I. This Escalated Quickly

I mentioned one post ago that this blog has done approximately 2M+ lifetime views, with over a million of them being in the past two weeks in response to the now-infamous rant about AI, then I went out of my way to not write the most maximally viral thing possible for personal don't-be-a-clickbaiting-grifter¹ reasons. But to say that the blog has done a lot of traffic is actually a huge understatement.

I have been understating the madness of the last few weeks because it took me a while to even figure out if it was a flash in the pan or something that is just my life now. I don't have any experience with how blog posts should do, so I genuinely didn't know if a million hits was "pretty good" or "Jesus Christ". On the previous occasions that my writing has done well, that merely resulted in getting enough email that I had to dedicate a few hours of time to reply to all of it.

This time around, it's just at a whole new level. My anonymity is totally gone. I have 318 unread emails, maybe another 500 lengthy messages on LinkedIn (which, despite the medium, are all thoughtful). I've joked before about making the Clout Number that is LinkedIn followers go up to terrorize empty suits, but I now have three thousand even though the only way to find me on LinkedIn is to navigate to my homepage, to the About Me, then to my profile. Do you know how much work that is in internet terms? There are companies that could 5x their revenue by removing that many steps from finding the purchase button. The worst part is that it's all wasted on me, I don't even know what you do with LinkedIn followers, so I've just been mocking people.

My friend Stephen Deutsch once told me to proceed by the light of the bridges I'm burning. He was joking but I've realized that my greatest weakness is that I can't stop myself from taking advice, even bad advice, if it sounds witty enough.

I've been on an episode of Better Offline with Ed Zitron and Robert Evans. Zitron called me cool on air, which is now going to be the first line of my CV for the rest of my life. There are episodes inbound of Screaming in the Cloud, the MLOps Community podcast, Byte Marx, the Joe Reis² Show, and 1984 Today.

TIME magazine has asked me to provide a quote on AI influencers. I don't even know if that's a big deal — I only see people talk about them when they put Putin and Hitler on the front cover, which I know is only funny in hindsight, but this is hindsight so it is funny. I know this might reek of hubris, but I think I could pick a hundred people in a row and miraculously end up with no fascists, hit me up if you'd like tips. Also, having now read the quality of tech journalism out there to prepare for interviews, the temptation to start sinking the industry's battleships by just doing their job better is very strong (though the journalist from TIME, Rebecca Schneid, was a delightful conversation partner and clearly phenomenally intelligent).

Another magazine, affiliated with an institution that took A$12,000 from me when I was immigrating to rubber stamp that I'm a certified software engineer, reached out for a quote on an anti-AI piece, and I got to send them this:

I appreciate you reaching out, and the piece sounds good! Unfortunately, I do have some familiarity with the [ORG], and it was all related to how the organization extracts money from immigrants (read: me) to rubber stamp their I.T credentials during the [COURSE ON EMAIL WRITING FOR FILTHY FOREIGNERS]. Also between the two of us, the only [ORG] members I've met in the workplace have been ancient demi-liches with minimal talent held together by nothing but grift and willingness to commit political violence. Blink twice (or email me from a personal address) if they're holding you hostage.

I haven't worked out if I have a media policy yet, but suffice it to say that "don't work with the [ORG]" is probably part of it.

This did not actually do anything to recoup my losses, the journalists were not personally to blame outside of working for an organization that obviously did some sneaky inside deals with a politician³, and realistically this was simply throwing away a chance at seeming more important than I actually am, but fuck it, we didn't get here by compromising. Proceed as you intend to continue.

Also there is something incredibly funny about watching people very carefully thank you for your time without acknowledging anything else in the email because their true feelings might be used against them by the decrepit poltergeists that haunt the executive suites.

I am slated to give a talk at GDG Melbourne, demo it on Primagen's Twitch channel before the big day, and am hoping to give another talk at DDD alongside noted absolute unit Stefan Prandl. And there's another talk that I'm thinking about attending in Vegas in 2025.

I'm also going to appear as a voice of anti-LLM reason in a documentary, which will finally convince my extremely conservative father that I have not tanked my career by going too hard. Despite what grifters would like you to think, if you aren't from a hypermarginalized community it is very difficult to go too hard, and you'll know you're there when you wake up in a cold sweat with a half-assembled molotov clutched in your hands. Disclaimer: This advice may not apply in the U.S, where I have heard that in many states you can be fired for so much as thinking that the boss has made a mistake at any point in their lives.

Someone has shipped me an early copy of their to-be-released book in case the possibility of a review might drive traffic to it.

This morning, I woke up and an editor reached out to offer me the opportunity to get a book published, which I am probably going to accept after doing some due diligence on what to look for in a publisher, which includes such wonderful phrases as "free rein", "no rush", and "please don’t dropkick me"⁴.

