Nine Circles of Shell

Tartessos and Rio Tinto

Tartessos was a civilization in south-west Iberia that was renowned for its abundance of metals. Tin was panned out of rivers in the region to meet the demand for bronze (that's right, the one that Matt Damon ended). One river in the region that was probably worked was the Rio Tinto). The name of the river translates to "red river" because its waters have been so completely polluted by iron and heavy metal mining waste being dissolved into it. This is the result of mining activity that stretches back to the 3000 BCE. The region has been so exploited for resources for so long, and so polluted as a result, that the Wikipedia article doesn't even mention another name for it and the opening sentence bluntly identifies it as a "...a highly toxic river in southwestern Spain".

The name "Rio Tinto" arrested my attention away from the Wikipedia rabbit hole about the Phoenicians that had led me here. It was so arresting because, having lived in Utah for the last 10 years and having dated someone who worked at the Bingham Canyon copper mine, the name was already familiar to me. It's everyone's friendly local international mining conglomerate: Rio Tinto!

That's right, Rio Tinto stadium! Rio Tinto sponsors of the Natural History Museum of Utah! That Rio Tinto! The one everyone here loves. I had about 5 minutes of my life from this point where I knew about Rio Tinto the river, I knew about Rio Tinto the company, and I just assumed it was such a funny and unfortunate coincidence that the mining company shared their name with a river that had been completely annihilated by mining so thoroughly that it has never had a name that was not a reference to its defilement.

Then I read the rest of the article about the river and learned that the Rio Tinto Company is literally named after that river and they got their start exploiting and polluting it even more than it already was. I'm kind of stunned they never changed their name. Wouldn't you want to not have the literal brand name of your company be the very first river you polluted? Maybe they're proud of it? Like a small business hanging their first dollar of revenue on the wall. "Our first river defiled". Given their behavior I wouldn't put it past them.

AI Anxiety, LLM Lunacy

I hate AI for pretty much all the reasons anyone should. It's crass and tacky. It's ugly. It's sycophantic and pathetic. It steals creativity. The people who like it are people who see the end and don't care about the means. They are people who always resented you if you had actual technical skill and expertise, because when they see that skill they didn't see someone they should respect. They saw something that they had to pay for. They wanted to pay less for it and now they see their chance. Maybe your individual salary won't go down, for now, but it means there are fewer job openings in your department. It means there is more work for you. The expectation is rising and the implicit message is if you don't keep up you're done.

I remember going to a conference a couple years ago. It was specifically a data analytics conference. I figured there would be technical talks there. There weren't. All of the talks were geared towards leadership who then probably brought everything back to their team and said "do this!" without any context or understanding or anything. They just didn't want to look like they were falling behind. They hate you. They've always hated you. The mask is coming off.

Initially I was freaked out by AI and bought the hype, as far as coding goes at least. Eventually I got on the "AI isn't that good" cope train. I would read about new models coming out and how revolutionary they are and how I'll be left behind if I don't use them and think "of course the car salesman tells you that you need a new car". I felt smug in my ability to see through the sales pitch. I felt confident that eventually all of this will backfire and they'll start hiring juniors again. I thought OpenAI and Anthropic were cynically exploiting the tech layoffs that happened right before ChatGPT blew up in 2022 or 2023 or whenever. They were crediting themselves for disrupting labor when it was really a bunch of layoffs that would have happened anyway. Maybe now I wonder if the layoffs were preempting the LLMs. Maybe they had insider knowledge.

I don't know.

The longer it goes on the more it feels like cope. People aren't talking about the AI bubble bursting like an inevitability anymore. In fact I haven't even heard anyone mention that in the last month or so. I guess it is here to stay.

I feel depressed about it all. The worst people you know won. They resented you for having a skill. For trying. For having expertise that they didn't understand, but they knew they had to pay for it. And they resented that. They wanted you for free. They've got the next best thing now. Who knows. Maybe you will be free in the future.

When I was young I was entranced by the idea of coding. It seemed almost mystical. It was like the closest thing you could do to actually being a mystic. Speaking incantations to create something. It was fun to solve puzzles. It was fun to see something work. It was fun to build things. Coding was fun. That was the very first call to printf I ever made: "Hello, world! Coding is fun!". It doesn't feel so fun anymore. I'm sure everyone gets burnt out, but now it's just. What even is it?

I didn't study computer science in college. I studied geological engineering. People in my life told me it was a good idea, and I convinced myself I'd like it. I did like some of it. The environmental stuff was kinda neat. Hydrological models were cool, and if the class wasn't at 8:00 maybe I would have done better. Maybe I would have gone down that route.

When I graduated I spent a couple years doing bullshit data entry and then decided to take some actual computer science classes at a community college. It was the only thing that really got me excited, and the longer I went on without making inroads into anything related to my first degree, the more I felt like I should just cut my loses and start over. In retrospect I was only two years out from graduating. I probably could have given it a little more time.

I ended up becoming a business systems analyst, then getting laid off, then a business intelligence analyst (I tried for dev jobs but never got any), then a manager. I became depressed in that role. I still felt green. I felt like I had never had a mentor so how could I mentor others? Those three jobs spanned 8 or 9 years and the entire time I kept telling myself "I'll become a developer some day".

