Archive: November, 2025

I feel like I've had enough experience with AI this year to conclude that the thing it's not good at is context. I have some very recent examples of this.

First off, my Facebook banishment is a perfect example of what happens when you turn things over to the machines. I don't know what it thinks that I did, but I'm certain that cats and theater selfies are not against the rules. Enforcement is probably the worst application of enforcement of any kind, as false-positives in law enforcement can attest. It kind of reminds me of a variation on Minority Report, where people were convicted for crimes before they happened. This is an example though of the stakes are too high to use tools that get it wrong. Facebook banning doesn't matter in the larger scope of things (other than the continued enshitification of the platform), but civil rights violations are serious. The context of any situation, not simply markers that might relate to an actual problem, has to play a part. But AI doesn't do that.

The coding agent stuff gets a lot of attention lately, because people really believe that it can reduce the number of people that you need for those jobs. So far, that hasn't been true. Putting aside for a moment that software developers probably only spend about 40% of their time writing code, at best (because of meetings and other stuff), the AI tools today only write code if you can tell it exactly what you need. I have first hand experience with that. First I have to correct it over and over to do what I ask, then I end up having to ask it to do it in a way that is more readable, maintainable and scaleable. If that weren't enough, it confidently gives you code that won't compile. I've seen people liken this to plumbing. You don't have to solder pipes together anymore, because of PVC and snap-together bits, but you need a plumber to understand how the system works, and various quirks and concepts. You might be able to DIY stuff, but you aren't an expert.

What I really don't care for is the chat bots in customer service situations. Admittedly, this might be how they're trained and programmed more than what AI is capable of. If you've ever used these, all they're really doing is steering you toward support articles that may sound like they could help you. They generally do not ask contextual questions that get closer to the root of what you're after. So yeah, they're fine for the kind of "level 1" first line that's just following scripts, but when does your issue ever fit a script?

I had my tires replaced at my house today. They only had 28k miles, but two had already been patched and slow-leaked, and a third had a huge hole from something. Totally not fun thing to spend money on. But while they did cost more, it's certainly more convenient to have it done at home. That, and I don't have a spare, and it was very flat.

Beyond the convenience though, having stuff delivered, or services rendered at home, is actually much better for the world. Sure, the ethical and moral situations with Amazon are not great. But it is far more efficient to have drivers bringing stuff to you, and potentially dozens of others, than for you to get in your car and go to places to shop. It's better for the environment, too.

The weird thing is that this was more common back in the day, before cars became such a dominant part of our culture. Ask your grandparents about having milk delivered to their house (mine actually had a little door on the side of their house). I also get my propane delivered, infrequently as that might be. Obviously online commerce is almost entirely delivered. The pandemic seemed to bring us back to this, and then it stuck because it's so convenient. Not sure about where food is going to go, because it's never fresh and the fees are ridiculous.

So yay for new shoes on the car that I didn't have to go anywhere for. Though ironically this enables me to drive places. It's sun-powered, at least.

If there's one thing that you can say about LinkedIn, it's that people are overly confident. Not a lot of, "I don't really know" happening there. And that kind of makes sense, because everyone is selling something, even if it's themselves. I see frequent posts around software development that present "simple" solutions to common problems. "This process makes it easy and obvious!" Sometimes I wonder if that isn't a level of disconnect to some degree, judging by the titles some folks put by their name. The problem is that sometimes you can't just check boxes in a playbook and collect your bonus.

In thinking about how I may approach the talk I'm doing for Orlando Code Camp in the spring, about developers who want to be managers, it occurs to me that there are aspects to leadership work that do not conform to a playbook or system or process. The ability to provide wisdom, enablement and decision making is the process. For example, I saw a guy declare that a particular metric was the only way to achieve a certain outcome for code quality. But the truth is that there are a great many levers that can affect that outcome, most of which require experienced people to call out quality problems. There are no silver bullets, but there are great people who can lean on their skills to guide others toward better outcomes.

If I seem skeptical of frameworks and systems and checklists, that's because they devalue the people who can steer you in the right direction. So much of what we do is contextual. A metric or a standard assumes that a very Type-A defined condition can accommodate a very contextual and nuanced situation, and I find that's rarely the case. Sometimes, when you look at these standards, they're more about control and in-the-weeds stuff, not about the larger outcomes. As the Agile Manifesto says, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools." We tend to forget that.

This has been a tough season so far. I always get a little seasonal affective disorder this time of year, and then the time change makes it worse. I'm already on 300mg of bupropion, so I can't have more.

Mind you, there's a confluence of other things in life right now that make everything feel shitty. I am both fascinated and frightened by the way that environment affects your brain at a chemical level. I worry about the ways that age may affect that, too.

Fortunately there are a ton of distractions coming soon, like holidays, shows, comedians, more shows.

While I'm complaining about platforms, Google is on my list as well. Sure, there's the usual ad monopoly nonsense, where we're banking 37 cent CPM's lately, but let me turn my attention to their Workspace product.

