I write code for Humans & text for Robots
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It's been over a year and I didn't receive a single notification email from my web-server. It could either mean that my $6 VPS is amazing and hasn't gone down once this past year. Or it could mean that my health check service has gone down. Well this year, I have received emails from readers to tell me my website was down. So after doing some digging, I discovered that my health checker works just fine, but all emails it sends are being rejected by gmail. Unless you use a third party service, you have little to no chance of sending an email that gets delivered.
A few months back, news outlets were reporting that Satya Nadella claimed 30% of the code in Microsoft's repositories was AI-generated. This fueled the hype around tools like Copilot and Cursor. If Microsoft's developers were now "vibe coding," everyone should embrace the method. I have to admit, for a moment I felt like I was being left behind. When it comes to adopting new technology, I typically choose the slow and careful approach. But suddenly, it seemed like the world was moving on without me.
When browsing the web, I still follow rabbit holes. For example, I will click on a link, read an article, find another link in the body, follow that one as well, and keep on going until I get lost in the weeds and appear in wonderland. When I'm reading through my phone, I often have to go back to the browser history to see the trail of websites that lead me to my destination. But sometimes, I just can't find my way back. Why? Because somehow, I wasn't reading through the web browser. I was browsing through webview.
As a developer, you'll hear these terms often: "stable software," "stable release," or "stable version." Intuitively, it just means you can rely on it. That's not entirely wrong, but when I was new to programming, I didn't truly grasp the technical meaning. For anyone learning, the initial, simple definition of "it works reliably" is a great starting point. But if you're building systems for the long haul, that definition is incomplete.
Have you ever read a blog post here and thought: Meh? Some articles I write are ideas I've been working on for over a year. I think about them often, then add them to my little note app. Sometimes I'm driving and think of something clever, so I dictate it to my notes app while the kids are fighting in the background. Then, in the middle of the night, I take time away from sleep and start putting the ideas together. All because I challenged myself to publish every other day for an entire year. I do all this, hit the publish button, and... well, and then nothing.
When companies start embracing AI, it's only a matter of time before it reaches the engineering teams. For competent developers, AI makes their lives easier. The benefits of tools like Cursor or Copilot are often invisible because developers use them as tools to accelerate their workflow, not replace it. It's confusing when companies claim a specific percentage of their code is "AI-generated," since these tools function as assistants. With that logic in mind, could we say a certain percentage of code was "StackOverflow copy-pasted"?
You've probably seen the NEO home robot by now, from the company 1X. It's a friendly humanoid with a plush-toy face that can work around your house. Cleaning, making beds, folding laundry, even picking up after meals. Most importantly, there's the way it looks. Unlike Tesla's "Optimus," which resembles an industrial robot, NEO looks friendly. It has a cute, plush face with round eyes. Something you could let your children play with.
One thing that often surprises my friends and family is how tech-avoidant I am. I don't have the latest gadget, I talk about dumb TVs, and Siri isn't activated on my iPhone. The only thing left is to go to the kitchen, take a sheet of tin foil, and mold it into a hat.
After using Large Language Models extensively, the same questions keep resurfacing. Why didn't the lawyer who used ChatGPT to draft legal briefs verify the case citations before presenting them to a judge? Why are developers raising issues on projects like cURL using LLMs, but not verifying the generated code before pushing a Pull Request? Why are students using AI to write their essays, yet submitting the result without a single read-through?
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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.
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.