What I'm trying to say is that things have escalated extremely quickly.

II. The Mad Pathway To Get Here

One of my favourite authors, Nassim Taleb, is huge on the idea that the real world is pure chaos, and the incorrect belief that it isn't merely leads to people blundering constantly. The rough idea is that you want to maximize the areas of your life that are exposed to opportunity, preferably the kind that you can decline if the opportunity sucks. That is to say, don't hang out in a dark room all day, every day, if you're looking to live an exciting life. I live much of my life with that principle in mind, and point myself in an approximately nice-looking direction then accept that I'll end up somewhere totally different.

Did you know this blog was supposed to be about how to run fantasy tabletop RPGs effectively? Ludic isn't an inversion of lucid as most people guess, it means relating to play and is a reference to Taleb's ludic fallacy, which is the misapplication of simplistic game systems to the complexity of the real world. There's still a post in draft sitting at 5.5K words that I estimated would be finished at 50K which is mostly about how to be a good Game Master.

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In 2017, I wrote a blog post about my experience studying undergraduate psychology⁵ which did a thousand views on the first day. It was critical of epistemic and quality issues with how the field is approached at the undergraduate level. At the time, I had just graduated near the top of a major Australian university's Honours course, which tend to be hyper-competitive, not due to difficulty in the course material, but due to the fact that this is the main pathway to the very prestigious profession of clinical psychologist. Between us, as is a recurring theme on this blog, it was not actually very hard. Most of the other students refused to open their textbooks or start assignments the day before they were due. I was also interviewing to become a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Melbourne, which I didn't succeed at but even getting an interview as an international student is hard as hell. Plus I had tested most of my theories about the dysfunction of the university system by starting a small statistics tutoring business, where I showed students how to weaponize psychology against unserious academics. It did well enough that I probably could have filled my 9 to 5 with students if I had wanted to.

So of course, the internet being the internet, a very smart person on Reddit accused me of secretly failing, and then another genius insisted that I'm probably a Scientologist. Some people do not merely have smooth brains, they pride themselves on running their minds through an industrial QCM-SRP1300 Wide Belt Sander every morning. Then, amidst a swirling cloud of mangled neurons, they will insist that ackshually you're in a cult. Perish, dorks.

This is all you need to understand about why it is totally okay not to care what some people think. Namely, that some people do not think under any reasonable definition of the word. One of the funniest things that David Gerard told me when I started writing is that I can probably afford to be bold, because he survived tussling with Scientologists for real, which permanently blew out his threat detector.

There are some people who hate my guts. But that goes with the territory.

I changed the headline of that blog to "very little in terms of intellectual content", because you've got to laugh or you'll cry.

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Unfortunately, I never really followed up on that writing success. This is going to sound incredibly dumb, but I got so caught up trying to figure out how the website should look that I averaged a year between posts, before finally taking the website down because I didn't have a permanent work visa and was unexpectedly working with psychologists. I didn't want to find out if they had a self-reflective sense of humour and appreciation for epistemology the hard way.

I wrote another small piece on Taleb's narrative fallacy, which also did a few hundred views immediately, but I once again failed to follow up. If there's a lesson here for readers, it's that you can generate an audience very consistently even though luck is a major factor in how each individual piece goes. And also that you should be smarter than me and actually keep writing instead of getting stunlocked by font choices.

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While slaving over a chapter describing the game theory of lying to your players about what you rolled, I had a very frustrating day at work. I can't even remember what happened. I suspect someone just talked about Agile a little bit too much as I desperately begged them to understand that 0% test coverage is a problem. Since the blog already existed, I took two hours to knock out an article where I lamented that most of my work in the tech space seemed like it was being thrown away, as a total afterthought chucked in onto Hackernews, then went to bed.

Upon waking up, I was greeted by the startling knowledge that it had been #1 on Hackernews, something that seemed like it might be a big deal but I had no real way of knowing if it was a big deal.

I kept writing this time because I had chosen this precise platform because it was marketed as having no settings to mess with. Readership gradually built up, and currently every post in the backlog does between 200-500 hits per day, up from 10 per day last February. I have met a lot of astounding people that are on the same spiritual wavelength as me, and was pretty happy for this state of affairs to persist. Just enough attention to maybe give a fun talk at some point, maybe get a few job opportunities at nice companies, possibly generate a lead or two for consulting with the team.

Then I wrote a rant about AI which I expected to do 20K views, and now I'm worrying about how to tell if a printed book is going to have decent quality before signing with a publisher. Page feel is very important.

III. Why Me?

I've had to think deeply on whether I should accept all the attention.