Way back in the day, you were able to host your own domain email (in my case, popw.com) in Gmail. Later they added all of the apps for docs and spreadsheets and such. It was great because it was free, and why not, since Gmail on its own is free. There's no added cost beyond the code that recognizes the domain name. Two or three years ago, they declared that they were going to stop doing this for everyone grandfathered into it. That was a bit of a panic moment for me, because I've got a bunch of family and friends using it. Not having a good migration plan, they decided to just let it keep going. My thinking was that they should have brought back what they did at the start, which was limit the number of accounts.

A condition of the continued use was to not allow commercial use. OK, technically I have an LLC, but with the ad market being trash, it's not really a business anymore, it's just a hobby that costs $100 and change a month. Well, they (or the AI) thinks that I'm using it for commercial purposes. I appealed, and they (the AI) did not change its mind. No recourse, no explanation of how they arrived at this, nothing. If I want to keep using it, I've gotta pay for it.

Now, I do understand that I was getting something for nothing, for an awful lot of years. But was I? Gmail is all the same stuff. I can see the mailbox size of the users, and it's tiny. This isn't a company with a hundred employees neck deep in email and documents. The way I see it though, Google could cut me some slack when it gets to measure all of my traffic (Analytics), keep ad revenue from my video (YouTube) and get my ad inventory for basically nothing (AdSense). I don't get back what they take.

The worst part of it is that I'll pay the money for two accounts, at least.

Or at least, they have pending appeal. They say that I broke some rules, and I think (but am not certain) that it's from a post I made showing how Google's search summaries are apparently directing fans of child porn to our web sites. As it turns out, "Cedar Point" isn't the only thing with those initials. Anyway, I'm skeptical that an actual human will get involved.

Either way, this presents me with an opportunity to do an inventory of sorts. I mostly just post stuff, not read, because it's mostly garbage. It's videos of young women doing TikTok dances and political memes. Whatever friends that are still there, I don't see much of what they post. To that end, I suppose it's like a way to keep in touch with people from all over, given my moves around the country.

But is it? I've been saying for the last few years that the "socials" aren't social at all. I'm a remote worker, and because of that, my social interaction in real life is not robust. In some ways, I'm sure that I make online presence out to be some substitute, that casual, virtual contact is the same as real social contact. Certainly it's not. Yet there are still some feelings of FOMO, but for what. What am I really getting out of it? Some vague notion that I know people?

I think that there are two impulses that I have to examine more closely. The first is to share thoughts and articles about everything. I post all kinds of links to science stuff, but I'm pretty sure no one cares. I imagine they care even less if it's political stuff. The other impulse is to share mundane thoughts, which similarly have little value. The impulse that I think is valuable, to me at least, is to post photos as a means of journaling. Sure, others can see those, but they're mostly for me.

Really though, I just don't like the idea that some dumb AI "thinks" that I did something naughty, and that pisses me off. Plus I can't look at cat videos.

I installed a shaker motor in the pinball machine today. It's a pretty straight forward affair, since the mounting holes and electronics are already in the machine. The only thing difficult was understanding that you shouldn't crank up the power because it just rattles everything. You can keep it pretty low to get the desired effect. These guys come with the limited edition version, along with a special lighting package and different color legs and armor, but at a cost of $3k extra. I wasn't going to do that. Honestly, I like the premium version better (what we have) because the cabinet art is more of a classic Darth vs. Luke scene, instead of a Hoth battle. But I really like the tactile feedback of the shaker. For $140, it's not a huge upgrade.

Modding and augmenting pinball machines is apparently a pretty huge thing, with a ton of aftermarket stuff out there. This motor is an official Stern part, but there are others. You can get chrome legs, anti-reflective glass, the limited edition lighting packages, art blades for the inside of the cabinet, extra figures for the playfield, custom toppers... there is a lot out there. I am curious about the cost for the additional lighting, which isn't out yet because this is the first game on their new platform, but I'm not super married to it.

Because pinball is so kinetic in the real world, I get why it's becoming so popular relative to things on screens. Nothing on a screen, especially a phone screen, feels and looks like pinball. That's why I was attracted to the shaker. After playing the LE version in the arcade, I remembered how great it felt. My Jurassic Park machine had one back in the day.

There's also a maintenance commitment, but one rooted I think in a joy that's similar to what people used to feel when tinkering with cars. I've had the "hood" up on the machine a ton. At first it was to diagnose the short in the general illumination loop, which I wasn't going to fix because I didn't think I should have to on a new machine, out-of-the-box, and also because I didn't have a replacement lamp socket. But diagnosing it made it easier for the distributor to fix, so it helped. I also got in to figure out what the problem was with the Death Star ramp, because it was rejecting balls and almost impossible to hit. It's a narrow ramp, but the real problem was the alignment, which I fixed by loosening the screws, and jacking up one side by putting a washer under it. (Stern is allegedly working on a real fix, because it's a common problem.) Most of the time though, you slide off the glass to clean it. We've already logged more than 800 games, and it started to develop ball trails in the various lanes. You can also see the normal "dimpling" in the playfield start to develop, which happens when a steel ball is moving 70 mph+ and impacting a wood surface. Eventually, you need to replace the linkages on the flippers, which are like changing your breaks. The rubber bits also eventually need to be replaced, like tires.

