The people paid the most are often the best, at least at the individual contributor level. The MBAs doing the layoffs sort the to-be-canned spreadsheet by highest salary at the top and toss those people out first. They don’t care about skill or knowledge even a little bit.
That’s all it is.
A common mistake I see is that people now believe that all AI is an LLM. However, there are tons of other types of AI (not an exhaustive list): search algorithms, game-playing agents, recommender systems, robotics control, computer vision, classic expert systems, optimization, etc. Many of those precede modern LLMs by 40+ years.
When people hear “AI,” they think ChatGPT. But I had a colleague who was working on AI email spam filtering back in the 1990s. So this stuff has been around a while.
It’s a strange thing that I can look at an email for around 1-2 seconds and determine if it’s phishing and/or fraudulent just at a glance and many of the users I’ve worked with over the years couldn’t determine the same thing if they spent six months attempting to figure it out.
It is amazing sometimes the differences in people’s abilities.
That is the easiest way to get banned from anywhere — go against the herd. I find myself running away from the stampede often enough so I know how that works. It’s how I got banned from Reddit the first time. I disagreed with the wrong people and they kicked me out. And the closer to being right you are, the more likely you are to be shitcanned.
It’s annoying to think about how much better and actually-used and useful Firefox could have been if the devs had concentrated on making it distinguishable from other browsers rather than attempting to shape it into a third-rate Chrome clone. That was never going to be a successful strategy as many, many people including me told them over the years. In fact, I even got banned from all of Reddit for laying out the case in very clear terms. (And no, I didn’t violate the Reddit TOS. I just got the ire of every Firefox dev because my predictions started coming true).
Firefox was the last bastion of the old internet. Now effectively dead; a walking corpse that’ll fall into the first pit it stumbles across. It could’ve been different and the path there was fairly clear, but the devs chose a direction that granted them the most power rather than empowering the users.
And that was their grave mistake.
Hong Kong firefighters searching through 2000 flats like these to look for survivors.
One of the many reasons I dislike living in apartments or condos is that if a fire starts, you’re fucked. You can’t get out. By the time you know about the blaze it’s often too late.
In a house, you can just break out a window and jump out. Even if you’re on the second story, you might fracture your ankle or something but you’ll live. Good luck jumping from the 23rd floor of a tower.
Cool. Now that we’re getting rid of the curse of obesity, too bad we can’t also eliminate the scourge of tattoos. But I’ll take the win.
The fight for local Windows accounts matters—here’s why.
For what he does say, i think Spengler is more or less right. Concur.
France joins Europe’s military service bandwagon.
A stranger messaged him on Facebook. It was the start of a nightmare that cost him $280,000 A dumbass does dumbass stuff and then the expected end result occurred. Also, in IT with only $280K in savings at 52?
Is America’s jobs market nearing a cliff? Has already gone over, really, no matter what this article claims.
American Consumers Have Had It With High Car Prices.
Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors for America’s Commercial Fleet.
the unstated mental model of the ai bubble conversation seems to be that once the bubble pops, we go back to the world as it once was, butlerian jihad by financial overextension. but the honest reporting is that everything, everything, is already and forever changed
— Jake Eaton (@jkeatn) November 29, 2025
As a wise friend once advised in a different context: there is no going back. If you know nothing else about how history and the evolution thereof functions you must know that any idea of return to the past is an invalid one and impossible due to the nature of humanity and reality itself. Retreating there cannot be done and attempting to do so is a fool’s errand that leads only to ruin.
Railroads didn’t disappear when that bubble popped. Neither did the internet in 2001. AI and all its implications, complications and dislocations will not either when the AI bubble deflates in 2027 or 2028. Quite the opposite — AI will get vastly cheaper as all those data centers are liquidated and it thus will be used far more.
There is no return. The past’s waves ripple outward forever and cannot be un-waved nor thoughts un-thought. Indeed, as an also very-wise cat once observed: what has been seen cannot be un-seen.
Soap&Skin’s cover of Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues” is one of the greatest of all time.
It makes so much difference when an artist actually understands a song.
Western civilization has been so successful in providing personal safety that natural selection is no longer eliminating people who lack the most basic life-preserving instincts. https://t.co/UUFJxxtEEc
— Coddled Affluent Professional (@feelsdesperate) November 30, 2025
I think this is accurate. Just as with the clownish anti-vax rightists where anti-vax beliefs can only prosper where there are safe, effective vaccines, the sort of sentiments that Alyssa expresses can only proliferate when people are safe and cloistered from most harms.
It’s a disease of prosperity and safety. In both cases. “Suicidal empathy” like many other symptoms of terminal civilizational decline will be largely wiped out in the world war that’s coming up in the next decade or so.
Everyone buckled in?
This piece has tubular bells, goth girls, electric violin, great music and nice cinematography. The only way you could possibly improve it would be with a dinosaur or two.
Something else I’ve noticed about Gen Z and younger Millennials: they are extremely concerned with their “boundaries” and telling you all about them, but not at all interested in what they themselves have to offer in a relationship.
This is a symptom of how terrified they are of, well, everything and how closed off from the world they are. There is nothing wrong with boundaries as we used to think of them back in the 1990s. However, the version of those bounds now is designed to prevent any risk, stand in the way of closeness, and to forestall even the possibility of vulnerability.
Those aren’t “boundaries,” unless you consider four walls in a 6×8 cell with bars for a door to be a safe haven. No, all they’ve done is created a prison with a more PR-friendly name.
For the first time, ChatGPT made me laugh. I don’t usually talk with it (rather, I tell it to give me something), and I’ve disabled most of its suggestions and conversationalness. But I started it in this case. And it gave me a response that made me actually laugh out loud. I’m in green above. Below that is ChatGPT.
“The ‘nuke the doghouse’ era is over.”
That’s good stuff.
