Latest Posts (20 found)
DHH 1 weeks ago

Give me AI slop over human sludge any day

We're fed an endless stream of consternation over AI slop these days. The content apocalypse is nigh! It'll rot your brain! Okay, sure, maybe, but have you seen the kind of content sludge that perfectly ordinary humans are capable of producing? It's thrice as tragic. The web is full of it. Garbage writing and brain-dead shorts. Content mills pumping out nonsense pages and gagging videos to appease whatever the high priests of SEO now think they've divined will please Lord Google or Master TikTok.  It's been infecting websites everywhere with "calls to action", "white paper available upon sign up", and "10 ways to supercharge your productivity". Links stuffed into every crevice to juice rankings, capture "most searched for" keywords, and convert, convert, convert. It's an affront to humanity to make sentient beings do this work. Turning human potential, creativity, and ingenuity into content sludge is a process no more dignified than turning pink slime into chicken nuggets. I'll take AI slop over human sludge any day. Let the little robots barf up tokens to unlock the next basis point of incremental conversion. Better them than us, I say. This is exactly the soul-crushing, creative drudgery that machines were made to munch through without complaint. But couldn't we do without sludge or slop, you say? Sure, right after we reach a shared state of nirvana. As soon as the average 4.5 hours of screen-on time is turned into real reading, real making, real pursuits. So that'll happen exactly never. Case in point: the most important attribute of a phone for most people is still the battery life. These little content slop and sludge faucets can already spew out nearly an entire day's worth of nonstop eyeball junk, and yet you crave more. More! MORE! So stop whining about the AI slop. You're already steeped in human sludge. And the door to exit both was always there. But you're not going to open it, are you?

ai AI
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DHH 1 weeks ago

Pay yourself first

There'll always be more emails in need of reply, more meetings to attend, and more updates to read. A person can fill the entire workweek with these tasks over and over again. But to stay sane and sharp, you must pay yourself first by doing the work that actually means something to you. I feel this acutely as someone responsible to employees, customers, followers, and readers. I could do nothing all day but check up on projects, people, and posts, but my brain would quickly check out if it was just doing that. So quite frequently, I just don't. Don't check in, don't check up, and instead dive into the work that checks my own intellectual boxes. Programming for the love of it. Experimenting for the hell of it. Researching for the fun of it. In another age, I might have been tempted to apologize for such privilege, but screw that. Privilege is wonderful. You should do your best to earn more of it. Even if you have to carve it out of the bare rocks around you. Ironically, the best way to do that is also to choose to always pay yourself first, however little at first. By solving your own problems, tickling your own interests, chasing your own curiosity. That's where you'll find the motivation to elevate your talent. To turn interest into competency.  And once you've developed some competency, you'll be rewarded with more privilege to build it further. This is the virtuous circle of merit. There'll always be an endless list of work that could be done. You'll never get through it all and onto your own priorities, if you continue to put them at the bottom.

programming Programming career Career
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DHH 2 weeks ago

We've all had enough of this nonsense

Every few years, the same sad contingent of Ruby malcontents tries to cancel me from Rails. At the peak of the woke era, back in 2022, they were actually successful in getting Ruby Central to uninvite me from doing the yearly keynote at RailsConf. But now RailsConf is dead, Rails World is thriving, and the cancellation nonsense is over. Only I guess nobody told that same sad contingent! Because three days ago, they tried yet again, with the same trite grab bag of accusations: "he holds racist and transphobic views, as well as a number of other traits undesirable". And to add to the outrage theater, they named their little letter after a French resistance action fighting the Nazis during WWII. Subtle! Except this time, nobody cared. In fact, quite the opposite. Thousands of people have taken to X and elsewhere to reject this nonsense, and that's apparently making one of the organizers very sad: So far though, my experience has been that there are many more negative responses than positive. Maybe the Ruby community isn’t the place I thought it was, and MINASWAN was always a lie. That makes me sad. 😢 I guess I would be sad too if I had named my group after THE GOOD GUYS and then it turned out that everyone thought I was THE BAD GUYS. But that's exactly what happened. The outpouring of support from all sides has been overwhelming. This is what it looks like when preference falsification finally falls. When normal people are no longer afraid to say no to these people. Then it's revealed just how small and isolated these aggrieved individuals actually are. Tobi from Shopify said it best: It’s such a terrible mental tax on builders that divisive clowns just ride in and spew these bullshit terms that they clearly don’t understand themselves in bad faith. Ignore & keep building. That's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to reject and ignore these nut jobs. Then we're going to keep building.

