Your occasional reminder that "AI" is shit: Every assertion in this "AI Overview" of the question "What coffee does John Scalzi drink" is wrong. I don't regularly drink coffee (and never black) I've never had black sesame jasmine cream tea, and I don't hang in coffee shops. Don't trust "AI" ever!

— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2026-05-08T16:24:42.334Z

I still ask “AI” questions about me from time to time, just to see what it knows about a moderately notable science fiction author and whether it will still make up things when it doesn’t know something, and as of May 8, 2026, the answer to each is “not as much as it thinks it does,” and “it definitely will.”

As always, I remind myself: If it knows this little about something I know very well, think of how little it knows about things I know nothing about. It literally cannot be trusted with anything factual (because, one again, it doesn’t know facts, it just knows what is statistically likely to be the next word), and thinking that can be is an actual intellectual hazard and fault. Don’t be the one who does that.

— JS

In April, the U.S. Department of Education accused both Olathe Public Schools and the Shawnee Mission School District of violating federal Title IX and student privacy laws for their policies regarding transgender students and threatened to take away federal funding.

This week, Olathe signed a voluntary resolution aimed at resolving the investigation, but Shawnee Mission refused federal officials’ offer for a settlement.

Olathe submits to “voluntary resolution”

The “voluntary resolution agreement,” signed Friday by Olathe Superintendent Brent Yeager, is the first step to resolving the investigations launched last year by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and Student Privacy Policy.

In a statement, the district said it “firmly rejects the allegations” raised during the investigation calling it “a drawn-out political display,” but submitted the agreement in order to “remain focused on serving students and families,” avoid prolonged legal and financial disruption and protect federal funding.

The Olathe district will now update its policies regarding students’ gender identity, including guidance and training to state that participation in athletics “shall be based on the student’s sex.”

It also agreed to change its policy regarding restroom and locker room access to be “based on the student’s sex.”

The agreement Olathe signed explicitly defines sex as “a person’s biological classification at birth as either male or female as reflected on the student’s birth certificate.”

The district did, however, add a provision that its schools may continue to provide separate accommodations on a “case-by-case basis” determined at the building level by the principal in order to protect students’ “safety, privacy and disability rights.”

As part of the portion of the agreement regarding FERPA, or federal privacy statutes in education, Olathe agreed to issue a memo stating the district “has not had and does not have ‘gender support plans,’” but acknowledged that if such records existed and were maintained by the district, they would generally qualify as educational records subject to parental review under FERPA.

The district’s statement also stressed that the agreement isn’t an admission of a Title IX or FERPA violation.

Shawnee Mission refuses

In contrast, the Shawnee Mission district has so far refused to submit to federal investigators’ proffered resolution.

In a letter to the U.S. Department of Education dated May 4, attorneys for the Shawnee Mission School District rejected the proposed agreement, saying it contains “inaccurate statements of law, false allegations of fact, and unreasonable conditions.”

The district argued the law surrounding transgender students and Title IX remains unsettled and pointed to a recent Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling stating “whether Title IX requires, permits, or prohibits the participation of transgender athletes in female athletics remains an open question of law.”

SMSD’s attorneys also noted the Supreme Court recently heard arguments in cases involving transgender athletes, but has not yet issued rulings, which could change the legal landscape regarding trans students’ rights.

The district also accused federal investigators of acting in “bad faith” when it accused the district of withholding records while refusing to name specific complaints.

“Rather than engage in good faith, the Department has made a blanket allegation of intentional noncompliance,” Shawnee Mission’s letter reads.

It called the investigation a “sham process designed to reach a predetermined outcome untethered to the facts or controlling standards of law.”

The letter also lays out SMSD’s objections to two provisions in the agreement.

The first is the requirement for the district to state “there are only two sexes (female and male)” and that sex is “unchangeable.”

Another provision would have required Superintendent Michael Schumacher to issue an apology letter to students for violating their privacy rights and “personal dignity.”

“The Department has put forth a draft resolution agreement that would force SMSD to issue a new policy and make public statements that intentionally devalue some members of our community,” the letter reads.

The district rejected both demands.

The investigation

The agency began looking into the districts, as well as two others in Kansas in August 2025 and announced the investigations found violations last month.

The federal investigations stemmed from allegations that four Kansas school districts kept unofficial student records and used “gender support plans.”

“These Kansas school districts have allowed ‘gender ideology’ to run amok in their schools,” said Kimberly Richey, assistant secretary for civil rights for the U.S. Department of Education, in a press release in April.