One of the recurring jokes in David Edding's Belgariad is that characters, especially young ones, will ask the ancient sorcerer Belgarath why they were chosen for something, which alternates between frustrating the hell out of the old man and amusing him to no end. There is, of course, no point in asking "Why me?" because life just happens.

My first thought when most of this kicked off was, and I cannot emphasize this enough, I am some random guy with five years of industry experience who happens to be good at writing. Writing skill is not totally uncorrelated with aptitude for a field, but only insofar as you must genuinely have intuition for a field's underlying principles in order to draw links between areas to produce novelties. This is a complicated way of saying "I'm a better writer than I am a programmer", and the immediate temptation is to pass on the attention for fear of being in over one's head. So, why me? Well... because. That's all, because. I have Eddings to thank for being at peace with that answer. Things just happen when you put yourself out there.

However, I do have some more sophisticated thoughts on why me.

One is that I now view all fields as consisting of a bimodal distribution, which is how nerds say there are two types of people. That is, there is a huge clump of people that have not studied, have no particular talent for the thing they do professionally, but have nonetheless drifted into the field because it was a default. Some of the worst offenders I know in corporate settings are phenomenal parents or talented artists, and they do just do office work because it's easy to default into with no effort. Remember all those people that really wanted to get into HR at university? No? That probably explains why HR, real estate agents, and recruiters all seem largely disengaged in a way that is shocking to the rest of us. You'll hear people handwave this and say it's fine because they're just earning a living, and that's true until you realize that they work in hospitals and burn the billions of dollars necessary to compensate nurses respectfully. It's understandable, justifiable, and even I've benefited from those jobs, but it isn't fine.

Every single person I've spoken to in the past two weeks, from all industries, has quietly conceded that most of their field is run by people that have no business doing so. Don't panic, but this includes doctors.

While I know many people that are much smarter and wiser than me, I at least have opinions, try hard and read. I've self-certified myself as not being totally incompetent, which I know is a bold move in 2024, where everyone is encouraged to be maximally humble at all times to provide struggling psychologists with an endless supply of imposter syndrome work.⁶ Sincerely trying makes you good enough to be refreshing in a world that is filled by what my friend Courtney Brandabur calls "microphone guys". They just get the microphone and won't shut the fuck up even though we'd all like them too. Every night before bed, they gargle the words "innovation" and "alignment" until they're soaked in disgusting grifter saliva. The world isn't starved for my dubious engineering talent, it's starved for someone that can write decently, understands the fundamentals of the craft, and most importantly is willing to say risky things. I know this horrid state of affairs is true because otherwise someone with more experience would have been picked.

Secondly, my writing is obviously inflammatory. That makes for good listening. On Zitron's podcast, I accused Agile of being so many layers of terrible copying away from the original manifesto that "we're on Kamino but the clones have eight heads".

Thirdly, grifters have such a comprehensive stranglehold on the global corporate stage that the world is dying for someone to just say what we can all see. I can see the wishful thinking happening. It is very, very easy to transmute yourself into a thought leader. If I had lied and said my company did a hundred million dollars in revenue this year, journalists would have accepted it totally uncritically because they want it to be true.

Plenty of people who shared my writing described me as an "expert data scientist" and an "industry leader".

Expert data scientist, that's technically true, I'll concede, but I'm well out of practice and only talk about a university competition I cleaned up in. And, of course, people who actually read the linked article will note that I cleaned up via normal computer science, not machine learning! Ya boy even wins his AI competitions without using AI.

Industry leader, on the other hand, that's just wishful thinking. People want me to be an industry leader because they're craving an authority figure to confirm their feelings, but I don't run enough analytics to know if I am, so how could they know that? All my traffic could be Bobby "F5" Johnson from Rockford, Illinois, who compulsively refreshes every page on this blog a thousand times a day.

All that aside — much of that isn't a great reason to have a platform — it's clear to me that there's an opportunity to do something good. Grifters and hype will always exist, but loudly pushing back against those egos and bubbles is valuable work. More importantly, it's something that I'm uniquely positioned to do that other people can't right now, no matter how good they are at software engineering.

I received an astonishing amount of correspondence from non-technicians who tolerated by Postgres and try/catch jokes simply because they were so, so tired of hearing clowns tell them that ChatGPT is going to replace their jobs. The very dweebs who gloat about LLMs revolutionizing society are the ones on the chopping block and they're trying to scare other people. The first people to go will be Deloitte consultants because LLMs are very good at emitting bullshit — that's not their only use case, but it's obviously their main one.

Let me ask everyone in the audience this, both technical and non-technical — what is harder right now? Getting ChatGPT to produce a passable strategy for a large business, or getting artificial intelligence to navigate meatspace to fix someone's plumbing? Given the answer, do you think plumbers are going out of work before people that make Gantt charts for a living? I am going to spend a year repeating this question to every dickhead that brings this up, preferably on stages in front of large audiences.

