basics of the history. Meanwhile I have this cool-looking chair design open in a side tab and hope to build a couple during July.

Here's a better take! Slop-bots are like wood glue: a slurry of proteins that can join any two pieces of wood, Whatever their shapes may be, as long as they have a flat surface in common. (Don't ask where the proteins come from.) It's not hard to learn to mix in sawdust so that Whatever non-flat shapes can be joined. Or, if we start with flat pieces of Whatever wood, we can make plywood. Honestly, sawdust is inevitable and easier than planing, so just throw Whatever wood into a chipper and use the shards to make MDF. MDF is so cheap that we can imagine Whatever shape made with lumber, conceptually decompose it into Whatever pieces of MDF are manufactory, conceptually slice those pieces into Whatever is flat and easy to ship, and we get flat-paks.

So how did flat-paks change carpentry? Well, ignoring that my family has always made their own furniture in the garage, my grandparents bought from trusted family & friends, my parents bought from Eddie Bauer, and I buy from IKEA. My grandparents' furniture was sold as part of their estate, my parents still have a few pieces like dining tables and chairs, and my furniture needs to be replaced every decade because it is cheap and falls apart relatively quickly. Similarly, using slop-bots to produce software is going to make a cheap good that needs to be replaced often and has high maintenance costs.

To be fair to Simon, the cheapness of IKEA furniture means that it can be readily hacked. I've hacked lots of my furniture precisely because I have a spare flat-pak in the closet! But software is already cheap to version and backup, so it can be hacked too.

This caused me to reconsider something. I had kinda assumed that everything sucks because the bar of quality for software is so low, and that's pulling it down for every other field now that software proliferated into eating the world.

But I didn't examine that the relationship could work in both directions. Software sucks some of the time, but it doesn't excuse shit like how Crowdstrike can still be in business, and we should probably look into what's caused us to develop the attitude about not caring that shit is shit, just because the shit salesmen told us it'll be less shit in the future.

Either that, or live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal.

Wait what? Can people in the USA not, em, transfer money? What do the banks do then?