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2026-02-11 02:46:09

i am the oldest of the Gen-Z. I remember what it was like to use Facebook back in the day. I was too young for MySpace. I remember logging onto Facebook after a day of school to see which of my friends were online. What did they post? What game were they playing? Mobile apps weren't a thing.

Oh and I am old enough to remember I could actually run out of things to see on my feed. You could actually reach the end of your feed. Crazy right? You didn't have a sea of endless content waiting for you at all times.

Corporations hadn't taken over the feed, there were no influencers. No content creators. Maybe I am viewing it through the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia, there are certainly positives to what we have today but the negatives far outweigh them. People are so ready for a new kind of 'social media'. And players are starting to fill up that space. See PI.FYI for example. Even on BearBlog, we have a community here. I visit Bearblog far more frequently than I visit Instagram these days. (I get overstimulated easily and instagram/tiktok is the final boss of overstimulation.)

Most of us have lost confidence in these big tech companies, and there's very litle they can do to win it back. I guess this is my prediction for 2026 and beyond, more and more people are going to move to slower and more tight-knit social media spaces.

2026-02-11 01:38:00

this system seems to think that if it keeps creating new controversies, atrocities, and escalations, that i’ll forget about the old ones

???

you’re not going to convince me that raping children on epstein island is bad but killing them in gaza is ok

i’m not trying to have my every moral standard annihilated by career politicians and corporate media

???

if a politician rapes or kills children, that’s all i need to know about them

no way they can possibly represent me, or make laws for me to follow that aren’t a joke

???

i’m not impressed if a lawmaker criticizes ice but doesn't lift a finger to stop it

i don't think that democrats helping republicans to triple ice's funding is going to reduce ice violence even if a puerto rican plays at the super bowl

???

schumer, harris, newsom, jeffries, their whole corrupt party apparatus and media operatives want me to believe that certain genocides are ok

???

isn’t it funny how the government offers so many gory details of their past violence and sex crimes on epstein island

but no gory details on their current violence and sex crimes in palestine

???

i’m told it’s unrealistic to ask lawmakers and businesses to take actual action to stop genocide or ice

but it is realistic to give votes and money to lawmakers and businesses who support genocide and ice, and then expect them to turn around and change their minds once in power or wealth

???

it’s not like democrats and republicans don’t realize how hellishly far to the right they are of most americans on all the major existential issues facing humanity, whether it’s ice, policing, war, genocide, fossil fuels, healthcare, minimum wage, wall st, a.i.

it’s not like they’re about to figure it out, if only we would just go easy on them

???

human trafficking and genocide were basic to the country’s success and still are

money is king and life is disposable

meanwhile power wants you obsessed with a few paid actors playing “bad apples”

and totally ignorant of the depraved system they epitomize

???

power is not afraid of public anger as long as it’s disorganized or channeled into the super bowl and the public thinks that this will have any affect on policy

obviously power knows how to monetize anger and is doing so very profitably

???

this system can withstand tremendous amounts of hate

obsessing over every utterance of the attention whore in the white house did not make him less powerful

it gave him free publicity and got him elected

???

each new scandal is a test to see how much this system can get away with

this system is designed to handle tremendous waves of anger and hate, as long as they don’t disrupt the operation of the system

keep scrolling, keep arguing amongst ourselves, keep buying from corporations and voting for duopoly

meanwhile policies keep moving to the right year after year

???

one advantage of creating public anger, panic and confusion is it keeps the public perpetually glued to electronic screens, waiting in suspense for politicians and corporations to provide them with answers they never give

???

another advantage of creating public anger, panic and confusion is that it makes public violence more likely, which helps create a pretext for profitable arrests or murders

???

what power fears most is a public that’s savvy enough to see through their propaganda techniques, can remember things powerful people have done before the latest scandal, and can synthesize randomly shocking headlines into a logical narrative, and who takes matters into their own hands

!!!

2026-02-10 12:59:00

Hey, hi, hello.

Fun fact: One of this blog's readers shared February 3's post on her LinkedIn because she understands that when you're having one of those days, it's useful to read that about how other people kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

Moving on... do you remember when your teacher would show you a movie and it was the best day ever? And then later, remember when you realized it was likely because that teacher was hungover or otherwise ill-prepared to teach? Anyway, for reasons related to family and emotional fatigue I'm going to do something like that today but instead of dusting off an old VHS copy of Three Amigos I'm going to link you to a YouTube video I keep coming back to: Anthony Gramuglia's Elon Musk Doesn't Understand Cyberpunk.

Enjoy! I'm going to bed.

