My son calls the achy-muscled, sticky-mouthed aftermath of falling asleep on the sofa while watching TV “waking up on Roku Road.”
My wife and I went to the pub tonight to watch the Dodger game, and accidentally discovered that you can tell the blood-alcohol level of a room by playing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and seeing how many people sing along.
John Denver: Drunkometer.
On February 24, Greg Knauss was asked to remove himself from his place of employment.
That request came from his boss.
[The “Odd Couple” theme starts to play, but instead of a saxophone, it’s a tuba, which is somehow both sadder and much funnier.]
I had never been laid-off before, so I’m going to use that as the excuse for not knowing what was coming, and not that I’m a monumental naif. When a one-on-one with your manager appears on your calendar late Friday afternoon for early Monday morning, I can now state with confidence that it’s not going to be a good thing. They’re trying to do you a favor by not ruining your weekend.
I was also surprised to find out that I’d be given two weeks notice — like if the company was quitting me. “We’ve enjoyed our time here, Greg, but have an opportunity that we feel we can’t pass up.”
I’d just had a good review, with a raise and a bonus, and I’m pretty sure my manager would have assured me that I wasn’t being dropped over the side for performance reasons if Legal allowed them to say anything that wasn’t absolutely, litigationally neutral. I’d wager the “I’m sorry” was reviewed and approved. It took all of fifteen minutes.
Since I am a giant bundle of OCD ticks and reward triggers, I used the two weeks to finish some documentation, host an in-person knowledge transfer, test and check-in the last of my code, and give a presentation to a large group of senior engineers on an architectural change that I’d made and was proud of. My wife made me remove the strike-through over my title on the first slide: “Greg Knauss, Expert Engineer”.
Well, I thought it was funny.
All told, getting laid-off seems to have gone as well as it could have, other than the whole not-having-an-income thing. They offered generous severance, plenty of support services, and that two weeks where I could say my good-byes and tidy up. I genuinely valued that.
I signed the non-disparagement agreement to get my severance, so the only real complaints I have are ████ ███, ████ ██ ████, and that motherfucking █████ ███ bullshit.
Ahem.
As of today, I’m two months out from my notice, and the various services will start to wind down through the start of the summer. I’m paying for my own health insurance. In two weeks, my “preferential re-hire period” ends and I won’t be considered for another role at the company for a full year. It’s like when the girl who dumps you blocks your number, but in a way that’s intended to encourage you to move on. Also, stop driving by her apartment, man; it’s creepy. It’s not your business whose car that is.
I think the biggest worry I have about all this is that it probably means my career is over, at least as a living, growing thing. I’m 57 years old, and I have no managerial aspirations or interest. IC4LIFE, baby. I’m good at what I do — sometimes very good — and I’ve been lucky enough to get paid increasing amounts of money to do it over the past 40 years. I’ve maybe, possibly, perhaps improved the lives of the people who use my software a little.
But 150,000 programmers were laid-off in 2024, with another 22,000 so far in 2025. There’s a global recession coming because Biff Tannen is in charge of the economy, and wants to see if he can do a wheelie. Oh, and anyone with a Cursor subscription and a big hole where their common sense should be thinks they’re going to start writing production code.
That’s not (much of) a lament. I’ll be (mostly) fine. If my career is over, employment probably isn’t. I feel sorry for the people who didn’t have the foresight to be born into literally the best job market for nerds in the history of the planet. Sorry, kids. It honestly seemed like the party would go forever.
It’s my emotional well-being that I have the biggest worries about, which is a very old-white-guy thing to have worries about after getting canned. I have yet to even begin the re-framing that I thought was still a decade away. If I’m not a professional, career programmer, who am I? Yeah, yeah: father, husband, friend, sexual dynamo, I know, I know. But I’ve put an awful lot of my conception of myself — the me that I think of when I think of me — into making software. “What do you do?” doesn’t really cover it — it’s more “Who are you?”
I’ve been encouraged by various smart and emotionally healthy people to see this as an adventure. But, of course, the Chinese word for “adventure” uses the same glyph as “unsettling disconnect between the current state of reality and the previous one, where you inextricably linked your self-identity and self-esteem to the recognition provided by the corporate reward cycle.” It’s a complex and beautiful language.
I sold my first piece of software when I was 17, and I’ve been doing basically that same thing in the four decades since. If I’m being honest, the idea of having that particular often-upward avenue closed off — by economic forces, by the biases of the culture, by the fact that various industry whims and fads that are treated as roadmaps — scares me, and I haven’t found a good way to deal with it yet.
