Home to my thoughts
Hi, I'm Ibrahim Diallo. I write code and play with computers. Now let me tell you a story...
Deep dives into engineering, philosophy, and life.
I started learning web development around the time the term search engine optimization, SEO, was becoming more common. You could still see the shift between pre-SEO content and post-SEO content. A popular article titled "Forgotten" (a great story) was suddenly republished as "Forgotten: My Adventures as an Employee the System Forgot to Erase."
It's easier for someone in my position, after working 20 years in this field to talk about morals. I can disagree with the choices my employer makes. In fact, I can walk away. But I remember the dilemma I felt I was in, earlier in my career.
The YouTube tag marking a video as AI-generated is as insignificant as the little "Sponsored" text in search ads.
I don't think it's going to work out the way everybody thinks it will. The current narrative, at least the one pushed by the companies selling the shovels, is that AI will become centralized. Anthropic and OpenAI will offer safe, vetted AI. Developers will become mere prompt-engineers, submitting requests to these benevolent gatekeepers. They have tamed the dragon. We will benefit only if we become tenants to their API-driven fiefdoms, paying by the token for the privilege of renting intelligence.
There is a machine called Productivity, and on this machine there is a knob and a button. The knob increases productivity, and the button is labeled "reset."
What are you supposed to do after you've created the most successful product? Not just successful, but the most useful. In an ideal world, you would sail into the sunset and enjoy your riches. In this real world, you have to come up with another, even more successful product, or you're a failure. That's why it feels like Stack Overflow has failed.
During the pandemic, we completed one of our largest projects at work. To celebrate, since we couldn't meet in person, we all ordered food on DoorDash and played an online escape room game together. We were on a Zoom call, helping each other out and having fun. The first challenge was to escape a jail cell.