🌲 gonna zzzzzzz
🌼 go zzzzzzzzzzz
🌱 touch zzzzz
🌳 grass zzzzzz
🌷 zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Be good to yzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

==If you enjoyed this post, click the little up arrow chevron thinger below the tags to help it rank in Bear's Discovery feed and maybe consider sharing it with a friend or on your socials.==

2026-02-10 07:38:00

In the last couple weeks, various folks have written about feeling an inflection point using agentic AI for building software. The consensus seems to be that these tools have crossed some threshold into being genuinely game-changing, and maybe there's no turning back. The piece Competence As Tragedy especially got me thinking. It's not long, so I'd recommend reading the whole thing, but this feels like the heart of it:

[W]hat does it mean to keep practicing a craft you love when you suspect it's dying?

The skills might be depreciating, but the attention, the way of seeing systems, the pleasure of making something work, that's not separable from who I am. I didn't become an engineer because the market demanded it. I became one because my brain works this way, because I like the puzzle, because there's something satisfying about building things that function.

All this has pushed me to reconsider my (so far) lack of use of agentic AI as a professional software engineer. This article is me writing out my thoughts on the matter, as they stand right now, and my decision for how to proceed in this current moment.

Ethics

First off, I am tired of people writing things like this and not properly acknowledging the ethical issues of generative AI¹. These models are:

• Trained on stolen data,
• Using unreasonable amounts of electricity and other resources at a moment where humanity needs to be cutting down on our environmental impact,
• Accelerating the atomization of society and the destruction of our shared understanding of the world,
• Owned by a handful of Silicon Valley oligarchs who clearly have no interest in the well-being of individuals or humanity as a whole, and
• Likely not even financially viable in their current state, in which case this will cause a major economic crisis when the AI bubble bursts.

It sucks a little of my soul each time I hear someone at work talk about AI tools on a purely technical basis, without any consideration of these ethical issues. These are cool and powerful tools, with lots of technical nuance that's interesting to discuss and engineer, but don't get distracted. We as engineers cannot choose to ignore ethics in our professional decision-making.

All that being said, I don't feel that I have any notable impact on the harms being done. I know this is a doomer take, but that's where my head is right now. I'm not going to lead some luddite rebellion against AI at my workplace. My employer already has floating licenses for these tools, so what marginal impact will I have by trying them out? It's not zero, but it seems like it's small enough that I'm willing to begrudgingly continue.

There's a chance that if I start using these tools regularly, the ethics will end up making me queasy enough that I choose to disengage even if I find them otherwise useful and/or enjoyable. We'll see.

My History With AI

I've used AI for some one-off personal and professional tasks. These were via chatbots, where I ask a specific question and I'm looking for a clear answer. I have been relatively unimpressed with the results, though I haven't put much effort into changing my usage to prompt better responses.

For a while I told myself that once my job had a nice plug-and-play setup for agentic workflows, I would give it a try. But that happened a couple months ago and I haven't touched it. I told myself that if a task came up that felt like a good fit for the AI, I'd give it a go, but that never happened -- each task feels either small enough to not warrant learning a new system, or large enough that I don't want to entrust it to the AI on my first try.

So What Now?

My plan is to spend a week trying my best to learn some of these tools by using them in my day-to-day work.

This article seems like a reasonable guide for how to gradually grow experience around using these tools. On the plus side, I should be able to reuse a lot of the "harness engineering" that my coworkers have been working on as I do this.

My main goal from this is to learn. I think I already have a solid understanding of the technology and frameworks surrounding LLMs, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. However, none of that is from practical experience. I can talk about what the AIs are good at and where they struggle, and I think I'm right (my opinions are at least formed by reading and talking to smart, informed people). But any time I have a conversation about this stuff, I worry that I might be full of shit. After this week is done, I will hopefully have enough experience to feel confident I'm not full of shit (at least until there's some other paradigm-shift in how programming is done...)

After this week-long trial, I'll reassess and see how I'm feeling.

I'm Afraid

This all scares me. I don't like admitting that, but it does.

I'm afraid in so many ways for our world and how we're all going to make it through these unprecedented times.

I'm afraid that the joy I've always found in programming work will be lost, if programming turns into managing AI agents. Maybe non-AI programming will continue to be a viable option, or maybe I can find similar joy in AI-based workflows, but neither seem like a sure bet.

I'm afraid for the long term prospects of being a professional software engineer. I'm 27; I've been programming for almost half my life now. I love it, and for better or worse it's part of my identity. I think I'd struggle if AI significantly cuts down the need for this kind of work and I have to redirect my career path.

And I'm afraid for the craft of software itself. If AI tools become the norm for writing software, does that mean perpetual stagnation in language and framework design?

I recognize that I may be blowing things out of proportion, but this is the baggage that I've got. It seems likely at this point that AI-assisted software engineering is not just a fad. I hope I've made it clear that I'm not doing this just because "AI is the future, don't get left behind 🚀🚀🚀". But there is also an aspect that I'm afraid lacking this experience will leave me at a disadvantage compared to other developers if/when I end up job-searching in the future.

