De vuelta a las andadas 🔂
I haven't published anything long format in quite a while, at first I thought the best way to address it was not addressing it, and in a sense I won't, you'll only find this if you're stalking my profile. Alright so let's start, if you ever come across a piece of mine and wonder if there is a set of instructions to read it, this is it, this is the guide you were looking for, I'm also taking a chance to capitulate a bit on myself and the recent years of my professional life, perhaps all of it?
Only so that you, dear ready, know what you're dealing with. This is not an auto biography or anything like that, is just some context to understand the setting that lead to my view on things.
I am a software engineer by trade. I produce software for a living, have been doing so for the last 10 years. A decade sounds like much but time flies when you're having fun... or so whoever has fun says 🤷🏻♂️. I mainly contract for big beer company (AnheuserBusch) and for the Human Data team at spaceXAi and I'm always working on a couple of ideas, who isn't really?, no shortage of side projects, some more ambitious than others, but being a curious 🦝 and with a pretty resistant imposter syndrome I'm also always trying to brush up and learning something new.
I came into software by need, stayed by choice, kinda, I wish there was a better way to put it, there are many layers to why I'm still kicking virtual cans, you know, figuring out how to center divs, (but since I'm more experience now the real question is why would you want to center a div?
Am I all of a sudden maturing while I'm writing this? Thanks for coming along ❤️🔥) along with many other fun activities software developers do like fixing printers for friends and setting up wifi routers and figuring out phone settings for parents, maybe that's why I've stayed. In reality it likely boils down to my ability/addiction (vicious circle(?)) to solve puzzles, and since I'm a senior dev now, whenever I run out of puzzles to solve I find new ones, thankfully the industry is full of those. Are you thinking that I make up problems whenever I don't have any to solve? well that's not exactly what I said. But yeah kind of...
My github profile might not tell you as much but I also co-founded a software/branding agency some years ago, so if I'm a little bitter and dead inside is because I've been trying to build a business for as long as I've been writing software, actually, perhaps a bit more. And Mexico, where I live, and most of my software agency business is, well... it's not the most embracing/comforting of environments for entrepreneurs, you might need to fact-check me but it ranks quite high in the worst places to start a business index 💀.And this business I didn't start alone, I have a co founder, who is very private person and I'll be mentioning on every given opportunity 🤓. Right now, the agency is in the middle of being restructured, I don't know what will come out of it, whenever something exciting happens, I might resort to give updates on that.
As to my villain origin story, I think I wrote about it, perhaps in Spanish? I'm Mexican so my native language is... well Mexican of course, so expect some "güey", "jajaja", "tamadre" and the like.
So the English TL;DR:
I have a degree in Industrial Design, if you don't know what that is, you're not alone, so when I got out of uni, most industry was like "wha?!" and that's part of why I started making web pages for a living and one thing led to another, some years later here we are, discussing big O notation, systems, algos and all of those nightmare inducing stuff. I might write about and draw from that experience in the future, stay tuned.
To start with acknowledgements, ground rules or context setting however you want to think of it, whenever you're reading a piece of mine you can take some things for granted:
A human (me) wrote it, I'm not about to let a machine trick you into thinking it was me who wrote it, I'll find a way to certify it I guess
A lot of stuff that is kinda attached to a human writing this: I make mistakes, I can later change my mind, I'm not a fan of gurus and therefore you should never take my word for anything, I don't offer advice willingly, you do you and I do well me mostly, I sometimes pretend otherwise, (I'm into writing fiction as well).
I might lie to you, willingly or unwillingly, I might change a certain narrative to fit a purpose and or change the name of a participant in a story, I mostly write about my opinions and personal takes on stuff, and that carries a bias, sorry, not sorry.
I won't be hyped or sell hype on things I don't believe in. I won't pretend or do enthusiastic posts just for reads, I will always try to paint a fuller picture, I won't try and ignore bad aspects, you'd see right through it, honestly.
If you're ok with this, last thing I can tell you is, I'm a dog person to a fault, I drink industrial amounts of coffee, I should read more fiction and less specs and technical documents, I'm trying to write more, I'm in a campaign against acting my age, I game like I would've liked when I was 12 or I fantasise about doing so and I'm trying to construct a balanced political stance... proven impossible so far. And yeah if you're ok with this, then by all means swipe right or left, idk been off dating apps for a while, subscribe, let's stay in touch and tell me I'm wrong or something.
