This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as “content”. “Content” is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you’re designing the layout and don’t know what actually goes on the page yet. “Content” is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car’s trunk. “Content” is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.

“Content”… is Whatever.

I was going to make a comment on the Stubsack thread about how it kind of ticks me off how “content creator” has permeated its way so deep into the vernacular. I can forgive it when it’s used as a clumsy term to talk about creative workers across multiple media, but something like a video essayist calling another video essayist a content creator just gives me the ick. Have some pride and solidarity in your art form, for fuck’s sake.

i was very lucky that my introduction to software engineering came from a mentor who cared intensely about their work. but i dropped out of the IT industry after i never met someone like that again.

i never even went to secondary, but across several jobs i was having to teach my colleagues (compsci degrees) basic computer literacy skills. the moment they had to leave their IDE, they were lost. they had not even a basic understanding of version control systems. zero curiosity. they frequently broke their git repos and couldn’t fix it. they didn’t give a single fuck about the theory of what they were doing for 72 hours a week; what they were voluntarily choosing to do for 72 hours a week on 30 hour contracts. they hardly even cared about the practise.

LLMs completely ruined these people. they started using it for everything: responding to Slack messages, writing emails, writing code, doing code review… and when it was found out at my last company that i was the only one stubbornly refusing to use LLMs for anything, i was put on a fucking PIP and told it was company policy to use ‘labour saving technology.’ despite the fact that my code had the fewest defects, ignoring how frequently i was misled into doing something i wasn’t even supposed to do because the fucking task requirements were ALSO WRITTEN WITH AN LLM [THAT MADE SHIT UP]. but it was my fault for ‘not checking first’ (???).

i will never touch a computer for money ever fucking again.

aside: reading this while listening to clipping. was an experience

Either that, or live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider “send money to people” to be core functionality. But here in the good ol’ U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal.

Wait what? Can people in the USA not, em, transfer money? What do the banks do then?

This caused me to reconsider something. I had kinda assumed that everything sucks because the bar of quality for software is so low, and that’s pulling it down for every other field now that software proliferated into eating the world.

But I didn’t examine that the relationship could work in both directions. Software sucks some of the time, but it doesn’t excuse shit like how Crowdstrike can still be in business, and we should probably look into what’s caused us to develop the attitude about not caring that shit is shit, just because the shit salesmen told us it’ll be less shit in the future.