On Thursday night I attended a small gig in an upstairs room at the Old Nun’s Head in Nunhead. It was a Green Party fundraiser and also the kind of gig that appeals to me anyway.

I took a while to warm up to Tam Lin, but the long, brooding, mostly instrumental piece that they ended their set with won me over completely.

Volume One Tongue, a.k.a. Isla Greenwood, has a beautiful voice and amazing control over it.

A woman in vaguely mediaeval-looking garb stands behind a synthesiser with her arm raised

Me Lost Me

The line-up was curated by Me Lost Me – Jayne Dent – whose electronic folk I enjoyed a lot, especially her version of Mirie it is while sumer ilast, the oldest surviving recorded secular song in English – Middle English from the early 13th century, in fact.

L— organised a private screening of Nine to Five (1980) on Saturday, as a celebration of the life of Dolly Parton. There were about 20 of us at THE NEW BLXCK, a cosy little venue in Shoreditch. I hadn’t seen the film before, but it’s a lot of fun. The central theme is feminist, but it also shows how all workers should club together to fight the real enemy: bosses.

The expression “nine to five” was used a lot when I was young, on TV, in music, and as a phrase in general use, but when I started working I realised that it had given me an unrealistically rosy view of the working day. I don’t think I ever had a job whose official contracted hours were as short as that.

I spent a few hours on Sunday afternoon going through old repositories on GitHub and marking them as archived, or, if they were just forks with no particular value, deleting them entirely.

I took a step that I’d been considering for a while: I marked all the repositories of Ruby gems that I maintain(ed) as archived and added links to a blog post explaining my reasons.

I’ve been unimpressed with the direction of Ruby as a language and community for a while – I’ve written about that before – and the apparent takeover of programming in general and Ruby programming in particular by bot whisperers leaves me not really wanting to participate any longer. It’s hard to look at any programming job I see advertised these days and feel enthusiastic about it, and I’m lucky enough to be in a position where I don’t have to take one right now.

In the last few weeks, I’ve come to realise that maybe I’m never going back to the kind of work I spent the past few decades doing, because it has largely ceased to exist.

This leaves the question of what I should do instead. I still have plenty of useful skills even if programming isn’t so valuable in itself. However, because I’m also implacably opposed to almost everything about the current generative “AI” craze, on ethical, philosophical, practical, environmental, and aesthetic grounds, the pool of places I would be prepared to work is probably small.

It’s not zero, though: I know for certain that there are many people who feel the same way.

Links:

  • Making an 88x31 button book using ImageMagick: The whole of Moby Dick as a 19-hour, 4.2 MB GIF.
  • Why I Resist Generative “AI”. “Everything, from the ecological to the psychological to the weird”.
  • Are We Idiocracy Yet? “Tracking how close reality is to Mike Judge’s 2006 prophecy” (78% at the time of writing).
  • Why are we even doing all this? “Personally, I look forward to the day when ChatGPT can enjoy a sunset or a nice meal on my behalf and free up my time, in the same way I save time on scenic hikes using Uber. And now that AI has solved all our problems, we can devote ourselves to more important work: going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.”
  • Retired Penn professor arrested for blocking Uber Eats robot. She “has made a practice of it to protest ‘corporations that displace human delivery workers in order to enrich their own bottom line.’”
  • Flag Ninjas Field Manual: “If you are here, it is because you want help organizing your local community to remove the aggressive flags that decorate your lampposts”. Explains tools and gives instructions for doing so.
  • There’s little that’s “inevitable” about AI. “Certainly, given that situation you might say that LLMs are inevitable in the weak sense: inevitable in the sense that we can’t uninvent the technology and that there are going to be weak actors that will persist in using the tools. In the strong sense, however? Certainly not. Any actor that’s at all serious in their field is, sooner or later, going to hit a point where LLMs cease being useful to them and actively hinder their further progress, and we absolutely do not see the massively overwhelming advantages that LLMs would need to have in order to become inevitable.”
  • Why No AI? A useful compendium of reasons so you don’t have to repeat yourself.
  • Palantir CTO: AI Researchers Smoke, Betting AI Will Cure Cancer. Idiotic, but the sad thing is that it won’t take them out fast enough to get us off this current destructive path.
  • Reverse engineering a commercial spatial audio effect.