ai AI programming Programming ruby Ruby
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DHH 2 weeks ago

Calling someone a "nazi" is a permission slip for violence

The last loonies on tech's woke island are getting desperate. It used to be that a wide variety of baseless accusations of racism, misogyny, or white supremacy could inflict grave social and professional consequences for the accused, but that's no longer true. So now they've had to up the ante, and that's why everyone is suddenly a nazi to these people. Because if you can't intimidate people into silence and compliance with the woke orthodoxies by threatening their job or their social circle, you might be able to threaten them with actual violence or worse. That's what the "nazi" accusation is there to convey: That violence has been authorized. The slogan has been around for a while: Punch a nazi. It has a sorta quaint, winking phrasing, so you'd be forgiven for thinking that maybe it wasn't actually meant as a real threat. But I think that theory has gone out the window. Just look at what happened to Charlie Kirk. This is a natural consequence of all the lost terrain. The DEI bureaucracies in tech have been decimated or dismantled. The tone-setting social media, X, can no longer be wielded for narrative control (and Bluesky keeps shrinking from purity purges). And finally, the American administration went from blue to red in 2024. Lost terrain means lost leverage. Which means the usual threats have stopped working because they relied on that institutional and broad social leverage to be effective. And these loonies know that. The threat of violence, however, is evergreen. It's the final resort of a movement that has lost a political and philosophical path to victory in the public square. It's sad, it's pathetic, but you're not wrong to be worried when political assassinations are justified and exalted in reference to the "nazi" threat.  But that's just all the more reason you can't give in, you can't give up. The defeat of wokeism in the workplace should give you comfort. These people are not invincible. The wheels have been falling off their political project for years now. You can and should say "no" when they come with the "nazi" nonsense too.

culture Culture media Media
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DHH 3 weeks ago

The great falls of Boeing, Intel, and Apple

It takes ten years for the culture of a great company to fall apart once the CEO seat is given to someone without an engineering or product background. That's been the story of Boeing, Intel, and now Apple. Legendary American companies that all got lost when a bean counter, marketing man, or logistics hand took over

career Career business Business culture Culture
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DHH 1 months ago

As I remember London

As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go. Compared to Copenhagen at the time, there was something so majestic about Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and even the Tube around the turn of the millenium. Not just because their capital is twice as old as ours, but because it endured twice as much, through the Blitz and the rest of it, yet never lost its nerve

culture Culture writing Writing go Go
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DHH 1 months ago

Apple has no one left who can say no

Apple spent a decade trying to develop their own car with Project Titan. It never launched, and was finally canceled in 2024, but not before the company had spent ten billion dollars on getting nowhere. In the same time frame, Tesla launched the Model X, Model 3, Model Y, and the Cybertruck

business Business hardware Hardware
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DHH 1 months ago

Words are not violence

Debates, at their finest, are about exploring topics together in search for truth. That probably sounds hopelessly idealistic to anyone who've ever perused a comment section on the internet, but ideals are there to remind us of what's possible, to inspire us to reach higher — even if reality falls short. I've been reaching for those debating ideals for thirty years on the internet

writing Writing
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DHH 1 months ago

Thrice charmed at Rails World

The first Rails World in Amsterdam was a roaring success back in 2023. Tickets sold out in 45 minutes, the atmosphere was electric, and The Rails Foundation set a new standard for conference execution in the Ruby community. So when we decided to return to the Dutch Capital for the third edition of the conference this year, the expectations were towering

ruby Ruby rails Rails
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DHH 1 months ago