And, I would be dishonest if I didn't admit this was a major factor, I've been having a lot of fun with the whole thing.

IV. What Now?

What now? This is the thing that I've been wrestling with over the past two weeks. It is becoming apparent that the attention will quiet down, but not enough for opportunities to stop cropping up. My main goal for the year, which was simply to ship one web app for blog readers to play around with to a standard that my mentors approve of, is probably off the table.

The first thing is that I have to make sure those talks are good as I can make them. I'll make posts here as they come out in case people are interested. I'm estimating that it will take take at least an hour per minute going into each talk, and that's because some of the audiences are small. I'm delivering between 30 and 120 minutes of talk by the end of the year, so there's going to be some serious hustling.

Secondly, I have to make sure that I somehow find some time to study — I've slacked on this while handling everything, and haven't seriously made email headway. A platform without matching self-development is one of the fundamental manifestations of grifting, alongside TED talks and being rewarded with speaking engagements after purchasing enterprise software. Plus, you can't write well without reading widely, and I must make some time for that too.

Then, of course, writing a book, possibly two. This is something that I've wanted to do since I was old enough to distress my Southeast Asian parents by naming careers that weren't doctor and lawyer. However, I was expecting to self-publish for a readership of, let me check those core demographics, my mother. Instead, it looks like I'm going to have one fiction book being self-published and something else aimed at the technology sector specifically.

I've decided not to even try to writing full-time. I sincerely believe this would cause the quality of my writing to suffer, as any writer needs a certain amount of contact with reality to continue producing meaningful content, and lounging around the house all day writing is not sufficient contact for the type of thing I write about. I might try this if a career in fiction writing takes off, but that would address a completely different audience, and we honestly have no clue if I'm any good at it.

However, I am seriously considering a six to twelve month sabbatical from my part-time job in order to clear time for technical study⁷ and getting those books done. This is very expensive for me, but the current moment feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I still have Patreon and Liberapay and shows of support are always appreciated, but I cannot emphasize this enough, it will not increase my writing output, and I have sufficient savings to survive the sabbatical. I've received somewhat mixed advice on this, with Ed Zitron noting that it probably helps to mention it's possible to support me, and Corey Quinn noting that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth for readers to feel like they're being shaken for money. The worst part is that both of those things sounds right.

So I've stuck the links up above, and I'll add some disclaimers. Supporting me through either channel will not make me write more — I write when the inspiration hits me, and I can't force more out for money while keeping quality. This blog will never be paywalled, the podcast is not paywalled with no plans to change this, and I intend to earn my living from programming for spiritual reasons and to avoid audience capture — the day that my lived experience totally diverges from that of the reader is probably the day that I stop writing. The only reason to chuck a few dollars in is to reassure me that people like my work enough to help me if my writing makes me unemployable at large companies, which I have been warned is already happening. Previously readers would say that they'd give me an internal referral but hide the blog in case it upset their managers, but this is obviously no longer actually possible. I still don't know if the typical company would welcome me for my values or if they're too worried about the consequences of to inviting the grifter's apex predator into food chain.

All future Patreon/Liberapay plugs will only happen once a year because I still find them distasteful, starting July 2025. And, because this probably matters to the engineers in the audience, Liberapay takes a much smaller share then Patreon and is committed to supporting free and open-source software.

My podcast may run an ad read or two if I find a sponsor with a product that I actually like, as I'm now busy enough that editing them is actually an ordeal. I'm not sure what this would actually mean, because the only tech products that have given me nothing but warm fuzzy feelings in recent memory are REAPER and the ZSA Moonlander, and they are right now getting plugged on my largest platform for free. Uh, I don't know anything about this, hit me up if you know how to get ethical podcast sponsors, I guess?

V.

So, to recap, it's all pretty straightforward.

I just have to prepare for two talks, fly to meet readers in Europe, get Australian citizenship so I can do a 2025 speaking engagement in Vegas, be in a documentary, handle a few more podcast episodes, keep producing my own podcast, ship the application that'll get me into software Valhalla, complete books such as How Linux Works and Writing a Compiler in Go, write a fiction and a non-fiction book, deal with the business coming to my consultancy, take care of my girlfriend who is currently dealing with Covid isolation, prepare for a theater performance in December, practice my first student performance for my music school, give career advice to all the students that reached out, try out my first journalism gig for a major U.S publication, get a coffee every weekday in the city with a reader, try to connect everyone that emailed me with someone in their local area who can help them with their job searches, and keep interviewing for good day jobs.

...

Oh fu—