Where am I going with this? I was hoping you’d know.
It’s so weird that it took years for Clarence Thomas to be removed from the Supreme Court and tried for accepting bribes even after it had been proven that he’s taken millions in “undisclosed gifts.”
…Wait, what?
I’m honestly a little surprised at how many people would burst into flame if I could suddenly set things on fire with my mind.
Just taking some notes for a side project: Which end was pointed up when they hung Mussolini from the lamppost?
We — the general “we,” the societal “we” — are suffering from a profound, and profoundly unearned, surfeit of self-confidence. It’s everywhere.
We know what we’re doing, the thinking goes, despite all evidence and common sense and historical precedent. This is a sweaty, desperate kind of confidence, the most urgent kind of confidence — about tech, about law, about sociology, about everything — and we’re desperate to convince everyone else of our rightness, too, no matter what the reality actually is. Reality is for losers.
This is not going to end well. It has never ended well before.
The same way street lunatics and Republicans cling to whatever a random collection of neurons burped up when whey they last bothered to have a thought, an increasing percentage of our culture is soaked in the absolute, and almost always unfounded, belief that this — whatever “this” turns out to be — is the way, the right way, the only way. This one here. I found it on the ground, but it still looks good. Joe Rogan said so.
I’m speaking — of course — of AI.
Or maybe crypto. Or NFTs. Or the metaverse. Or capitalism. Or religion. Or MAGA. Or whatever other goddamned thing some goddamned group of confidence-swelled chuckleheads is trying to foist onto us today, as the One True, Unalterable, and Inevitable Path. Because they’re all the same thing. You gotta believe, because then others just might believe, too. And that’s where the profit is.
They’re called confidence men for a reason.
Doubt, in any form, is to be dismissed out of hand. Fake it ‘til you make it, baby, because of course you’re going to make it. YOLO hard enough, and it precludes wasting your single, precious life as a fraud, right? Right? Fuckin’-A. No doubt, no fear, no common sense, no obligation to reality or the truth or the rest of society.
To pick one especially sweaty example, Elon Musk is currently rampaging through the governmental infrastructure that keeps us — the general “us,” the societal “us” — alive, unplugging things, just to see what happens. You think he doubts himself, even for a second? He’ll say literally anything that makes it out of the gravity well of his k-hole. Move fast and break things, and if those things happen to be institutions or the Constitution or human beings, well… Look, dude, you can actually launch missiles with this code. Sick.
One problem — one of the many problems — one of the near-infinite number of problems — with the cryptocurrency “industry” (is there a way to put distain-quotes around distain-quotes?) was / is / will be its monumental arrogance. The hubris that flushed billions in electronic beanie babies down the crypto-toilet was born from every Ponzi scheme investor who thinks they got in early enough, or who did not know that they were involved in a Ponzi scheme, who does not know what a Ponzi scheme is but assumes it’s probably something good. “Have fun staying poor!” they’d blithely sneer at anybody who had ethical, financial, or flat-out common-sensical doubts about their ramshackle assault on a century of hard-learned, society-wide lessons. “Look how much money I’ve ma— Oh, shit. Oh, no. No, no, no, no.”
Crypto grift — by which I mean crypto — is now playing in the biggest league possible, with someone no less powerful than the (enterally confident) President of the United States prepping a nation-state-sized bag, for countless suckers to be left holding. But that does not change its fundamental nature; it clarifies it, to its purest possible form. By bringing in the most successful con-man in history to hype their super-special hash keys, cryptobros have been granted access to the same gullible rubes that see Trump as a paragon of patriotic virtue. These suckers believe, no matter how many times they’re proven wrong, and they keep clapping hard enough for the whole Tinkerbell-contraption to stay aloft. I don’t think Trump believes (or even understands) a word he says, but I do think he thinks you’ll believe it. Which is the point.
“You just don’t understand,” the bleat inevitably goes. “De-fi! Uh, code is law. Solidity?” But I do understand, because I’m not financially incentivized not to. “I’m having fun making you poor” doesn’t have the same ring. “gm” (“God, where is my money?”) had its day. Crypto triumphalism — despite it’s Trumpy-come-lately hoopla — has aged like $MILK.
And so we’re left with the AI “industry” — we really need to come up with a shortcut to represent double-pumping two raised fingers on each hand while rolling your eyes — as the current apex example of the tech-exultation grift. Of course — [checks notes] — AI is going to make it. We are going to make it, just like last time.