Admittedly, I'm a little disappointed about the lighting short and the ramp alignment, but with so many moving parts, it's not that unusual to have some initial problems, especially with the first runs off the line. That's why arcades (I'm looking at you, Dave & Busters) often don't have pinballs, because they require techs to keep them running. The arcade we went to last weekend had a guy working on one in their large collection. Stern machines are cool too because you can login to them with a QR code, and they have leaderboards in the venues.

I don't have the electronics expertise for these, but I imagine that most of those parts are simply replaced entirely. Their platform consists of a central CPU, and then nodes on a bus that in turn connect to all of the lights and mechanical bits. I get switches and solenoids and stuff! I shouldn't have to spend a ton of time maintaining the machine, but at the rate we're racking up plays, I imagine there will be regular cleaning and certain parts replacements.

It's hard to believe that we've now been in this house for eight years. It's almost the longest that I've lived anywhere in my adult life, and will be in a few months.

Houses for me have been about as utilitarian to me as cars. While some might see home ownership as a life milestone, or source of pride (or ego), I see it as a place to live. I am not particularly nostalgic or attached to the place. I was excited about the construction, but that's because construction is interesting. Once it was done, it was kind of a buzzkill. When we moved in, it was just a relief to have more office space as a remote worker. When the pandemic came along, I was even more happy about the amount of space, and our ability to keep some space from each other.

To that end, it is absurdly large for three people. It has appreciated about 80%, and I wouldn't consider living around here "affordable" anymore. We got super lucky that we were able to move here when we did. We also refinanced only three years in, when rates were stupid low (2.875%). The taxes keep going up too, but they're not nearly as bad, relative to size, as they were/are in Ohio. Insurance is ridiculous. I don't know how long we'll stay here, but with Simon graduating from high school in two and a half years, and a strong desire to not have a mortgage, it won't be forever. We have enough equity that we might be able to find a smaller place that we can buy outright.

Pulte built the place with some serious crap. The carpet looks as if a dozen people lived here for two decades. We've entirely replaced the upstairs HVAC, and we're trying to bandaid the downstairs. We repainted the exterior at four years. There were a ton of warranty issues in the first year. It seems structurally durable, with no issues through four hurricanes, but I credit the building code with that win. The solar plant that we installed is in the "paid off" phase, which is to say that it has generated as much energy in terms of cost relative to the cost to install it.

The neighborhood itself is solid. Simon didn't really fit in with the other kids, but they too have kind of grown up and gone different ways. We have great neighbors, who have a pool now. Some "arts friends" live a couple of blocks down. There were people in a rental a few down that partied loud, but they moved out. There are plenty of places now to go to eat, and we're close to at least four different Publix locations. And yes, we have fireworks every night, and we enjoy a few specific resort locations to feel like we're on vacation when we're not.

One of the weird things about autism is that often times a person on the spectrum has little use for certain social contracts, but at the same time, cares deeply about following the rules. So for example, I've never had much use for the idea that you should wear certain formal clothes in certain situations. I'm half way through life and never owned a suit, and I don't intend to. On the other hand, it drives me crazy when people don't adhere to traffic rules. At a four-way, don't wave me through if I'm not next, because first-in, first-out. When you change the rules, accidents happen because there's no shared understanding of what is supposed to happen. Yes, that's the kind of thing that my brain labors on.

Now, not every autistic person necessarily thinks this way. I know Simon does, especially with driving. He points out everything other drivers do wrong. But people like Trump, who are probably some level of ASD (it wasn't the Tylenol, you orange moron), seem to have total disregard for the rules. So again, this is not a hard fast rule. But in the write-up for my own diagnosis, it's mentioned that I am deeply troubled by injustice. The psychologist talked with me about that, and explained that some combination of a need for order and possibly enduring some amount of bullying probably influences this thinking. Again, not a hard and fast rule, but it's a common sentiment.

You can imagine then, how troubling it is when criminals are being released en masse. The 1,500+ people who attacked the capital, excused. George Santos, forgiven for his fraud. The Silk Road guy, trafficking drugs and people through the web, no problem. The Binance crypto bro who financed terrorists, also no biggie. The Blackwater contractors, tax evaders, obstructionists, etc., all convicted criminals, all pardoned. Meanwhile, honest people trying to make a living are deported, often violently.

This creates the classic loop for me of trying to reconcile a situation where two things coexist that shouldn't. The anger it engenders is more directed toward the people who enable and support this than it is the felon in (what's left of) the White House. Right and wrong still exist, but there's enough cognitive dissonance for them to distance themselves from it. It's like the stuff I'm reading in Separation of Church and Hate, where self-described "Christians" are in fact acting the opposite of the way that Christ would have. A significant portion of Americans simply don't give a shit about right and wrong anymore. And now they're surprised that all of this nonsense affects them too (see: inflation, unemployment, etc.).

For now, I've backed off of news and social media quite a bit. I disappear into pinball and Lego and music. It's not that I don't care or don't act, I just can't let my head obsess about it.