Homo Publicum
Ahem yeah excuse me, boundaries. When I said I would lie to you, yeah I mean, I don't intend to tell you anything too personal about me, I'm an over sharer but only in private (that doesn't even make sense). So expect some level of fantasy in everything I write, sometimes it'll be intended sometimes it wont, in general terms, you shouldn't believe everything you see on the internet.
Unguruable
I don't think anyone should ever prescribe anything to anyone, advice tends to be empty, specially when given en mass, I know this is something that might be pointed at as obvious but I'm not quite convinced, I live in Mexico where junk food was labeled some years back and my friend, has that not helped at all... Maybe a little, I would like to come up with a better way, but for lack of one, I want to lead with this: I think that obvious is an overstated word but I'm also trained to identify patterns and make abstractions so, in whatever format I take part in, I refuse to give any kind of advice, rich of me tu suppose I could haha, this is one of those moments of no one asked me, but if they did, this is my prepared response, anything you ever hear/read you need to do so through the lens of whoever is producing it, no single piece of action applies to all people, I believe in this deeply, an advice if you're so keen on taking it, adapt it to your story. We can't all be founders or multi million companies, nor do we all have parents that can lend us no interest, enough money to do so. Any story you come across, is that, a story, there's always a messenger behind it, and there's a reason tools to see stories from many political views exist, cause there is no such thing as objective. I might be repeating myself 🥸, but you shouldn't believe everything you see on the internet.
Hasta la vista baby
Back to finding issues by trade, sometimes I create new problems for myself, like how I'm trying to write more, it's a hobby of mine that I pick up from time to time, but I'm trying to be more disciplined with it. I've been in software long enough so that people ask me to document things, for some reason I don't quite get as you become more experienced with software, it is expected that you become a chronicler, a monk-scribe of sorts, which makes sense, you've seen some 💩, and since we're all optimists, people expect that by writing something down other people will be able to avoid it, it's only true partially I guess. But it is useful and it constructs on our own goal as humans to improve life on earth for future generations (that is our purpose right?).
Now there's writing and there's writing I guess, you can write with the intention of no one consuming your work, but in my case at least professionally I've always written with the intention that someone else lays their pupils on my poorly selected words and then tries to form a criteria of their own, my writing, at least the part connected to my work is meant to inform, god forbid they saw my tweets, bruh. Which takes me to I also write for fun I enjoy it, apparently I'm one of the few crazy vast earths that do, these days writing or as they call it content creation is all about letting a statistical linear algebra vector machine writes the word for you, actually is that even writing? choose statistically probably words? select? invoke?
I'm talking about LLM's in case you were lost with my weird reference, the Yipitee, the Grok, the Clowne, all of them, neither, a virtual Llama or whatever people ( I assume but honestly I don't even know by now) use to generate articles and well "content". ("content" is a word that amuses/interests me cause it implies a container, something that wraps it and I don't know why but I don't see how that tracks... 🤡).
Now I do want to state that I am not against Ai, I mean I'd be a bit of a hypocrite (would a hypocrite accept it? ha!) to work with for spaceXAi and be anti-ai, but as with all things these days I'm divided, I'm pro progress, having tools that might enhance us and our human experience yay! I'm not so sold on water and general resource consumption needed for it, I'm against exploitation, the burnout and panic and social rejection is causing, jobs lost, scam calls, theft, scam automation... and a long etc.
To all of that I say:
Nay! booo 👎
Perhaps the development of these tools will unblock a better way, in the meantime, I wish things would go slower, but sadly they can't, we're on a race and I try to stay at the front cause, well, as a friend would put it: "I have a passion for not starving". Work is work is work and you can only help steer if you're at the front, backseat driving might be empowering but it's not very efficient.
Empty promises
A couple of years back I started a blog and it kept running for very little, I lost track of it very soon, it was on LinkedIn before it became a bot network (like them all?) and it's called 🚀Rocket 🚲 Bicycle Log. In it I kept track of how many blog posts I've written and I kinda played with the notion of letting ai take over one day. I would add it at the end of every post and it looked like:
You'll be surprised to learn that this entire issue was created by a Human Interface known as Luis (hi there! 👋) which leads the score as follows:
Luis - 12
chatGPT3/4 - 0
It was cute in my mind, I won't keep track now, I just won't use it, even providers are making sure you can't pass generated text as your own words and I applaud that, to some extent, I don't think the whole thing is rightly applied but what should never happen is that you see content generated by an LLM and someone passes it as human. I know there would be a debate of what is even human, but if you're able to algorithmically mark something, then you know is not inherently human made; I commend the intent.
Remember when I told that I might lie to you, yeah I lie to myself sometimes too, I wanted to keep writing and thought it was gonna be much easier than it turned out to be.