Scratch the skin of wild-eyed AI proponents, and a thick syrup oozes out, made up of the blendered remains of Roko’s Basilisk, barely sublimated Christian end-times thinking, and the mis-remembered plot of that one cool science-fiction story they read when they were twelve. This is the basis for the new order, just like the blockchain was a couple of years ago, and a dead-eyed, low-poly, pantsless rendering of Mark Zuckerberg was a couple of years before that.
Is it still early? When does it stop being early?
LLMs are not, say, an expensive way to produce marginally useful summaries of longer documents, oh no. They’re the first step towards our evil / benevolent (pick one) AI overlords. They’re the wellspring of a quasi-religious cult whose enthusiastic acolytes can clearly see the inexorable path from an unprofitable parlor trick to AGI godhood, where the technology that lies between them is inevitable, despite not actually existing, or being possible, or stuff.
It’s a thin line between confidence and delusion. Like, really thin. Like, negative thickness.
Eric Schmidt demands that 99% of the electrical output of the planet be dedicated to AI, without pausing to wonder what else it might be used for. Sam Altman plans a seven-trillion-dollar AI infrastructure, without giving a second thought to, God, literally anything. Vibecoders come super-duper close to a working implementation of FizzBuzz, and cheer the coming replacement of everyone but themselves. People who stuff prompts into diffusion models declare themselves artists, the same way that people who yell at waiters declare themselves chefs.
Ethical concerns are dismissed as irrelevant, legal issues are declared moot. It’s a done deal. Get in, loser, we’re going AI-ing.
And doesn’t that actually make sense? If the threat - economic, national, philosophical — is existential, doesn’t the risk/reward calculation require that we throw all available resources into to the fray? Yes, of course, it makes sense.
Assuming there’s actually an existential risk. Which lots and lots of people are trying to convince you of, using lots and lots of hand waving, and press releases, and podcasts for some reason — it’s always podcasts. There is no place for thinking things through, there is no time for quiet reflection, there’s certainly not time for regulation.
The word “hype” does not do the situation justice. If it’s not now, it’s never, and if it’s never, we are dooooomed. Your children will curse your name as they eat dirt to survive.
But “You’re going to be left behind” is only the latest version of “Have fun staying poor.” It’s got every ounce of the smug self-satisfaction that it shouldn’t need if the inevitability it promises were actually inevitable. People who are tired of winning shouldn’t need to mock those they see as their lessers, as the losers the future is going to trample over. Inexorable triumph does not require it.
Unless, just maybe, that triumph isn’t so inexorable, and their triumphalism is a rhetorical strategy rather than an actual belief. People in a panic tend to make bad decisions — commit resources that they shouldn’t, put money into the pockets of people they shouldn’t. Perhaps all this self-confidence, this arrogance, this self-satisfaction is the gambit of a used-car salesman, promising that someone else was just here and is going to come back tomorrow and now is your only chance to pick up this beauty. [Slaps roof.] You can fit so much passionate intensity in here. Buy, buy, buy buy. The thing is, you can just walk off the lot and leave the salesman’s shouts that you’ll be sorry fading into the distance. Here though, now, with AI, the shouts follow you, are presented to you, constantly, as deep-think and serious philosophy and stolid news. Does Schmidt even understand what dedicating 99% of available energy to this nonsense means? Who cares? It sounds urgent, it sounds impressive, it sounds like a big demand for a big job and that’s what’s important. Who cares if it works, or causes harm, or any of that loser shit? Eric Schmidt doesn’t care. Do you? I should amend the first sentence of this rant. We are suffering from a profound sense of self-delusion. The confident ones are just trying to pedal their commitment to that delusion to the rest of us, to make it conventional wisdom instead of nut-baggery. If they believe it hard enough, if their can fool themselves (either truly or performatively), then maybe they can fool us, too. And that’s, ultimately, what matters: the sale. What happens afterwards, well, at least we’ll have a nice bag.
The span between the Crucification and the Resurrection is supposed to be three days, but it feels awfully fast — maybe Friday afternoon to early Sunday morning, say 42 hours total. The Tomb apparently has a late check-in / early check-out policy, and Jesus should have phoned the front desk to ask for some extra time.
You know that scene in “Civil War” — spoiler alert — where they drag the authoritarian President of the United States from behind the Resolute Desk and put a bullet in him?
Was thinking about that today, no reason.
Atom Feed