I write code for Humans & text for Robots
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That first Monday of my holiday break, I made a promise to myself. No work emails, no side projects, not even glancing at my blog. This time was for family, for Netflix queues, for rereading dog-eared novels. One thing I was really looking forward to was learning something new, a new skill. Not for utility, but purely for curiosity. I wanted to learn about batteries. They power our world, yet they're a complete mystery to me. I only vaguely remember what I learned in high school decades ago. This would be the perfect subject for me.
Whenever I hear someone express a thought really well, like they make a sharp observation, tell a funny story, or just have a moment of clarity, I ask the same question: "Why don't you have a blog?" Their answer is almost always a variation of, "I don't know what to write about."
How fast is a horse? I was kinda baffled when I got the answer. For the average horse, one grazing in nature or on a ranch, they can go between 20 to 30 miles per hour. Doesn't that feel slow? What about race horses? I don't have a horse to clock it myself, so I'm relying on petmd.com. The website tells me that the English Thoroughbred can run for up to 44 miles per hour. It's fast alright. But I was going just as fast on my short commute to the office, and it didn't feel like I was racing at all.
When I moved to a new apartment with my family, the cable company we were used to wasn't available. We had to settle for Dish Network. I wasn't too happy about making that switch, but something on their website caught my attention. For an additional $5 a month, I could have access to DVR. I switched immediately.
When I started 2025, I set myself a simple challenge: write consistently and see if I could reclaim some of the audience this blog once had. In 2024, I had published just 4 posts and had only a handful of RSS subscribers. It felt like shouting into the void.
Have you ever joined a large organization? One with a quarter million employees? Their process is fascinating. You receive hundreds of emails to set up different software. You get a machine mailed to you. Your badge comes from FedEx. The onboarding process is long and tedious. When you finally get an account set up, they direct you to Jira, where several other steps need to be completed before you can start working.
What does it mean when we say that investors are subsidizing the price of a service? We often hear that ChatGPT is not profitable, despite some users paying $20 a month, or others up to $200 a month. The business is still losing money despite everything we're paying. To stay afloat, OpenAI and other AI companies have to use money from their investors to cover operations until they find a way to generate sustainable income.
I was watching a movie when I got a random notification from Google Maps on my phone. I never get notifications from this app unless I'm doing turn-by-turn navigation. This one was titled "Timeline," and Google was requesting if I wanted to turn on backups for this feature. This section of Google Maps that I had never visited drew a timeline of every place I've ever visited: home, work, grocery store, etc. All this without me explicitly asking it to track these things. Now I see where I go to lunch every day, I see where I walk, drive, shop, and everything in between. It got me thinking: All the tools for mass surveillance are in place. And they are not going away.
A few years back, I worked at an AI startup as the first hired engineer. All of us could fit in a four-space cubicle, sharing an office with multiple startups. As you can imagine, when you're trying to get a startup off the ground, you have to put in the hours. Every day I would drive to the beautiful city of Venice Beach, California, cram into our little space, and type as much code as I could fit in a day. Then I would pack the laptop back into my bag and drive right back home.
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It was 7am when my phone rang. Instead of an alarm, it was my recruiter disturbing me from a pleasant dream. It was too early for a phone call or to be caught off guard, so I did not answer. I went to take a shower and get ready for the day. On my way to work, I listened to the voice mail she had left.
As a Linux user, I can't help but spend most of my time on the command line. Not that the GUI is not efficient, but there are things that are simply faster to do with the keyboard.
Search is an important feature on a website. When my few readers want to look for a particular passage on my blog, they use the search box. It used to be powered by Google Search, but I have since then changed it to my own home-brewed version not because I can do better but because it was an interesting challenge.
a book by Ibrahim Diallo
After the explosive reception of my story, The Machine Fired Me, I set out to write a book to tell the before and after.
I started as a minimum wage laborer in Los Angeles and I set out to reach the top of the echelon in Silicon Valley. Every time I made a step forward, I was greeted with the harsh changing reality of the modern work space.
Getting fired is no longer reserved to those who mess up. Instead, it's a popular company strategy to decrease expenses and increase productivity.
Every little corner has a story. Sometimes a camera tells the story and a picture is worth a thousand words.
There are professional photographers and then there is me who happens to have a camera on my phone. Here's to what came out.