The department warned the districts that they would be at risk of losing federal funding if they didn’t change their policies. Both districts receive about a million dollars of federal funding a year.

Both Olathe Public Schools and the Shawnee Mission School District pushed back against the allegations in April saying the districts’ policies didn’t violate federal law.

Olathe Schools must provide documentation to federal officials by Oct. 1 showing updated guidance, training materials and websites to comply with the agreement.

The agreement also requires annual certification through 2028 affirming the district’s compliance.

Federal officials will close the investigation into Olathe when it determines the district has fulfilled the agreement.

“Olathe Public Schools looks forward to returning its full attention to the work that matters most – educating students and preparing them for their future,” the district said.

Because the district rejected the agreement, SMSD now faces a loss of federal funding and a possible legal fight with the Department of Education.

The looming Supreme Court decision could reshape the requirements of the agreements.

The Post reached out to The U.S. Department of Education but did not hear back at time of publication.

SAN DIEGO — As an 8-year-old boy steered his bicycle in figure eights, his mother piled three plates with pizza and pineapple slices from an outdoor kitchen shared with more than a dozen other families who call this parking lot home.

She carried the plates past her family’s sedan — their last asset and, until recently, their only shelter — and placed the dinner inside a recreational vehicle assigned to them for the next six months. After dinner, she helped the third grader with his homework, then made sure he showered and brushed his teeth before bed. The next morning, she drove the 10 miles to her son’s school, where she works as a part-time site monitor. Their belongings and beds and private bathroom, meanwhile, remained secure at the city-owned lot, where homeless families like theirs find temporary stability. 

“He likes it here,” said the mother, M., who is being referred to by her first initial to protect her family’s privacy. “We can actually cook. I waste less money. There’s a lot to like.”

Since late last year, M. and her family have been living in parking lots opened by the city of San Diego, the local school district and a nonprofit partner. Priced out of San Diego’s housing market, they now call the RV lot their temporary home as they meet with a caseworker who helps them search for more permanent housing.

Family homelessness hit a record high in 2024, as the end of federal pandemic assistance and rising inflation pushed more families with children and unaccompanied youth out of their homes. A sluggish labor market and high housing costs have further strained family budgets. And now, as the number and visibility of unhoused families continue to climb, a handful of school districts are considering their parking lots as a way to shelter homeless students and their families. 

The city of San Diego began experimenting in 2017, when it partnered with nonprofit Jewish Family Service (JFS) to convert the first of what are now four parking lots into safe places to sleep. It added its first lot prioritizing families in 2023. A few months later, as the city pushed a sweeping ban on public camping, officials with San Diego Unified School District approached the city with the idea of turning a vacant elementary and other district properties into temporary shelters.   

The model is now spreading beyond California. In Ohio, the Cincinnati school district later this spring will open its first safe parking lot for families at a downtown elementary school. The teachers union for Fayette County Public Schools, in neighboring Kentucky, has asked its school board to follow Cincinnati’s lead. 

San Diego’s parking program has drawn some opposition, including from nearby residents and private developers who worry about crime and impact on property values. Progressives here also wonder, quietly, whether the program diverts attention and resources from addressing why families lose their housing in the first place. The Trump administration, meanwhile, also has criticized safe parking lots as “dystopian” and “reprehensible” — even as it plans for major cuts to long-term housing programs. With the exception of the Rose Canyon lot where M. and her family are staying, San Diego’s safe parking sites do not offer RVs or other amenities beyond security and portable bathrooms to families. 

But some advocates for homeless people argue the safe parking sites are an effective, if highly imperfect, short-term fix, offering autonomy and dignity to people as they search for more permanent housing. 

“Parking lots are a terrible option, but there are options that are worse,” said Jennifer Erb-Downward, director of housing stability programs and policy initiatives for Poverty Solutions, a University of Michigan project to promote economic mobility. “Often the only other option is literal homelessness, in your car and on the streets. This creates a middle ground where you can get families into the system, where you can try to meet their needs and in a place that keeps them safe.”

The San Diego school district says students can’t learn unless they’re safe and healthy. It refers families to city shelters, but those don’t have nearly enough space to accommodate the need. 

“The goal is for this to be a way station,” Kristy Drake, the district’s liaison for homeless and foster youth, said of the school district’s lot. “When families drive onto this lot,” Drake added, “they come into this wider network of support and resources. The goal is to move on. Hopefully no one’s there too long.”

