I have been reading quite a bit lately.

Not by any absolute terms. But compared to myself in last, oh … lots of years it is significant.

I hope I keep it up. It feels like some small extra part of my brain has woken up in the process, a part that can go too sleep when reading becomes too many snippets of too many things too often.

Or, you know, perhaps it is just early summer and the light and warmth is doing me good?

Reading and the brain waking up sounds a bit cooler though.

Maybe it would be better if I just talked to people instead?

Sane insights can come from anywhere. This one came from thinking about a webinar I watched yesterday about - of all things - creating a podcast which makes you money. It was put in slightly more stylish terms, but that was the essence. The central point was really to have a plan about how to make money, but an important side point was that for this to work you never need huge download numbers. Quality and a clear niche matters much more for that particular goal.

Reasonable, buisiness smart, somewhat business consultant book-like. But it popped back into my mind as I was posting about Kodsnack in various channels:

Is there a point in me posting this in channel X? Even if this should blow up for some reason, would it result in something which would affect me and the podcast in a way I would like?

If not, perhaps I should just skip it.

Talk to real people instead of attempting to broadcast.

(Stuff I do like doing for their own sake will of course keep coming wherever and whenever I feel like them.)

Lesstex

An era of Cortex ended with the latest episode. I am really curious how things will evolve going forward, and I greatly look forward to the things which have been revealed about the near future.

And I will listen to the episode at least once more.

Today, I watched a video I recently stumbled across, of a 1995 lecture by architect Christopher Alexander.

I knew about his influence on modern software development, but it was still amazing to see just how direct the connection is. He and his team was doing in 1995 what we in software at best aspire to be doing in 2025.

Plus, he was building out of concrete.

Oh, and on fixed price.

I wonder if any teams of software craftsmen out there have managed to get there?

I am fully aware that the video may not seem like a flash of brilliance to everyone. You possibly need to have been immersed in a very similar soup of impressions and ideas. But if you have, the feeling of quiet revelation might feel equally large. Here comes this very 90's looking man into this very 90's looking lecture room. He sits down next to a overhead projector, not a single note in sight, and just begins talking. Very early on, he says:

"There is a fiction that you can get buildings right by drawing drawings. And I do want to emphasize that it is only a fiction."

That is just the start.

He speaks for about an hour, talking through a current project and how they solve problems and grasp opportunities by being deeply involved in the construction process. "They" include the people for which the house is built, architects, engineers, and of course all other builders.

The fact that all skills required should always be on hand is merely a side note.

I have not even mentioned all the prototyping and iteration you can do while constructing a building.

So much software architecture gold in a single video completely not about software architecture.

I have tried to pick up the Switch a bit more often in the last few days. Doing so has made feel very challenge-averse in games. A game is not bad because I fail a couple of times at something, and if I do fail simply trying again should be the default option. Not sighing and jumping out to the Switch home screen, wondering if there is anything else I could be doing instead.

So I try one more time. Try to rebuild the slightest bit of gaming muscles. There is fun to be had and things to improve, even on a tired Tuesday evening.

Putting in that little bit of work, overcoming challenges and feeling a sense of progress is of course also fun in itself. Back in 1992 or so, I read a review (most likely in Datormagazin) of History line: 1914-1918 which gave me a surprisingly lasting a-ha moment about good challenges in games. The reviewer wrote that they had failed one of the missions and turned off their computer in anger. However - and this was a sign of the game being good - their mind had immediately started working on what they could do differently to succeed next time, and soon they had found themselves starting the game again to try those ideas.

I like to think of this when I fail in a game. What can I do differently, even if needing to do so seems annoying and unfair in the moment? Oh, and remembering that simply trying again after a break can yield amazing results is also good.

My current playlist is Super mario bros wonder, I, robot, and a little bit of Akka arrh.

Building muscle, one Mario rep at a time.

The talk went well. I feel happy about it, and even happier about the feedback and follow-on effects I have got for it.

(It was recorded and will be out in video form relatively soon, but it is not yet. I will probably post the link all over the place once it happens.)

What I talked about was the current AI bubble, its many bad sides, and why I choose to believe in all the regular developers out there when the emperors so clearly lack any clothes whatsoever. I felt and feel that perspective is vastly under-represented, over shadowed by the breathless hype, and that I could add something by trying to spread it a bit further.

Building a talk about an ongoing hype can be kind of tiring, in that there is always more material drifting by. So many links and thoughts all the time which could be added for more context, or which provided another idea for me, or added polish to an existing idea. Especially validating was a couple of times when I read things which put things in the same way as I had in my talk. Not only am I not mad, others see this in the exact same way!

I kept finding things and polishing almost up to the last minute, and I felt nicely exhausted afterward. I got multiple comments from people showing they had latched on to various ideas, and I had some great longer conversations about several of the topics with people. One of those is out as the latest episode of the podcast Developers!, and there may be more to come in the future.

I have not put the topic of the AI bubble away nearly as much as I thought I would. At this point my Mastodon flow is naturally aligned for bubble coverage, so the topic stays fresh in my mind and I keep thinking about ways I might adjust the presentation if I gave it again, both to similar and different audiences.

Talking about the bubble to a whole different audience would be very interesting - not least if it could be more of a dialogue. How would executives react to the content? Or students? What about people from different industries?

Like I said, the thoughts keep swirling, nudging me in various interesting ways.