ExFed

The ability to weaponize capital markets doesn’t make them inherently bad.

It also doesn’t help that it seems to conveniently forget that the fossil fuel industry is an international cartel. It breaks capitalism by virtue that it can control its entire market and a great many markets (and governments) to which it’s connected.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

What? You mean global cartels controlling a plurality (if not majority) of the world’s wealth break the free market? Say it ain’t so!

Seriously, getting everybody to forget the basic fact that the fossil fuel industry is a cartel is one of the first priorities of the fossil fuel industry’s propaganda playbook. This article might as well be written by one of their FUD propagandists.

Y’all realize that the fossil fuel industry already isn’t a capitalistic entity, right?

An entire article about capitalism and the economics of fossil fuels? Surely they’ll mention the fossil fuel industry is NOT a capitalistic free market, allowing it to actively suppresses the process of internalizing externalities (via environmental cost accounting), right?

No mention? Bummer.

They’re arguing the opposite? Whacko.

No no no you see George Washington was an avowed Marxist.

Time travel was definitely involved.

It’s not that my brain is tired or even that I trust LLMs, I just don’t have time and either an LLM can create the thing I want or I do without. If the project fails, nothing of value is lost.

At home, that’s the summary of so many of my hobby projects lately. At work, however, there’s one phenomenon that I don’t know if we have a name for yet: loss of job satisfaction because a large part of the joy of creative problem solving comes from the process of wrestling with a hard problem, making a breakthrough, and genuinely learning something. LLMs make it too easy. I don’t feel like I’m learning anything of value. I’m just regurgitating some version of the LLM’s solution back to my coworkers during stand-ups. And so, if anyone really pressed me on the details, I would have a hard time coming up with anything. For this latest release on a project that I’ve worked on for most of a year and given demos for in the past, we unleashed AI. I’m genuinely nervous to give an upcoming customer demo for this release because I don’t really feel like I understand the changes were shipping.

At first, I thought it was just a problem I was experiencing alone. But then I started hearing others express very similar sentiments. At least one person mentioned that they chose to work on hobby projects without LLMs, precisely because they wanted to recapture that joy they lost from their career. Even though I’ve finally started knocking out quite a few ideas from the backlog that had accumulated over the years, it’s hard to really reach that same level of satisfaction.

Is there a balance point where I can stay on top of the backlog while feeling like my brain hasn’t fallen out of my head?