Never before have so many families in the U.S. lived without stable housing, according to the most recent data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Its annual homeless census from January 2024 found nearly 260,000 people in families with children experiencing homelessness — a jump of more than 50 percent since before the pandemic. And those figures are likely undercounts: Experts often note that HUD’s numbers don’t capture “hidden” homelessness, such as families who sometimes pay out of pocket to stay in hotels and motels or couch-surf with friends and families to avoid the streets. And while the agency still hasn’t released homeless numbers for 2025, early data from school districts and states around the country suggest youth homelessness continues to rise.

In California, family homelessness has risen 14 percent since before the pandemic. 

“There’s this huge amount of instability that exists for children in this country that goes unrecognized,” said Erb-Downward. “Pretty much the only point of true stability they have is their school.”

M., who grew up in nearby Calexico and has lived in San Diego since 2012, lost her housing after the expiration of the subsidy her family received through a federal rental assistance program Congress created during the pandemic. The program ran out of cash last year, and M.’s subsidy expired just as her landlord planned to hike their rent by nearly a third.

“It was like, there’s no way we can do that,” said M. “We tried to look for an affordable place,” she added. “They’re all asking three times rent and a 650 credit score. That’s impossible right now.”

In San Diego County, there are roughly 1,500 people in families experiencing homelessness, but only a handful of emergency shelters offer space for children and parents. San Diego, the county and several surrounding cities have recently closed their waiting lists for housing vouchers that subsidize the cost of rent. M. did not want to leave the city, but had few options.

As the family packed their belongings into storage, M. contemplated asking friends to allow her son to crash on their couch while she and her husband slept in their vehicle. But then the principal at her son’s school learned of their situation and encouraged M. to sign up as the first family to move into a new safe parking lot at the former Central Elementary School.

A security guard station separates the gates to the Central Elementary lot from construction on a busy boulevard in the eastern City Heights neighborhood. So far, 15 families have used one of the 40 spots for vehicles there. In a pair of old portable classrooms, the district and JFS added microwaves for families to prepare food. Parents can meet with case managers while students access Wi-Fi to do homework or play on the school’s old soccer field.

For M. and some other parents, the lots are preferable to shelters, many of which keep hard curfews, require that minors be supervised at all times and lack quiet space to do homework, said Jesse Mendez, director of the safe parking program for JFS. 

By contrast, the Rose Canyon lot provides each family with their own trailer. The city and JFS also recently added the covered communal area, which includes a small library, dining and study area, charging station for electronics and the shared kitchen. 

“Here, you’re choosing who gets to sleep next to you and in a place where you’re safe,” Mendez said. “Kids end up here by no choice of their own. I don’t want them to even realize they’re experiencing homelessness.”

Not long after the Rose Canyon lot opened for families in 2023, school district leaders began to consider converting the lot at the Central Elementary school campus into a safe parking site. Eventually the district plans to develop the school into affordable housing for teachers, custodians and other district employees, but construction crews aren’t expected to break ground for years. In San Diego, salaries for many district employees are low: Hourly school staff, like classroom aides and bus monitors, can earn as little as $1,832.64 a month, with median rent topping $2,200 for a one-bedroom apartment as of January. A two-bedroom apartment would cost M.’s family a median of nearly $3,000 a month.

“We have this vacant land, sitting in the middle of a city struggling with the problem of homelessness,” said the school district’s Drake. “Why not put up this land? We just ask that our families get first dibs on spaces.”

As she waited for funding from the city to materialize, Drake began calling every family in her database that listed their residence as either unsheltered or in a hotel or motel — anyone who might be living in their car.

When funding finally came through just before Thanksgiving 2025, she quickly could refer more than two dozen families to the lot. It’s a subset of homeless families who are eligible, notes Drake — families must have their own vehicle to qualify, meaning they need enough resources to own one but do not have enough to pay rent. 

The lot at Central Elementary is open to families each day from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m. There’s a row of portable restrooms, but families must wait until a nearby YMCA opens and allows them to shower. They have access to its food pantry as well.  

M. said she vastly prefers the Rose Canyon lot to the one at the school, though. There’s often construction noise from work on an apartment complex next door, she said, and “the area’s not great. There’s a lot of homeless people on the streets there. It matters, the location.”

Last year, San Diego County recorded a dramatic drop — 72 percent — in the number of families living without shelter. Some homeless and housing advocates say the city’s 2023 ban on public camping just pushed more homeless families out of sight.

