This year has been a painful one. I’ve also been pretty quiet… here anyway. It’s been over a year since I’ve posted here as most of my musings have been published on my new anonymous blog. Nevertheless, I felt like I owed whatever readers remain here at least some sort of update as to what’s been going on with me this year and where my head is at.
In truth my head isn’t in a good place. The world is going to shit. Regardless of which slice of the spectrum you are interested in, it is hard to maintain any kind of optimism about the direction things are moving in. Politics has finally turned into the complete and utter dumpster fire that I always knew it was capable of becoming. Be sure to thank Donald and his fascist enablers for this wonderful gift. Big Tech has finally begun its metamorphosis into what was probably always going to be its final form: an endless sea of the completely enshittified platforms dedicated to entrapping and enslaving unwitting prey (aka customers) by pushing an endless stream of lies and bullshit.
Between tariffs and AI related DRAM supply issues I’ve decided to plan for 2026 as being a year in which I won’t be upgrading anything at all, short of catastrophic breakage. Prices are up, supply is down and things are only going to get worse. Between the fact that our dementia addled Wharton degree wielding President seemingly has no understanding of basic economics and the fact that the entirety of tech has decided to bet the farm on the AI gold rush / bubble lasting forever, everything that had avoided becoming unavailable is now about to become unaffordable. The net result of course is the same.
This meant of course that I spent extra money at the end of this year shoring up various parts of my setup here, while the supply was there and the prices were still at least somewhat affordable. I’ve finally dumped my TP Link switches and replaced them with Ubiquiti switches. I completed taking every soundbar out of service as I’ve come to realize that soundbars are really just garbage and aren’t worth the effort. As it turns out a decent set of stereo speakers sounds way better. Of course, your mileage may vary here.
A few months back I picked up a 64 gigabyte Framework Desktop (my first Framework hardware purchase) and made it into my Steam console. I love that thing. It’s small, it’s quiet and exceedingly efficient when it comes to power usage. I currently have it booting Bazzite and capped to max its power draw at 100 watts and it kicks the shit out of every other piece of hardware in the house when it comes to gaming. Initially the plan was to eventually buy a second one. Then the Steam Machine was announced and the plan transitioned to me buying a Steam Machine, making it the console and moving the Framework Desktop into my home office. Of course none of that is likely to happen with the DRAM supply issues and price gouging that has only just begun. Framework Desktop pricing hasn’t changed yet, but honestly I just can’t afford to buy a second $2000 machine right now. The Steam Machine of course doesn’t exist yet… and perhaps it won’t? Who knows.
Looming over all of this is the country’s descent into fascism. Fascism is of course very real and at this point, I doubt that any current political party in our country is capable of undoing the damage Trump has managed to do within less than a year of his second term. He was weakened core institutions in ways that will make it very difficult for them to recover by systemically destroying our faith in them. He is doing this across the entire spectrum of the federal government. He is one of the most vile and corrupt people in the history of country and he overtly reveals that every single day. He is a pedophile. I was afraid to say these things here for quite awhile, but the time to be afraid of such an infantile thin skinned tyrant has come to an end. We must publicly and strongly push back. We must stand up for the values we used to claim that we shared, lest we run the risk of losing them altogether.
You may be wondering, “Won’t this hurt your future career prospects Jay?” Well if I had any of those, I might be concerned but alas at this point I do not. My career is winding down. Watching Big Tech constantly double down on the insane lie that is AI has basically destroyed what was left of my will to be part of this industry. It’s not about building tools or solving customer problems anymore. Instead its about cashing in on hype we generate. There are now three segments left in tech:
- AI Snake Oil Salesmen
- True AI Believers
- Traditional Engineers (aka AI Luddites)
Obviously I count myself as part of the third group. This group is rapidly being silenced and beaten into submission however. We wield no actual power. Much like how Donald Trump is enabled by MAGAs unwavering support of him regardless of how terrible he is, AI Snake Oil Salesmen are being enabled by the unwavering support of the second group, the True AI Believers regardless of how consistently AI fails to deliver.
There is no real future in LLMs. It’s a dead end tech. I’ll probably die on that hill. Either this bubble will persist long enough that I’ll be kicked to the curb due to non-compliance or during the inevitable pop I’ll get caught up in what is surely going to become industry wide layoffs in an attempt to placate soon to be poor investors who bought into this hype and ignored all of the warning signs around it. This bubble cannot last. It’s inefficient. It’s power hungry and it’s kicked off an arms race that will be remembered as the greatest waste of limited and rare materials we’ve ever seen. And it’s happening because social media has eroded enough of our basic human connections so that a large percentage of people have become desperate enough to accept comfort from a chatbot because they no longer have an actual endearing human presence in their life.
Truth is, knowing that my end in tech is near is kind of a relief. My actual interests in tech don’t involve writing code that much anymore. That should’ve been clear to anybody following along when I shelved the Presentation Engine. For most of what I do, there is already good and decent software written that can do it. The real trick is avoiding en-shittification. Sticking to mostly Free and Open Source Software has thus far been the best way to push back against that trend. The other side of the coin is that I’m just not that interested in writing code in this climate. It’s like I told my co-workers in Slack a few weeks ago, “I still want to build a better hammer, but people only want magic wands now.”
So where am I going? I don’t know. That part of this is still very much a work in progress and still stuck in more of the conceptual stage than anything else, so I’m not going to say a whole lot. As for tech most of my current interest is being hoovered up by fiddling with my home assistant setup. It feels good to exert control over the tech in my house as having control over tech is no longer either an expectation or a norm. I’ve been playing with home assistant throughout 2025 and its become a very rewarding way to take back a little bit of control.
The real takeaway is that I think the feast is ending and the famine is nearly upon us. I think tech has very hard year ahead of it and I’m expecting this year to personally be a tough one. But I’m still optimistic to some degree. Mostly because I’ve surrounded myself with bright and capable people who I know will be there through thick and thin (not the least of which is my wife Annette).
As always when it comes to the dire predictions I make, I sincerely hope I’m wrong. With that in mind, I hope that everybody out there reading this has a great 2026 and that we are able to collectively find a way to grapple with, overcome and succeed in spite of all of the omens inspiring me to predict otherwise.
Together we can overcome. Alone we are conquered.