wanting control over my computer and what it does makes me luddite in 2026 apparently.

vibe coding so far has really homogenized the tech stacks by the self promoters. Vercel is printing money off this phenomenon that's a self fulfilling snowball. But stack diversity is good, not everything needs to be js/ts

younger folks may not realize how many of his strips were cut out of the newspaper and taped to fridges, cubicles, and office breakrooms.

In the 90's, I worked for a small consulting company with large corporate clients.

We joked that we could assess the health of a company's culture by whether Dilbert cartoons were tapped up in cubicles. Companies without them tended to have not much in the way of a sense of humor, or irony, or self-awareness.

The worst job I ever had was working for a manager who literally had a "no Dilbert cartoons in the workplace" policy. Other cartoons, fine, go crazy. But no Dilbert.

That place wasn't just kinda like Initech in Office Space, it pretty much WAS Initech in Office Space, only way less funny and interesting.

I worked for a Pointy-Haired Boss who used to pass out Dilbert strips he himself found funny and relevant to that person. Sadly, he could not recognize the PHB in himself.

Yeah I think that Joel Spolsky wrote some blog post about Dilbert cartoons on walls being a red flag. However, surely no cartoons is surely more often down to stiff policy which in it self is a way worse red flag. (Black flag? At least on the beach)

I suspect there was a healthy medium: none meant cultural issues, while too many meant the entire company was dysfunctional to an extreme.

As a young engineer, I was once visited at my work desk by my CEO and the HR team because of all the Dilberts I had up on my cubicle wall. They felt they were harming morale. The engineers around me loved them, but they made fun of management, the real issue. I was surprised it merited the attention. I won a short battle over the issue and was allowed to keep them up. I still have a photo of that cubicle with them up.

Once, before the web existed, I emailed Scott and joked that perhaps he was someone at my company, looking over my shoulder. The comics were often absurd but also so accurate. He replied something friendly, I forget what.

As was Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. Oddly in my own corporate travels, the practice seemed to have stopped mid-90's. In the '00's and later, cubicle walls were mostly barren. After '08, cubicles had disappeared altogether and they just lined us up along long tables like cordwood.

That brings back memories. They were definitely popular. In the early 2000s, I worked at a small company and one coworker had a bunch of Dilbert strips all over one of her cubicle walls. It wasn't an insane amount, but her cube was on the way to the break room, so it was visible to everyone passing by. Apparently the owners of the company did not like that and had her take them down.

Back then it was possible for authors and artists to maintain a mystique about who they were. What you saw was what you got and that was it. Making social media a necessity for product marketing changed that forever.

I always thought that finding those strips in an office was a warning sign. If they identify with those characters, there was something profoundly wrong.

And yes, the norm was already pretty bad.

they were never positioned as a unicorn, the question becomes can you be a small business/SMB in software/tech

Most software/tech is a small business.

yes, but you have to size your expectations accordingly and can't assume that the sv model will work for your 1-2 person business.

the ai companies are presented as just 'existing', when in fact there is money being made it's just be routed to them.

prompting in my experience is boring and/or frustrating. Why anyone would want to do more of that without MASSIVE financial incentives is unthinkable. No composer or writer would ever want to prompt a "work".

I've loaded up omarchy and I'm really digging all the keyboard short cuts and window tiling.

My previous setup with Kubuntu was quite developer friendly with workspaces but Omarchy takes it to the next level. I'm very happy with it. I actually like most of the default tools that come with it. For example,.I was using a lot of vim before but actually neovim is a big improvement.

It has a lot of nice-to-haves which I wouldn't have bothered setting up individually but having them altogether out of the box does improve the overall developer experience significantly.

rss and private forums are the soul of the internet. find your people

Thinking about it. There are some things which can be done to better sooth the private forums.

Like to me especially signing up to each and every forum and then waiting to be accepted by a person feels good but has tons of friction and has some stress attached because you never know how strict the community is as well, it might take a day or two, perhaps this is the reason why we got the dumpster fire of mega internet forums called reddit or twitter of sorts

To me, federation feels better in this context since I can still have a single identity of sorts across multiple forums and you got better idea / ways to filter as well if need be

Another thing I feel about private forums where users have to wait for permission signing up is that I feel like something even as simple as having a cute cat or cute apple LOL or anything relaxing could make it less stressful for people to join. I assume its impact would be few but it would leave a deeper impact on those who do want to join.

not essentially private per se, but usenet groups and bbs had a natural vetting because it required some competency to even access it

Listen while I tell of Christmas 1983, when every 14-year old with a VIC-20 got a cheap modem.

Seriously, haven't we been working tirelessly to expand the circle of access? Nostalgia reflects when the circle was smaller, and we felt that we knew everyone in it.

I've come around on this one. you used to be the town idiot who was a flat earther, but thanks to the internet you're part of the community

I took the good with the bad: the ai assisted coding tools are a multiplier, google ai overviews in search results are half baked (at best) and often just factually wrong. AI was put in the instagram search bar for no practical purpose etc.

Yeah totally. The point I’m trying to make, however, is that most people don’t code, so they didn’t get the multiplier, and only got the mediocre-to-bad, with a handful of them doing things like generating dumb images for a boost. I think that’s why a lot of people in the software business are utterly bewildered when customers aren’t jumping for joy when they release a new AI “feature.” I think a lot of what gets classified as cynical ceo enshittification is really people ignoring basic good design practices, like making sure you’re effectively helping customers solve an actual problem in a context and with methods they, at least, don’t hate. Especially on the smaller scale, like indie app developers who probably get more out of AI than most, they really think people are going to like new AI features simply because they’re new AI features. They’re very wrong.

there was a funny joke that chatgpt removes the critical part of being a writer which is hours staring at a blank screen, then deleting everything you've done on a weekly basis.