Yet research on JFS’s safe parking model suggests it does make a difference for families longer-term: A 2024 study found that 40 percent of households that stayed at a JFS site between March 2020 and November 2021 had moved on to more stable housing, either permanent or temporary. Clients who had used both the parking program and emergency shelters “highly preferred” the lots, the study said. More recently, JFS reported that 53 percent of all households in the program and 76 percent at the Rose Canyon lot found more stable housing. (The national average for people moving from homeless services into permanent housing hovered just below 34 percent last year, according to HUD. And across San Diego, shelters generally reported a similar rate of only 9 percent, the study noted.)

JFS enrolls households for an initial 60 days, as case managers work with them to set goals and make progress toward stable housing. Many families stay longer. 

In March, that assistance finally paid off for Dezarae S. and her family.

She and her siblings spent most of their childhood homeless, living in San Diego’s emergency shelters, on the streets or in their mother’s car. Mendez, now with JFS, first met Dezarae years ago during one of her family’s stays at a shelter. They met again recently when Dezarae — whose surname is withheld to protect her children’s privacy — moved with her husband and their four kids onto the Rose Canyon lot.

Her twin sons, 2, are both autistic and met with specialists at the lot to prepare for preschool. The youngest boy, a 1-year-old, is a light sleeper. Her oldest daughter, 4, was potty trained in the RV.

“It doesn’t feel like we live in an RV,” said Dezarae last month, adding that her childhood memories fueled her motivation to keep her own kids out of shelters and off the streets.

Then, after three years on the city’s waiting list for a housing voucher, they finally secured one and moved into a three-bedroom apartment in late March.

“My kids are my world, and my kids are still happy,” Dezarae said. “We do everything in our power to keep their childhood innocence.”

Other districts are trying to help families experiencing homelessness by following San Diego’s lead. The Cincinnati Public Schools safe sleep lot is scheduled to open with a dozen spots; the district will hire security to monitor the lot seven days a week and build a structure to house a private bathroom, laundry and shower facilities.

Rebeka Beach, head of homeless services for Cincinnati schools, visited safe parking programs in San Diego and at Long Beach Community College before adopting the idea.

Beach acknowledged that the safe parking program was just a stopgap, with many more families needing help. She also spends more than $50,000 each year to place students and their families in short-term hotels and motels. “We know it’s not a solution. It’s just a bridge and response to an immediate crisis.”

Educators in Kentucky’s Fayette County Public Schools, which reported more than 1,100 students as homeless this year, shared a similar message. “Schools can’t take care of everything, but we feel we can help where we can,” Laura Hartke, an organizer with American Federation of Teachers-120, a local union, who is encouraging her district to adopt the model, told local media.

M., meanwhile, continues to weigh her options. She considered moving her family back to her hometown of Calexico, more than 100 miles away, but that would have meant leaving her job. The housing voucher program, now closed, isn’t an option for her family like it was for Dezarae’s. And with gas prices climbing and a high monthly bill to store their belongings, it’s difficult to save

“There’s no getting ahead,” she said.

But they find free ways to enjoy time as a family, at the beach and nearby tide pools. M. recently got her son’s bike out of the family’s storage unit too.   

Watching him ride the figure eights, she said, “We just got to make it work.”

Contact staff writer Neal Morton at 212-678-8247, on Signal at nealmorton.99, or via email at morton@hechingerreport.org.

This story about homeless students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Two weeks ago, I quit my job.

It wasn’t a bad job, not by most metrics. It ticked the boxes a job is supposed to tick: good pay. Health insurance. Remote work. Time off. Nice coworkers.

I worked as our org's only design engineer and maintainer of our design system. My job was to build components, to polish the final product that went out into the world, and to bridge gaps between design and engineering. During my time, I doubled surface coverage of our components, chipped away at bugs, and fixed accessibility issues. I published documentation. I administered twice-yearly surveys which indicated high satisfaction from the team—up significantly compared to when I began. I was doing good work.

And yet, work was rendering me increasingly miserable. I questioned myself. Why am I here? Does any of this work actually matter? And if I stop caring about the quality of my work... will anyone notice? (An uncomfortable thought.)

I knew I was tired, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to quit. I took a week off to consider it, and told myself: if you still want to leave at the end of this week, hand in your resignation.

The following Monday, I handed in my resignation. I felt immediate relief. I had nothing else lined up, but I knew I needed to go. I'm unsure when (or if) I'll return to full-time tech work.

What happened?

