I write code for Humans & text for Robots
Are you Human?
The most interesting Articles
Imagine this: You walk up to your driveway where your car is parked. You reach for the handle that automatically senses your presence, confirms your identity, and opens to welcome you in. You sit down, the controls appear in front of you, and your seatbelt secures itself around your waist. Instead of driving forward onto the pavement, you take off. You soar into the skies like an eagle and fly to your destination. This is what technology promises: freedom, power, and something undeniably cool.
AGI has been "5 years away" for the past decade. The Tesla Roadster? Five years away since 2014. Tesla's Level 5 self-driving? Promised by 2017, then quietly pushed into the perpetual five-year window. If you've been paying attention, you've probably noticed this pattern extends far beyond Silicon Valley.
I was too young to lose money in the Dot-Com crash of 2000. I didn't own any tech stock. In fact, I didn't even know there was a bubble to pop. My interaction with the "Internet" was a dial-up modem sputtering to life and the simple, joyful ritual of visiting a handful of websites I had discovered.
The computer is not just working less well. Instead, it is actively trying to undermine you. And there is nothing you can do about it. When Windows wants to update, you don't get to say "no." You get "Update now" or "Remind me later." When Twitter shows you notifications from people you don't follow, you can't dismiss them, only "see less often." When LinkedIn changes your email preferences, you'll reset them, only to find they've reverted a few months later.
There has always been a disconnect between the hiring process and finding the best engineers. But when we somehow find them, the career ladder ensures that they don't remain in that position of strength. An incompetent company might create the conditions for engineers to leave for better jobs. A generous company will apply the Peter Principle and promote engineers to their level of incompetence. Either way, the best engineers never remain in that position of strength.
A few years back, I had a ritual. I'd walk to the nearest Starbucks, get a coffee, and bury myself in work. I came so often that I knew all the baristas and their schedules. I also started noticing the music. There were songs I loved but never managed to catch the name of, always playing at the most inconvenient times for me to Shazam them. It felt random, but I began to wonder: Was this playlist really on shuffle? Or was there a method to the music?
On my first day at a furniture store, my boss pointed to a warehouse full of boxes and said, "Unpack that one and build it." Simple enough. I found a large, heavy box, sliced it open, and laid out an array of wooden slats, metal screws, and chains. It was a love seat swing. Clearly a two or three person job. But I didn't know that. If my boss asked me to build it, I figured, it must be possible.
The moment I learned how to program, I wanted to experiment with my new super powers. Building a BMI calculator in the command line wouldn't cut it. I didn't want to read another book, or follow any other tutorial. What I wanted was to experience chaos. Controlled, beautiful, instructive chaos that comes from building something real and watching it spectacularly fail.
On the first day on the job, the manager introduced me to the team, made a couple of jokes, then threatened to fire someone. At first, I thought it was just his sense of humor, that it was something I would understand once I worked long enough on the team. But no one else laughed. The air in the meeting room became stiff as he rambled about issues we had. The next Monday morning, he did it again. Now I was confused. Was I being hazed? No. Because he did it again the following Monday. He was an asshole.
The most read articles
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.
The majority of the traffic on the web is from bots. For the most part, these bots are used to discover new content. These are RSS Feed readers, search engines crawling your content, or nowadays AI bots crawling content to power LLMs. But then there are the malicious bots. These are from spammers, content scrapers or hackers. At my old employer, a bot discovered a wordpress vulnerability and inserted a malicious script into our server. It then turned the machine into a botnet used for DDOS. One of my first websites was yanked off of Google search entirely due to bots generating spam. At some point, I had to find a way to protect myself from these bots. That's when I started using zip bombs.
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.
