Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait. When automation threatens the work, it reaches past the income and touches the identity.'
Excerpt from the article above. It heavily leans on Reddit quotes, articles posted on Reddit and the number of upvotes to backup or sustain certain arguments. But I found the article informative, and publishing a message and a feeling I've been struggling to describe, write or externalise. Hope it's helpful or at least interesting to us here.
Apparently my feelings of disillusionment, confusion, anxiety, failing self esteem and occasionally anger or frustration from AI has a name that's starting to be written and formalised. Though not yet accepted either informally or formally, but it's starting a conversation which I'm thankful for, _Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction_. From the article:
"In September 2025, two psychiatrists at the University of Florida College of Medicine, Stephanie McNamara and Joseph E. Thornton, published a paper in the journal Cureus proposing a new construct they call Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction, or AIRD."
I'll be sharing this article with my psychologist when we meet in a few weeks.
It's exactly the same. "The secret ingredient is crime...", then once the coffers are full use the cash to legitimate their presence into a legal offering.
It's not as much of a hoodwink as you would think however, it's everywhere and has been the same throughout history.
East India Company, Facebook, and even more recently Uber. Uber is the most readily documented.
In Australia (and I'm almost certain else where, but I'll talk about Brisbane, Queensland explicitly), Uber were illegal for years and just paid the fines to the local authorities when pegged. And continued to do so until they became legal.
It's a confronting and candid example of "money fixes all problems". The truth of this continues to bother me, the older and maybe not wiser I become, the more twisted I am from feeling disenfranchised, jaded and cynical from this truth.
The world fundamentally operates very differently at the macro level where money is counted in 10 or more digits than the micro level where most of us here sit. Witnessing the average person struggle to home and feed them selves on a countries median wage. While organisations wash their sins with coffers and pivot into unicorns and technical behemoths.
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
It seems to me that the writer, Herman, doesn't want to use the cloud short of the parts that are almost mandatory these days (e.g., CloudFlare, or a CDN of some sort).
GitHub Pages, CloudFlare pages etc are a great and very simple service. But they're opposite or contrary to running your own hardware, warts and all.
Herman wasn't looking for solutions IMO, I read it more as him lamenting at how hostile and insidious the internet has become. It has been for some time, but it seems to be getting exponentially worse.
That's the thing. Even when you consider the hardware benefits. Let's say they're 10% better (I feel but happy to be corrected, that feels understated).
There isn't a single machine out there that's even moderately close in terms of build quality. Either at the dollar cost for an entry series MacBook Pro or Air with 36GB (38?) memory.
I don't think there's an OEM Linux or Windows laptop with Linux as a first class citizen laptop out there even moderately close for value, performance and build quality.
Shit I'm not sure if there's even one out there if you spent considerably more than on a MacBook. MacBook Pro's are pretty good value now.
Not too dissimilar to what I and some colleagues went through with our local dev tooling yesterday. Not related to DNS, but the frustration was on par.
Went around in circles deleting the repo, deleting packages from homebrew, reimporting the tool chain from our private repo, constantly got HTTP 400 errors from the Rails Console when we were attempting to use our local dev instance to talk to third party APIs.
Eventually found out it was because of a recent release of OpenSSL:
Exactly. If you can avoid having to do _any_ patches except those that have a security purpose you've already reduced your risk to supply chain attacks considerably.
This isn't trivial to organise though since semver by it's self doesn't denote when a patch is security related or not. Of course, you can always review the release notes but this is time consuming, and doesn't scale well when a product grows either in size of code base or community support.
This is where there's a fairly natural place for SAST (E.g., Semgrep, Snyk (many more but these are the two I've used the most, in no particular order)), and supply chain scans fall in place, but they're prohibitively expensive.
There is a lot of open source tooling out there that can achieve the same too of course.
I've found there's a considerable linear climb with overheads/TOIL and the larger the number of open source tools you commit to create a security baseline. Unfortunately, this realistically means most companies where time is scarcer than money, means more money shifts into closed source products like those I listed, rather than those ran by open source products/companies.
Aww dude, nothing to thank me for, thank you though! :)
I had no idea English was your second language! That's awesome.
I'm dyslexic so language is really hard for me, I have to put a lot more effort than most. I'm pretty intolerant of people who get annoyed at others when spelling or grammar is incorrect when we don't know their personal context (I had to triple check my spelling of grammar at least three times there XD).
I never got that impression from your post English wasn't your first language though! But I also wouldn't have stepped in to correct you even if you had. I nearly always find my own errors after a second or third visit, if I want cristicism of how I wrote something. I'll ask for it. If I didn't. I don't. I assume the same for everyone else.
You don't need to get sun burns to get skin cancer, but there is of course a strong correlation.
Australia does have the highest records of skin cancer diagnosis per capita though, and it has for some time. [1] The reason for it is for a few reasons.
A prevalance of outdoors focused lifestyles, exasperated by a higher amount of UV penetration to the ground due to proximity to the equator, and a much smaller/thinner O-zone layer than anywhere else in the world. This applies to both Australia and New Zealand btw.
Both due to the location, and man made causes (e.g., CFC's) [2]. Though fortunately, the O-zone layer is getting much better and quite quickly. The article I linked states the ozone layer will be at pre-1980 levels by 2050. Taking this at face value without much scrutiny though.
Australian's statistically have fairer skin. I'm half Cypriot by mother's, Norweigan. I did not get my fathers complexion ;-).
Throw in the sheer number of people who travel here from places where the ozone is much stronger/better, means people enjoying our lifestyle without the same level of protection warranted. I thiink this risk is overstated though, I made the mistake of not using enough sunscrean or clothing once, and got the most hellish skin burn. You only ever make that mistake once.
This is what's strange to me, I've never, ever heard anyone here in QLD say "buy banana boat products", it's always said that it is shit though.
So, we, as a community knew to avoid them for an awful long time. I can't be specific about when I heard this first but I'm almost certain some one said this to me in the first 12 months I moved to Brisbane (from the UK) 17 years ago.
So, there's been an urban myth for almost, if not longer than 2 decades. And we're only finding out now that it's true? That's the most surprising part of this to me IMO.