Conclusion

I feel like I'm supposed to have some big smart conclusion for all this, but I don't. I'm giving in and trying agentic AI, despite remaining unhappy with the ethical ramifications of the decision. We'll see how it goes.

2026-02-10 07:02:00

The things often left out of the age verification conversations

Today Discord announced they're going to be moving towards mandatory photo ID for users and locking all features down to a “teen” age level unless an ID or face scan has been added.

This is hugely problematic for a lot of reasons (least of which is them accidentally letting over 70,000 government IDs get leaked) but in theory this is to comply with laws and as someone who has seen horrendous shit go down with unsupervised kids online (including myself as a teen) I can understand a tiny sliver of why someone might be fooled into thinking they want this or that it's actually helpful for kid's protection.

It's not, but that's how they get you.

The thing is, changing these policies is not gonna keep predators away from kids and it's not gonna keep kids from finding things that either they shouldn't, OR they SHOULD / NEED to find. It'll just push everyone further into less safe places. To elaborate a bit:

Every conversation in major media surrounding kids on the internet usually boils down to “it's a ripe avenue for predators to groom children” (as if that's a thing we actually care about given the pedophile in the highest political office in my supposedly major world power country) and things that don't often factor in these conversations:

1. Parents should be doing a better job helping their kids navigate the internet and having an interest and dialog in what they're up to - while also giving said kids privacy to become people. It's my job as a parent to help my kids understand red flags and how to be safe, not panopticon over their activity logs

2. The flip side of the above where abusive, horrendous bigoted parents have queer kids who need access to resources outside of the home with a guarantee of safety and anonymity

The inclusion of photo ID requirements is not gonna serve the point that allows queer kids to get help if they have a hostile home life, and it's not gonna encourage lazy parents to be more involved in their kids online activity if "oh they don't have an 18+ ID, I don't need to worry about what they're up to".

That's even as an aside when you consider that there will be plenty of illicit circumventing of these policies that I can already imagine (and probably plenty that haven't even been thought up yet).

So where does that leave us? Who fucken knows, man. Shit is only gonna get worse for people by locking it down.

And while on the subject of one platform for everything

As an aside to the age conversation, Discord has become a monolith in a way it never should have. As a group chat app / friends list chat program? Sure. That's its main purpose. But it's moved on to replace community forums, websites, even fucking FILE hosting; I travel in a lot of emulation and modding circles and there's nothing more bonkers than “Join our Discord to download the latest update”. I legitimately hate being put in a situation where I long for a goddamn github link.

Will this photo ID thing be the "death" of Discord? No - but like Twitter being bought by a maniac with a humiliation kink that I shouldn't be forced to know about, a lot of the people who I'd trust to make good calls in this space have wanted to distance themselves from the platform for a while and I think the addition of the ID policy gives the extra push to start making that happen. And hopefully not to just one new or alternative platform.

Maybe it's because I went through this with the death of twitter and then cohost (DAYS SINCE COHOST MENTIONED ON THIS BLOG: 102?? no, that can't be right) but I don't want one place for everything. One login, one platform etc. If my band's group chat needs to be in a different app than the one where I share shitposts in a channel called [checks notes] #cloaca with fellow audio people? That's ok with me!!

I know I sound like a fucking grumpy old bastard all the time when it comes to discussing modern internet but god damn - we had it so good and we didn't even know it. Back to websites. Back to forums. Back to RSS. Back to competing platforms that don't have a monopoly on fucking everything. I know this sounds rich coming from a Website League sicko, but even that platform I don't use monolithically. If anything, I blog first and then go to various socials. It's pretty freeing, tbh.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Here's a cat. Her name is Skitters.

2026-02-10 04:57:21

Well, I did it! I finally found a cosy little spot on the web to call my own. (I played around with the appearance a bit, but will do so again later, once I've learned more coding and made some more imagery.)

This blog's purpose won't be anything special, to be honest. Just a place for me to casually spill my thoughts, record what I've been up to, and share photos (and maybe art). My memory's not amazing, so I hope that by writing things down, I can remember them better. Or... if not, then at least I'll have something to look back at to refresh my memory.

A quick bit about myself (though, I'll make a proper about page, eventually): The name's Tash. I live in the UK, with my husband, my daughter (whom I'm a full-time carer for), and my cat. I started getting into gardening just over a year ago, and it's been a great boon to my mental health. (I struggle with depression and severe ADHD, but I'm currently doing well. Amazing what less screen-time and more dirt-time does for the mind, body, and spirit.)

I need to go cook dinner now, but will write again soon. TTFN!

Currently...

• Listening to: "Wild Swamps" by Tales Under the Oak
• Drinking: Lemon and ginger tea