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Heidegger thinks about tools like so: a tool is something (a thing that has being in the Heideggerian sense, not necessarily an object) that represents an extension of human capabilities in some way.

Well, I run a product and a service that I make available using a fair amount of tech infrastructure now.

By contrast with this, the obscene Real underpinning the industry and the business world in 2025 isn't the Real of exploitation or of a founding act of violence but rather the Real of illegitimacy.

With that in mind, it became fairly clear to me that the tech industry these days has a depth problem: as much as tech is becoming quite a bit more complex, it's also becoming shallower.

I suppose that when I got into the industry the good parts of it were already on the way out.

I think the worst failure mode I've ever seen is one team that maintained a "git repository" for a collection of analysis scripts that was simply a directory on a shared drive.

You can feel the weariness at any tech meetup you go to these days.

I answer reader questions: this week we have discuss how to teach people non-intuitive concepts, avoiding mediocrity, how I feel about writing fiction and the pervasive sense a lot of us have that we don't belong in the industry.

In our society, elite competition happens largely on the fields of LinkedIn.

The competent LLM-using engineer will, in general, find themselves treated by management as though they're exactly as bad as the people who refuse to use LLMs at all.

The average quality of documentation available for most tech is abysmal.

All this is to say that I think that perhaps we were lying to ourselves when we worried about AI and its social impacts, not because we said that the technology is bad and has negative consequences (it does), but because of what we told ourselves: we crit…

Post removed as I wrote it in a situation of complete, abject burnout

Looking at my peers, this seems like a consistent pattern: the people who get the best engineering results out of coding agents are not only *not* the boosters, they're the people who think the whole enterprise is dubious and that basically everyone who m…

LIMy 2025 article An essay on wank proved to be startlingly widely read.

In this article, I tackle the single biggest factor, to my mind, that's hampering the development of a strong tech and startup industry in this country: the absolutely execrable state of our housing market.

In this article, then, I'll discuss five misconceptions that people commonly hold about trans people, with a tilt towards workforce interactions.

That, in short, is how friction works in war: things start out organised, prepared and informed.

There's a malaise in the air, in the tech industry and on LinkedIn (well, there's always a malaise on LinkedIn, but this is a new variety).

In dark times such as these, those of us who wish to see a better, more just world speak a lot of hope.

The tech industry has extreme difficulty integrating information that doesn't have its source in an overtly rationalist process.

Finally, it's a monumental waste of potential: some of the finest minds of this generation are stuck writing open-source Rust tools because nobody's willing to employ them, and while the tools are very useful, I think we'd all benefit from having them work

And now the punchline: this depersonalisation, the weird relationship to their bodily existence, inability to enjoy things and an internal void that people constantly try and fill with what they're told they should want... all of these things are very sim…

I've written my thoughts on what you, as a software professional, can do to make yourself less susceptible to being displaced by AI in our current wave of tech madness.

Which raises the question: what if the people on the other side of the divide aren't more trusting, less curious, less experienced or otherwise less suited or less capable of making use of the tools?

In today's article, I write a summary of my experiences working with an LLM coding assistant for a week.

rv is a new declarative command-line package manager for the R programming language written in Rust.

In the last two chapters of this book we've gone through the basics of setting up a development container, building a package and writing some functions that perform basic mathematical tasks.

As much as most of this year has been quite regrettable, my writing has been pretty successful.

All of these species of people, despite their wildly diverging politics, have one thing in common: they trigger the "my God, you're saying this again?

This chapter then aims to cover two important programming concept that software engineers use all the time but that statisticians tend not to use so much: functions and control flow.

It is worth noting from the very beginning that a software engineer's work doesn't start with writing code, but with setting up the development environment and the tools that they need to write code effectively.

The thing is, projects don't usually fail like that: I'd be hard-pressed to think of any projects where the strategic underpinnings of the project are sound, the supporting logistics and suchlike behind the company work as expected and the project simply…

Clausewitz (and I don't think Jomini particularly disagrees with him on this point) stresses understanding the capabilities of various units and weapons systems.

Despite what an awful lot of us like to think, social capability isn't a monolith: there is no one body of skills, knowledge and innate traits that makes you "good at social stuff": rather, there's a whole blob of different things, some innate, some learn…

This raises so many questions.

This captures well the uncomfortable, slightly disorienting feeling that wank creates when you're subjected to it, wherein you're expected to speak about and think about the statement as though it says what it facially does, but also not push too hard or…

A household can be resilient for a while.

It's fair to say that the tech industry at the moment is not in a good place.

The rockets, the bigotry, the LLMs, the AI cults, all of this... in the end, it all comes down to death.

When the first and most important skill for survival in a society is persuading some very wealthy, very stupid people, it completely fucks the whole incentive structure of the global economy.

In short, there are three major avenues of opposition to the tech industry: the vulgar, the horny and the threatening, mapping to attacks on the tech industry's luminaries from below, horizontally and from above.

The common ideological kernel of all of this behaviour is a deeply embedded trope in anglosphere societies: a contempt for materiality, or the idea that the material world that we eat, sleep, drink, fuck and die in is somehow beneath the notice or the care

The last article I published was by far the most popular one I have written so far.

The only reason that LLMs took root in the first place was because our societies in the anglosphere have already developed cultures solely devoted to gaining status and keeping up the appearance of doing things rather than actually doing them.

And of course, in the end, LLMs are themselves an example of this: something new, shiny and capable, but nonetheless something that doesn't fit into systems or meet real needs.

Well, a large part of it is CV-driven development, I'll not lie: I need to write thought leadership pieces demonstrating my skill with all aspects of technology and especially infrastructure and DevOps, and these days, that means you have to understand co…

Which raises the question: given these struggles and the precarious position I exist in, why did I think this was the best use of my time?

Given that this is the case, erstwhile critics of DEI policies from a broadly leftish perspective need a new synthesis for how to talk about DEI practices that captures the good things they were doing.

The fact, however, is that for a lot of us who've mastered something hard, this kind of experience of bringing unconscious knowledge consciously into the forefront of one's mind by *having it pointed out to you* by a teacher whom you trust is absolutely a…