Archive: November, 2025

This is around the time of the year that I have to decide whether or not to re-up my Adobe subscription. It's super shady the way they do it now. If you do nothing, they charge you like $800 and that's that. But if you go on and try to cancel, they offer you a rate of $480 for a year. Like, if that's the way they're going to play it, why not just give me the better rate in the first place? I hate these stupid games. It's the kind of thing that SiriusXM used to do before they gave me a permanent forever rate of $10 or whatever. I don't really use it much anymore. I could probably just drop down to the photo tier, which is Photoshop and Lightroom. That's around $240, which is more reasonable. I don't use Premier at all, since I have a perpetual license (and free updates) for DaVinci Resolve, which is superior in every way. Illustrator and After Effects use are rare. I've probably used Acrobat more.

One bit of perspective: When the Adobe suite was boxed and perpetually licensed, I would typically buy the new version every two years, and spend $1,200 in aughts dollars. So technically, $480 is a deal. I just don't like how they go about it.

Then there's Vectorworks, which I decided to try about a year ago with a Black Friday deal. That's a legit CAD app that also does lighting. So full on rigs that you can export to MA3, plus a very nice visualizer. That was an expensive self-taught "class" so to speak, but for $900, I did actually learn quite a bit. I get the software to an extent, but it's really overkill since I'm not doing actual rigging, including weight and power stuff. But because it's also CAD, I could theoretically build anything in it, and 3D print it. I have a feeling that's yet another expensive hobby I could land in.

By contrast, the Vectorworks folks are actually very cool, and real humans. That makes sense given the cost and niche of their product. When I found a bug early in the subscription, they were very supportive. As I neared the end of my sub, they reached out and asked if there was anything they could do to help, though they weren't going to extend another discount, which I get. At least they're honest about it.

I keep having this experience where I'm like, "Oh, it's only 6:30, I have plenty of time for activities!" You'd think that I've never seen winter.

But despite the slight sense of dread, it's kind of energizing. I know intellectually that there aren't more hours in the evening, but it feels like it. I've found myself getting back into my various hobbies. I'm interested in too many things, and finish few of them. Ah the ADHD brain.

I did ship a new forum version today, though it only has one new feature.

I'm not gonna lie, life without Facebook is definitely better. Since getting bounced off of it by what I assume is AI enforcement, and a false positive to something, I've mostly confirmed what I already knew: The algorithm is for attention, not for tracking friends. There's a great video by the CEO of Patreon, of all people, spelling it out for you, if you don't already get it (embedded below).

It's weird how the doomscrolling can radicalize people, not in the terrorist sense, but in the "I'm a victim and it's 'their' fault" way. My experience has been that being a hetero white male has resulted in little to no systemic discrimination or disadvantage for me. No amount of DEI efforts, anti-racism or other corrective action has changed that. But I suppose if people are telling you anything enough, you might believe it. It's unfortunate that critical thinking hasn't headed this off. But while older generations subscribe to the, "If you see it on TV (or online), you can trust it," and the younger people don't remember three network newsmen whose credibility was everything. In many ways, a lot of people have never had to think critically.

Again, I was using FB less and less. It was basically a scrapbooking mechanism. I saw so little of friends, because Facebook's intent is not to keep you connected with friends. That ended years ago. The only issue, maybe, is that there are a few folks I was hanging on to in terms of contact, but I don't know if that was ever that important. Maybe it was just hanging on to feeling like I know people. I know for sure that not seeing endless things intended to enrage is better for me.

Hard to believe that it has been almost two years since I first tried using an AI agent to help write code. Looking back, I seemed really optimistic, but I recall giving it a ton of context, and the thing I was working on was specifically math. I tried again a few months ago to add a feature to POP Forums, and wasn't that excited about the results. Despite it being a mature code base, if not necessarily the most well-structured or coded, it just got a lot of stuff wrong. Maybe that was just the state of Github's Copilot, but that was not ideal.

A friend of mine kept raving about Claude Code, so I forked over $20 and gave it a shot on a new greenfield project that I started. I took the guidance to have it generate its own readme first, and it seemed to figure out a number of the conventions that wanted, in terms of the project structure. It's a Blazor-based WASM app, meaning it runs in the browser, so I wasn't sure how much it would "get." But it actually did really well, provided I was giving it specific context. So for example, I wanted to create a class that scraped a web page, pulled out the title and any social-protocol for meta tags that would correspond to an image. I did this in two parts, knowing that's how I'd structure it. First I had it code a class to fetch the page, and then I had another class parse out the title and image location. This involves a bunch of regular expressions, the bane of my coding existence, so I was happy to let the machine figure it out. Finally, when the result came back, triggered by typing a URL in a text box, I wanted a link and the image to appear in a box that you could remove, and it did all of that, pretty much first try. There were some tweaks I asked it to do, like un-HTML-encoding the title, and some other minor things, but it worked.

This was a much more positive experience than I had last time, but to be honest, a lot of that has to do with the context. I keep saying that over and over, that AI needs context to get stuff right, so I gave it a lot of context. Having something that is new and not infested with years of bad decisions also helps. I'm also limiting the scope of any given problem. I'm not telling it to do some end-to-end thing that involves many application layers.

And that's why, at this moment, I still see so much value in senior software developers. The analogy that I recently saw was to plumbers and plumbing. Sure, with PVC pipes and twist on couplings, you don't need to solder pipes anymore. It's all much easier. But knowing how the system is supposed to work, and all of the associated nuance, is still something that requires plumber knowledge. Well, code is in many ways like plumbing, so that experience is important. Sure, you can find a bunch of YouTubers who are "vibe coding" until they have something that works, but it doesn't mean that it can scale, that it's secure or robust enough to handle humans breaking it.

"Just you wait," say people selling AI stuff. But many predicted that it could be there by now, and clearly it is not. In fact, I'd say the last year has been kind of stagnant in terms of improvement (specifically in the code generation realm). I'm not saying that it will never get there, it's hard to know, but as I've said before, if AI eventually hits a point of having to train on its own work, it will break.

The funny thing about the "internet of things" and "smart" stuff is that most of it seems like convenience, or marginal quality of life improvements. But as time has rolled on and we sit with this stuff, it's more than that.

For example, my recent issues with HVAC spotted a potentially expensive issue. The short story is that a wiring problem, in combination with a blower motor problem, resulted in the system turning on the stage 2 heating coil. This was happening with the AC running at the same time (since the heat pump and blower communication is pretty crude). It may have taken awhile for me to notice, since it was blowing room temperature air, but I noticed immediately that we were pulling an absurd 14 kW from the grid. Even having caught it when I did, we used something like 120 kWh that day, and it could have gone on for days.

In this case, the thermostats track run time, and the electric plant (solar and batter) measure usage. Ordinarily, this is just something neat to see, predictive of your electric bill and a record of the climate. But in this case, it also identified a serious issue.

Even when you go smaller, there are unexpected benefits of devices. A self-cleaning litter box seems like a luxury for people who tire of dealing with the cat shitters, but it turns out that they also weigh cats. So combined with the usage statistics, this thing is giving you a picture of your cats' health. Without this, you likely have to be reactive about cat health, but with the data, you can be proactive before something becomes serious.

The HVAC guy has something in his electrical panel where he can spontaneously measure everything on a per-circuit basis. That would be cool, if generally unnecessary.

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.