<figure> (quality:90) <figcaption> Not long after quitting, my phone dropped and shattered. Photo by the author. </figcaption> </figure>

The psychic toll of AI

Consider the following scenarios:

• You join a meeting with a coworker. Your coworker has enabled an AI tool to automatically take notes and summarize the meeting. They do not ask for consent to turn it on. The tool mischaracterizes what you discuss.
• A team lead adds an AI chatbot to a Slack channel. Anyone can tag the bot to answer questions about the company's products. Coworkers tag the chatbot many times a day. You never see someone check that the bot's responses are correct.
• An engineer adds 12,000 lines of code affecting your app's authentication. They ask that it be reviewed and merged same-day. Another engineer enlists a "swarm" of AI agents to review the code. The code merges with no one having read the full set of changes.
• A designer is tasked with exploring a new feature. They prompt an AI tool for an interactive prototype. Design crit is spent analyzing visual details in the generated prototype, with minimal discussion of core ideas, goals, or tradeoffs.
• One of your pull requests has been open for a few days. You ask other engineers to leave a code review. Minutes later, an engineer pastes a review that was generated by an AI tool. There are no additional thoughts of their own.
• You point an engineer to the relevant section of a library's docs in order to request a feature. They tell you that the feature request is not possible, and send a screenshot of their chat with an AI tool as proof.
• Documents and code are being generated faster than team members can review. You get the feeling that most people have stopped reading altogether.
• Organization leadership has mandated that each person adopt new AI tools to "uplevel" themselves and their team.

I encountered each of these scenarios over the past few years, and each one left me wondering: do I raise an issue about AI here? Do I ask my coworker to disable their note-taking tool, or do I allow them to record me? (Where does the data go? Who is reading it? Do we retain knowledge in the same way without manual note-taking?) Do I voice concerns over unread code entering the codebase, and the consequences of that pattern for institutional knowledge-building? Do I ask others on the design team to delay prototyping until later in the design process? Is it already too late to ask? Has the team already shipped the code, already designed the feature, already moved onto the next task? If someone requests my review on a pull request that was clearly vibe coded, do I review the code and write comments as usual, or send it back to them for self-review? Would initiating these discussions result in interpersonal stress? Should I just let things slide? Would I become known as a "difficult" coworker for pushing back on AI use? Does any of it really matter? Does anyone really care?

All of these questions consumed energy. Whether I decided to confront them or not was moot: they left me tired and alienated either way. AI had hooked its tendrils into every corner of my work life. Even if I, personally, abstained from most AI usage, I was steeped in an environment which made it impossible to avoid. Pushing back felt futile.

<aside> I prefer to avoid AI usage for ethical, practical, and financial reasons.

1. Ethically: Generative AI tools, powered by data centers which consume vast amounts of water and pollute our environment, are built on the collective theft of the works of millions of artists, developers, authors, and other creatives, supercharge the spread of disinformation and fascism, have repeatedly provoked psychosis and suicide, and concentrate wealth in fewer hands while providing cover for widespread layoffs.
2. Practically: I have found that AI tools overcomplicate implementations and that cleaner, simpler solutions can often be written by hand. AI doesn't "know" anything, and is making life worse for open source maintainers. Overreliance on AI risks deskilling.
3. Financially: I dislike sending money to large corporations when alternatives include learning the skill for free and contributing to open source projects. Tokens are currently heavily subsidized and likely to become more expensive, so I would prefer not to make a habit of using them.

I use AI tools sparingly for assistance while refactoring code in languages I understand. I occasionally use it to help compose command line arguments for tools like ffmpeg. I never use AI to generate images, video, or prose. </aside>

The explosion of AI has played a significant role in my own burnout. Worse, it feels inescapable. Few tech organizations are taking a principled stance against AI use.

But AI use is only one part of broader social trends within tech that leave me questioning whether I should remain here.

The loss of an ideal

When I started full-time design and dev work in the 2010s, tech was generally understood to be a progressive place. This was peak "fun tech job" era, with magazines publishing glossy covers about life at Google. Apple had a gay CEO!

The web was still in flux; as a designer, the prospect of shaping sites into more usable forms excited me. Usability and user-centered design were hot topics. Budding federal organizations like 18F and the United States Digital Service were embarking on meaningful technology-enabled civic work.

After Trump's first election, people recoiled with shock and disbelief. How could this happen? Many organizations distanced themselves from the administration and reiterated their commitment to equality. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, alongside a surge of protests for racial justice. There was a glimpse of unity. Biden was elected and swiftly proclaimed a return to "normal".

"Normal" landed us where we are now: the second Trump administration, more flagrantly corrupt and cruel than the first. Protests surge (larger than ever!) amidst a quieter type of elite resignation. The words "equity" and "inclusion" are no more.