Engineering excellence starts on edge

The best engineering teams take control of their tools. They help develop the frameworks and libraries they depend on, and they do this by running production code on edge — the unreleased next version. That's where progress is made, that's where participation matters most. This sounds scary at first. Edge. Isn't that just another word for danger. What if there's a bug. Yes, what if

devops DevOps programming Programming
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DHH 1 months ago

Omarchy 2.0

Omarchy 2. 0 was released on Linux's 34th birthday as a gift to perhaps the greatest open-source project the world has ever known. Not only does Linux run 95% of all servers on the web, billions of devices as an embedded OS, but it also turns out to be an incredible desktop environment

programming Programming
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DHH 1 months ago

National pride

The Danish flag is everywhere in Denmark. It's at the airport when parents greet their kids coming back from holiday. It's on the birthday cake when you invite people over. It's swinging from the flagpoles in house after house, especially in the countryside. It's on the buses on the monarch's birthday. It's everywhere and all the time. I love it

ai AI culture Culture media Media
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DHH 2 months ago

Omarchy micro-forks Chromium

You can just change things. That's the power of open source. But for a lot of people, it might seem like a theoretical power. Can you really change, say, Chrome. Well, yes. We've made a micro fork of Chromium for Omarchy (our new 37signals Linux distribution). Just to add one feature needed for live theming

open-source Open Source linux Linux
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DHH 2 months ago

What do you do with a chance?

One day, I got a chance. It just seemed to show up. It acted like it knew me, as if it wanted something. This is how Kobi Yamada's book What do you do with a chance. starts. I've been reading that beautiful book to the boys at bedtime since it came out in 2018. It continues: It fluttered around me. It brushed up against me. It circled me as if it wanted me to grab it

books Books
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DHH 2 months ago

All-in on Omarchy at 37signals

We're going all-in on Omarchy at 37signals. Over the next three years, as the regular churn of hardware invites it, we're switching everyone on our Ops and Ruby programming teams to our own Arch-derived Linux distribution (and of course sharing all the improvements we make along the way with everyone else on Omarchy. )

business Business web-development Web Development
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DHH 2 months ago

It's beginning to feel like the 80s in America again

Have I told you how much I've come to dislike the 90s. The depressive music, the ironic distance to everything, the deconstructive narratives, the moral relativism, and the total cultural takeover of postmodern ideology. Oh, I did that just last week. Well, allow me another go. But rather than railing against the 90s, let me tell you about the 80s. They were amazing

ai AI music Music culture Culture go Go
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DHH 2 months ago

The Framework Desktop is a beast

I've been running the Framework Desktop for a few months here in Copenhagen now. It's an incredible machine. It's completely quiet, even under heavy, stress-all-cores load. It's tiny too, at just 4. 5L of volume, especially compared to my old beautiful but bulky North tower running the 7950X — yet it's faster. And finally, it's simply funky, quirky, and fun

hardware Hardware performance Performance
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DHH 2 months ago

YouTube has earned its crown

I often give Google a lot of shit for shutting down services whenever they're bored, hire a new executive, or face a three-day weekend. The company seems institutionally incapable of standing behind the majority of the products they launch for longer than a KPI cycle. But when the company does decide that something is pivotal to the business, it's an entirely different story

media Media business Business
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DHH 2 months ago

Omarchy is on the move

Omarchy has been improving at a furious pace. Since it was first released on June 26, I've pushed out 18(. ) new releases together with a rapidly growing community of collaborators, users, and new-to-Linux enthusiasts. We have about 3,500 early adopters on the Omarchy Discord, 250 pull requests processed, and one heck of an awesome Arch + Hyprland Linux environment to show for it

open-source Open Source programming Programming
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DHH 2 months ago

Executives should be the least busy people

If your executive calendar is packed back to back, you have no room for fires, customers, or serendipities. You've traded all your availability for efficiency. That's a bad deal. Executives of old used to know this. That's what the long lunches, early escapes to the golf course, and reading the paper at work were all about. A great fictional example of this is Bert Cooper from Mad Men

business Business
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