My company created a new dev position in 2025 and I applied for it. I got it, not because of my developer experience but because I had five years of domain knowledge built up. If I hadn't gotten it I would have left. I was off the back of a blackpilling Netsuite conference that I just could not give a shit about.

This was the end of 2025. AI had been established but I kept telling myself it wasn't that great. They needed me. They needed my skills and my ability to write code.

Now I feel like I slept walked into this. In 2024 I got a wild hare up my ass. I (briefly, and barely) dated a girl the year before who worked in wildlife and it inspired me or something. Or maybe I just hoped if I did something like what she did it would win her back. Stupidly. I thought I could leverage my degree in geological engineering to work in something environmental. Plus there were things going on in my current industry that were giving me second thoughts. I also felt at that time that AI was going to win, so time to give up the software developer hopes. I thought about going to grad school. I thought about moving to another state. I thought about moving across the country! I genuinely had a moment of "I'm going to do this!". I applied for a job in New York! In Albany! So far from Salt Lake.

It all petered out. It slowed down. I felt ashamed. I felt scared. I didn't do it. I just kept working as a manager, and then the dev job opened up and I applied. Part of me hoped I wouldn't get it. Now I feel stuck.

To get a little speculative sci-fi on you, here is my vision of the future. This isn't schizo rambling. It's me analyzing systems and motives and resources, and I could be wrong. I probably will be...

Eventually the work done per resource consumed for AI will surpass human beings. A human does around 8 hours of work in a day. Needs some amount of water that I don't care enough to look up. Needs square feet to live, a yard, a family, hobbies, green space, a community, fuel for their car, food, yada yada... Put all that in the denominator and work in the numerator. Now put what AI needs in the denominator. The numerator for AI is a little spotty right now, but it will probably grow, and the denominator will probably shrink over time.

We're fucked if that is the case. The middle class will be mulched for bio fuel. Or may as well be. They'll keep a slave class of laborers around who will have no leverage because there's 8 billion people who are now useless to them. Maybe they'll just liquidate as many people as they can. Needless wars. Human wave attacks. Extermination camps. Who knows. People will be expendable. More so than they already think of us now.

Socialism or barbarism. We chose barbarism.

Claude, fix this and don't make any mistakes.

On Ranching and Public Land

I found this via Reddit. Puts into words something I've felt about the west for a while. I think in Nevada the blame gets shifted pretty effectively to the wild horses, which is probably partially true but probably is overstated to take the heat off the cattle industry for their devestation of habitat. The issue with wolves really upsets me too. When you think about it, we've all just decided that one industry gets to drive a species to the brink of extinction so they can profit. It's psychotic. Ranchers truly are welfare queens.

Then there's mining of course. People talk about the environmental devestation mining has wrought on Appalachia, but Nevada and the rest of the west gets overlooked because it already looked like shit to most people. Perhaps because of the cattle.

Accent Colors on non-iMac Macs

Just posting this so I can remember how to do it for new Macs. This is a link to a blog post explaining how to change the accent color on MacOS to use the special accent colors only available to the nice colorful iMacs. So now you can use those on your drab, homely Mac Mini or whatever.

Instructions below if the link dies.

First, enable the hardware-based accent colours.

defaults write -g NSColorSimulateHardwareAccent -bool YES

Second, choose a color. Use integers 3-8 to specify color.

defaults write -g NSColorSimulatedHardwareEnclosureNumber -int 3

Finally, restart your computer.

Colors are as follows...

• 3 Yellow
• 4 Green
• 5 Blue
• 6 Pink
• 7 Purple
• 8 Orange

Amazon's Unethical Dark Patterns

I know it's been knocked out of the news cycle now by the Oceangate sub and Wagner's mutiny bluff-charge, but recently Amazon was sued by the FTC for using dark patterns to trick people into signing up for Amazon Prime and making it overly difficult to cancel that subscription. When I read this I double checked my account and realized that I was, indeed, a non-consenting Prime member. How?

I didn't see much coverage of what the actual dark pattern is, so here is how I think they got me. Do not click the free overnight shipping option if you aren't already a Prime member, or you don't intend to sign up for Prime. By clicking that, you apparently consent to signing up for Prime and to being billed monthly for it. At time of writing, it is Prime month/week/whatever so they actually WILL give you free overnight shipping if you aren't a Prime member. When I saw the free overnight option, my exact thoughts were "Oh it must be some kind of promotion and then they'll remove this option eventually when the promotion is done". It didn't occur to me that it was actually me signing up for Prime.

Part of the coverage has been around Amazon's "labyrinthine" cancellation process. I found the easiest way to cancel was to just google "cancel prime" rather than navigate from within Amazon.

So here's what to take away.

1. Don't click the free overnight shipping options if you aren't already a Prime member, it isn't Prime month/week/epoch or you don't intend to become a Prime member.
2. If you are tricked to sign up for Prime, it's easier to just google "cancel Prime" or something to that effect than it is to navigate to wherever you get to cancel from your Amazon home page.

Another note: it felt pretty cathartic to tell them that I hope the FTC destroys them in the cancellation survery.