Tech organizations have now given up on pushing back against an unethical and violent administration, deciding that it is in their best business interest to flatter the president's ego with gold trophies and pandering praise. Elon Musk and the "Department of Government Efficiency" took a sledgehammer to 18F and replaced it with National Design Studio, a propaganda shop whose main talent is building expensive and inaccessible landing pages.

Leaders at Google have abandoned former climate pledges as they work to build new data centers powered by natural gas turbines which emit more carbon than the entire city of San Francisco. Other tech CEOs smile for photos alongside war criminals.

<figure class="no-bleed" style="max-width: 560px;"> (quality:100) <figcaption> Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, poses with Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for "war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population." Original tweet. </figcaption> </figure>

I keep asking myself:

What happened to the principles that were professed a decade ago? To address climate change? To reduce racial, gender, and economic inequality? To "don't be evil"?

Were these principles abandoned, or were they merely born of convenience?

Has tech always been like this? Was I just blind to it before?

When I say that I am burnt out I do not mean simply that I am tired. I'm referring to the "emotional experience of political defeat":

Burnout in Freudenberger’s articles from this period is not just defined in terms of physical tiredness as a result of doing too many things; rather, it emerges from emotional investment in a cause and from the disappointments that arise when flaws in a political project become apparent. Freudenberger’s concept not only describes physical exhaustion but also acknowledges the need to deal with anger caused by grief brought about by the “loss of an ideal.” Burnout in the context of social justice projects thus often involves a process of mourning, according to Freudenberger. Returning to his earlier writings on burnout makes it clear that when understood as a malaise arising from politically committed activities, burnout cannot be equated with tiredness or stress.

<cite>Hannah Proctor, Burnout, p. 92</cite>

I love designing and building things for the web, but I'm mourning an industry that does not share the ideals I once thought it did.

---

I understand why people use AI. Life can be difficult and confusing. Prompting the machine is so alluring—it answers with such certainty! How could it be wrong? (And even if it is a little wrong, well... hasn't it saved time? Does it need to be perfect?) The temptation is real.

I don’t blame people for opting to use tools that promise quick, convenient solutions to problems. We all operate under capitalism. Many of us have bullshit jobs where the goal is not, in fact, to make something good, or even to learn, but to simply make money to pay rent and medical expenses. To hopefully find a little joy on the side. The whole system is broken; AI alone didn't break it, but it is widening the cracks.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I wish none of us had to live like this. I would like to imagine a future that does not look like this.

Ironically, what I've gained from AI is a deeper appreciation for human communication, in all its messy imperfection. The point of a code review is not simply for good code to make it into a codebase, but to build institutional knowledge as people debate and iterate and compromise, slow as it may be. Friction is good.

<blockquote class="bluesky-embed" data-bluesky-uri="at://did:plc:xfjf7fkhv6rwsx5e6p2ar37o/app.bsky.feed.post/3midldzhcdc26" data-bluesky-cid="bafyreid2n3rks7uaki5mqzi55obgrmvj7av5bf6wiixaqanxf6bvrwoycq" data-bluesky-embed-color-mode="system"> <p lang="en"> I’ve posted it before, but it feels evergreen

The two hardest problems in Computer Science are

1. Human communication
2. Getting people in tech to believe that human communication is important </p> — Hazel Weakly (<a href="https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:xfjf7fkhv6rwsx5e6p2ar37o?ref_src=embed">@hazelweakly.me</a>) <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:xfjf7fkhv6rwsx5e6p2ar37o/post/3midldzhcdc26?ref_src=embed">March 31, 2026 at 2:46 AM</a> </blockquote><script async src="https://embed.bsky.app/static/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Where do I go from here?

No matter how rapidly technology changes, I am coalescing around some core beliefs:

1. Things that are worth doing are worth doing well.
2. Things that are done well require time and effort.
3. You make meaning through the doing.
4. Ideas are common; effort is not.
5. There are no shortcuts.

I am, as it stands, without a job. Recovering from burnout will take time. Thankfully, I have savings that afford me the privilege to take that time. I’m distancing myself from social media and news, at least for a little while. At some point, I will need to decide if I want to remain in this industry, and if so, where to go next.

In the meantime, I’m going to the gym. (Crossfit, weirdly.) I’m learning more about how synthesizers work and I'm generating different sounds. I’m looking at birds. I'm looking at my cat. I’m continuing to build tools to help trans people with legal name changes. I'm spending time with friends.

Eventually I will find new work. Who knows where.

Knees!