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"Homer was not great literature at the time he his works were written".

They were not written at all. No written literature existed in the time of Homer.

If 90% of tech startups failed in the past, AI pushes that that rate to over 99%.

Cloud was like this too. You spent all this money as a startup with AWS regardless of whether you made a dollar or not.

"Ride the wave."

Or don't.

Most LLMs people are using to code are paywalled, and controlled by private, for-profit entities.

This is fundamentally different than the past, and diametrically opposed to the hacker.

If you're a hacker, which most of you are not (things have changed here over time), you will reject this.

The web stuff is well done. Now, with this newly created momentum, you should re-record the songs now, without AI. Hell, you could probably afford an awesome studio and equipment too. You could easily blow the AI out of the water.

Organic Maps 17 days ago

People at Apple are not left-handed, they don't drive, they don't work out, and they don't seem to go out in the cold very much. Oh, and they definitely don't play video games.

Becoming a professional software engineer without a Comp Sci (or overlapping engineering degree) was a bad idea for the reasons you mention.

I made it 15 years on mostly willpower earning millions of dollars, but never worked for a FAANG in any capacity, was unemployed (and even homeless) for different stints starting out, and to this day still get asked why I don't have a CS or engineering degree.

And a Haiku-powered Claude Code could now probably one-shot most of the stuff I have ever banged my head on as hard as I could to figure out.

I am just reflecting on the past though. What will make you "successful" then won't be what makes you that now.

My whole career (15+ year) is built on orgs (Fortune 500s, academia, government, and even startups) hiring me to actually get something done that an employee spent months "working on" that ended up useless and scrapped. It's everywhere, all the time.

Additionally, you can be productive from a development sense, ship functional software that is to spec, and everybody is happy - and it still never gets used, or gets canceled, and does nothing for anyone. This too, could also be considered performative.

The money does put food on the family dinner table, so be it.

Thales Bad Bot Report categorizes the traffic between "good" and "bad" bots.

I would add that AI dramatically blurs the line between legitimate and malicious, and the intent generally speaking.

In regards to social bots, there's a 2024 study of over 1 million accounts on X and over 60% were found likely to be bots. Curiously, when Musk took over Twitter, the "Blue Checkmark" became something that can be bought for several bucks a month (with crypto, even), without any sort of verification.

According to the Thales Bad Bot Report, in 2025 >53% of traffic came from bots. 2024 was 50 - 50, and in 2013, it was measured at 43%.

AI-driven* bot activity has increased more than tenfold however in the past 12 months so I'm confident this will grow to a very solid majority.

Screw Cloudflare. I went through a bizarre 3+ months hiring process where I would have a disconnected, vague 30 minute interview with someone every couple weeks. Then, suddenly rejected for no real reason given.