đĄ No One Knows Anything About AI (and more)
No One Knows Anything About AI
Donât let the clickbait title put you off. Related to my link about AI killing jobs in tech, here Cal Newport produces some compelling âboth sidesâ receipts about how AI is helping + hurting software development. His conclusions are solid:
My advice, for the moment:
- Tune out both the most heated and the most dismissive rhetoric.
- Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem connected to AIâread widely and ask people you trust about what theyâre seeing.
- Beyond that, however, follow AI news with a large grain of salt. All of this is too new for anyone to really understand what theyâre saying.
AI is important. But we donât yet fully know why.
Source: No One Knows Anything About AI â
From Memo to Movement: Shopifyâs Cultural Adoption of AI
I think weâve all seen the internal Shopify memo on requiring teams to use AI. This is a great article on what happened next. I especially love the internal tools Shopify built to make adoption easier:
Employees can use the LLM proxy to build the workflows they need. They can select from different models, which are updated with the latest versions as soon as theyâre released. Thereâs a collection of MCPs, and all it takes is asking the proxy (or another tool like Cursor) to access them. Thereâs even a stable of agents already created by other people for anyone to use. Itâs a one-stop shop for everything someone needs to use AI.
Source: From Memo to Movement: Shopifyâs Cultural Adoption of AI â
How not to lose your job to AI
There are a lot of these âhow to beat the AI cookie monsterâ posts out there right now, but this one by Benjamin Todd is well-researched and articulated, with lots of practical examples on how to do the one thing that we all need to do anyway: keep learning.
I break this down into four key categories of skills likely to increase in value:
- Hard for AI: data poor, messy, long-horizon tasks where a person-in-the-loop is wanted
- Needed for deploying AI: the skills of organising and auditing AI systems, as well as those used in complementary industries such as data centre construction
- Used to make things the world could use far more of: skills that contribute to improved healthcare, housing, research, luxury goods, etc. â things which people want more of as they get better and cheaper
- Hard for others to learn: rare expertise that matches your unique strengths
Source: How not to lose your job to AI â
The Most âCD Albumâ Albums Ever, Ranked
This is a great Xennial list. And I am glad Iâm not the only one who thinks R.E.M.âs Monster is actually pretty good.
Monster is commonly regarded as the most âused CDâ CD of all time. Which I think is somewhat unfair and due in large part to how conspicuous the blaze orange packaging is. I would bet that Come Away With Me or Eric Claptonâs Unplugged or my beloved New Miserable Experience are just as common. They just blend in with the pack better. Though I donât think being the most âused CDâ CD is a bad thing, if itâs true. So long as itâs not used as shorthand for lack of quality. I love Monster, I love used CDs, and I will strenuously defend both against all haters.
Source: The Most âCD Albumâ Albums Ever, Ranked â
The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations
You know how those of us who read The Lord of the Rings before the movies came out got all weirdly and annoyingly upset about all the ânew fansâ and how they should have âread the books years agoâ? Thatâs how I feel about the em dash and its AI takeover.
The real issue isnât meâitâs you. You simply donât read enough. If you did, youâd know Iâve been here for centuries. Iâm in Austen. Iâm in Baldwin. Iâve appeared in Pulitzer-winning prose, viral op-eds, and the final paragraphs of breakup emails that needed âa little more punch.â I am wielded by novelists, bloggers, essayists, and that one friend who types exclusively in lowercase but still demands emotional range.
Source: The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations â
Lifetime Achievement Award: The đ« Melting Face Emoji
This tracks. Itâs definitely my most-used emoji.
Whether youâre overwhelmed, overextended, or simply over trying to keep it together, the
Melting Face is the perfect pictographic companion for the full spectrum of emotional discomfortâfrom awkwardness to shame to existential dread. [âŠ]
Because, in the words of Erik Carter, the graphic designer involved in proposing the emoji: âSometimes it does feel as though the best we can do is smile as we melt away.â
Source: Lifetime Achievement Award: The Melting Face Emoji â
The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: Whatâs in your tech stack?
This was a very comprehensive survey about everything from AI tools to Terminal app preferences, CI/CD systems, and more. Very much worth the click to skim through the results. Gergely also has an interesting theory on why developers hate Jira so much:
But I wonder if the root problem is really with JIRA itself, or whether any project management tool idolized by managers would encounter the same push back? It is rare to find a dev who loves creating and updating tickets, and writing documentation. Those who do tend to develop into PMs or TPMs (Technical Program Managers), and do more of âhigher-levelâ, organizational work, and less of the coding. Perhaps this in turn makes them biased to something like JIRA?
Source: The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: Whatâs in your tech stack? â
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PS. You look nice today đ