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It's Better Offline, the tech podcast.

I'm your host at Zetron.

Better Offline. A few weeks ago, the internet was captivated by the work of one particularly pissed-off software developer, who claimed, and I quote the title of his blog,

I will fucking pile drive you if you mention AI again.

The writer, based in Australia, lays out in detail how infuriating a distraction AI has become from the wider problems riddling many modern tech companies, as well as the

noxious, nasty presence of Gryffter Management Consultant types that are deliberately

keeping it inflated regardless of whether it actually

means anything. One particular quote stood out to me. You see, while hype is nice, it's only nice

in small bursts for practitioners. We have a few things that a grifter does not have such as job

stability, genuine friendships and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch

fields the moment the gold rushes over due to the sad fact that we actually need to study

things and build experience. Grifters, on the other hand, wield the omnis tool that they self-aggrandizingly

call politics. That is to say,

it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can't actually deliver is highly transferable.

This piece caught both my eye and that of Cool Zone Media's Robert Evans,

who assured me he promised that I'd be allowed to leave the Cool Zone Media pain cage

if I was able to get the author

of the piece on the show. So that's what I did.

...