Richard Bown

Agree! That was great.

Honestly, if you read formulaic pulp, does it matter if AI writes it? Some people buy into the mythos of authors, some just like a genre. Do authors matter?

Wow. These drone shots of the Women's downhill are just spine-tingling. Amazing stuff #olympics2026

The Human Engineer newsletter Sharing humane and empathetic leadership practices and the sociotechnical aspects of working in tech.

"We are imperilled and yet cheering on from the sidelines, not just in terms of LLMs and AgenticAI, but in terms of megacorporations deciding our futures."

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Techgiganten gaan honderden miljarden investeren in onder meer datacenters Alleen Amazon, Google en Meta verwachten in 2026 in totaal voor tussen de 490 en 520 miljard dollar uit te geven.

Money money money while the world burns nos.nl/artikel/2601...

Insert ObSmithism plusgood

The Moral and Planetary Cost of the Use of GenAI - HUMAN SOFTWARE: A Life in I.T. - A Novel What is the true cost of GenAI? What should engineers consider morally, before using hyperscale factory tooling to crack simple problems.

What is the true cost of GenAI and AgenticAI to our lives as engineers and to our planet? I put a few thoughts together.

humansoftwarebook.com/2026/02/07/t...

I would like to see more debates that also account for the human and planetary impacts of GenAI and hyperscale factory computing.

I became an engineer (and later a software engineer) to solve problems for humanity, not create them. This mindless factory approach to software engineering must be tempered with the parsimony and attention to detail of real engineering.

In my view, this is far from a golden age of AgenticAI - it is a terrible, wasteful age where we burn through tokens and destroy communities to build data centres and divert water and power to the machines.

"Amazon signed a $25 million contract with ICE last year to operate its cloud services and databases."

The Mechanical Turk strikes again.

AgenticAI-driven software entrepreneurs boasting about their productivity in terms of lines of code generated per day when we already know that productivity in software engineering is notoriously hard to measure and LoC is the very worst one 🙄

Lots of new followers recently, so it's good to remind you that I wrote a book all about data centres, AI and local communities and software developers fighting back. It's available all over and here's a handy link for digital and print books2read.com/humansoftware #booksky

Alluding to your "perpetual state of alertness" which indeed is just exhausting. Better I believe to take a position - not necessarily pro or anti and stick with that. I'm trying to formulate something myself based on what I'm obverving and feeling.

Yep, just back from a conf where people seem still puzzled by the fact there are pro and anti-AI camps but only the pro-AI camps are making noise in terms of "producitivity gains" that normally SWE would baulk at. There is enormous skepitcism in the industry itself but also fear of speaking up.

On the other days, we swear a lot and blame the idiots who built this crazy thing

I just had a two-hour nap. I'm with Squoof.

I got a leaving card recently that said “Hoera!” (hooray) and yeah well that

België werkt door aan duur tolvignet, ondanks Nederlandse zorgen Het zijn enkel nog plannen, maar Nederland ziet Belgische voornemens een verplicht tolvignet in te voeren niet zitten. Als het niet van de baan gaat, komen er mogelijk tegenmaatregelen.

If I have to pay 140EUR a year to drive to Belgium I’ll do it because the petrol prices are 60c a litre less than in NL. Simple. nos.nl/artikel/2600...

Tend to agree that the "one big crapshoot anyhoo" thing must balance the continuous attempts at fitness. Mental health vs physical health. Slow and steady etc.

Obligatory post-conference LinkedIn post ✅
AI YAY vs AI NEE thoughtpiece? 🤔
Do some actual writing rather than writing about writing? 🚦

I've been rewatching Breaking Bad, and the first season had only 7 episodes and felt ramshackle and exciting. Better Call Saul felt organised and pacy in the first season. Pluribus felt slow from the outset. Will I care enough about S2 let alone more?

Book "Bureuacrats and How to Annoy Them" by R.T Fishall with illustrations by Willie Rushton (remember him?)

The language around Low Emission Zones, no matter the country, is always opaque. Bureaucratic bliss. Motorists either ignore these zones and get fined, or somehow navigate the complexity or just avoid them. There must be a way around it...

Hey I’m trying here!

Hotel car charges are my number 1 pet peeve of the 12month. Marriott hotel on the outskirts of Gent in January. 20eur a night for a ducking parking place. Duckers.

Fully excited for this to become a reality. For too long Europe has dithered and now Trump has provided the perfect incentive for EU to decouple from US tech.

Great beer menu and I’m loosening up with a couple of these

No amount of quiet spaces or badge stickers is ever going to fix this for people like me.

Do I have a solution? Not really. But it starts with awareness.