Methodology

I pointed Claude — Anthropic’s AI — at this blog’s 1,713 posts spanning 22 years and asked a simple question: What can you infer about me from reading these entries?

It dispatched four research agents in parallel, each sampling a different slice of the archive: the early years (2004–2008), the middle years (2011–2016), the recent years (2017–2026), and a separate pass through movie reviews and milestone posts. Each agent read 15–20 posts from its assigned era, then reported back. What follows is the synthesized portrait — unedited, exactly as the AI wrote it.

It’s “Summit” season.

My employer is a sprawling concern, with people working in sites all across the world. The home office is in Seattle (the one true timezone–Pacific Time), but we also encamp in Silicon Valley (multiple sites), Austin, Denver, Nashville, Greater D.C., NYC, and Greater Boston. And that’s just the “big” sites–other smaller enclaves dot the country, and that doesn’t scratch the surface of our worldwide presence in Corporate.

“What do you get when you mix all the colors together?”

“You get a neutral, blah grey”

This is one of those musings that you don’t put on social media:

Democratizing everythings makes nothing special.

This is another version of Syndrome’s line:

I guess when I look back on the things that I’ve really enjoyed in life, once they became really mainstream they just became less “fun”

1. Computers: Once the realm of the hobbyist and early adopters, computers are omnipresent. As phones, they have considerably more power than a Cray Supercomputer from the 80’s and no “window” into the inner workings of the machine. It’s a streamlined, sealed case that provides a perfect abstraction away from 1s and 0s. Or: “This is why I like my Raspberry Pi so much”
2. Photography: Taking good pictures used to be hard. Taking great pictures used to be a real art, requiring a balance of correct equipment, film, aperture, shutter speed, lighting, composition, and dumb luck. Oh, and you had 12, 24, or 36 pictures per 35mm roll. That’s a 7-dimensional matrix to achieve Ansel Adams. (Oh, and darkroom processing, but I never unlocked that level of wizardry.) Now: (1) Pull out phone, (2) click. There’s still a retro group of people that use film, but this is incredibly rare.
3. Cars: Gearheads never die, but “gears” may well. We’re tip-toeing to a full electric future. The cars are big computers (see #1).
4. Programming: “I’m a PM and I don’t know coding, but that didn’t stop me from getting my app in the AppStore.”
5. WRITING: AI Slop. It’s all I see now. And here, we care about writing. I can’t imagine working somewhere that writing is an afterthought.

At the end of the day: Is there some sociological/psychological name for “Something started to get very ‘mid’ when everone adopted it”?

Well, my wife blocked me on Threads about 3 days ago. I’ve been so busy I didn’t even notice.

I’ve really enjoyed shring a “real” social media platform with her, especially as she’s very funny and I get a window into her StrayKids (“Stay”) world.

But oh well. Apparently my posts and those of my daughter somehow polluted her algorithm and sucked her into the general hellscape that is modern social media.

So, we woke-up to this on easter

Since February 27th, we’ve been in Operation Epic Fury:

• Oil prices have exploded. Gas prices are above $4 / gallon most places. Here in central texas, gas went from $2.499 to $3.47
• Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is stopped. This stops petroleum, natural gas, and fertilizer used throughout the world (see previous bullet)
• Iran broadened the war to UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia
• There’s no exit / stop criteria
• Our planes aren’t invulnerable
• Iran is lobbing drones that cost $10k and we’re intercepting with missiles costing $10 Million.
• Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth fired experienced generals and admirals
• Trump’s approval rating at last report:
  • Approval rating < 40%
  • Disapproval Rating: 60%

I’m sure there are more

This is going to be one of those “So, that happened” blogs.

In mid-February, I saw on my Facebook Feed that my old band director, Jim Yount, was throwing “one final Halloween party for his band kids”, hosed at his original Sears Modern Home house in Jackson, Ky. On impulse, I decided to go, not knowing if anyone else would show-up. Of course, this meant airplane tickets, but the pitiful stock verst that dropped in February would 100% cover it + incidentals. So, I got some tickets on American (more on that later), and looked forward to March 20-22.

“Do you like yourself?” he asked.

I burst out laughing. I must’ve laughed for fifteen seconds.

“Does anyone answer ‘yes’ to that question?” I replied, once I finally got a handle on it.

“Yes,” he replied flatly. Apparently the part of therapy where they “hold space” includes pregnant pauses while they wait for you to do…something.

“Well then: No. I don’t like myself.” Things you don’t stay to a therapist: Stop this train; I want to get off.

I’m sitting here at desk AUS13 07.580.K3, and I’m tired.

Last weekend, Whitney called an audible and sent me up to Abiline on Sunday and Monday to attend the ACU Presidential Scholars Reception and tour day.

This was also the day Maria decided ACU would be her undergraduate choice, culminating 2 years of college visits. I’m not 100% on this list, but I think she visited:

1. Baylor (twice)
2. ACU (4 times overall, including a summer program)
3. TCU
4. Texas A&M
5. UT Dallas
6. University of North Texas
7. UT Arlington
8. Texas Tech
9. Duke (Summer Program)
10. UNC-Chapel Hill (while @ Duke)

Maria was resolved to attend a school in Texas so some of the schools we dangled before her (Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Alabama, Vandy, etc.) didn’t resonate at all. General feedback on preferences:

Yesterday was about shock. Trying to gather information. Trying to simply comprehend.

Today is the next phase: Anger. I know what happened. I can’t fathom why and the company I hired on to 10 years ago seems gone.

Stretching back to Lexmark days, every layoff has been either about (1) culling low performers or (2) axing large swathes of people from a failed strategy. Those make sense, and one can even predict them. For about 5 years there, Lexmark didn’t even manage low-performers at all, so layoffs were the only way Bob down the hall who couldn’t code his way out of a Perl script was going to go away.

So this happened.

Yep. Sixteen thousand Amazonians lost their jobs today. This follows 14k layoffs last October, for a nice, round 30k in 4 months.

Here’s a play-by-play

Tuesday

10:00pm - Notice you're a little anxious
11:00pm - Attempt to go to bed, surf Blind incessantly because there was already a leak of an email "Following-up on Beth's email"

Wednsday

12:00am - Finally fall asleep
05:00am - Wake up stark awake, check phone, notice that 0 emails have shown-up.   No text messages either
06:00am - Alarm goes off.  Stumble through morning routine, notice an email from HR.  Understand I'm not actually fired but 16,000 people are.
08:00am - head to work.
09:00am - Arrive to work, get coffee with PM.  Looks like at least some of the PM group is laid-off.  Send slack message to group saying we're all safe.

From there, it’s slowly understanding that this one hasn’t passed us by. At all. Hallway conversations ensue–a favorite QA person is gone. Several Product Managers. Some tech teams have lost SDEs, then the bombshells start.

Amazon apparently has a mole.

There’s a poster on TeamBlind who goes by the handle “QuickSuite” who’s been giving play-by-play since October on what’s going on with layoffs. The date’s moved from 1/26 -> 1/28 (per rumor) and numbers are up in the air. Feels like everyone below VP level is nervous.

In any case, quarterly earnings come out 2/5, so it’ll certainly be this week.

I was speaking with a colleague last week who’s barely a year into Amazon, and he said, “I mean…would it be so bad to get laid off?” That seems to be a common sentiment. I understand where he’s coming from…the place can be a pressure cooker, especially for affirmation-seaking Type-A personalities. The joke within is: “This is the place where smart people come to feel bad about themselves.”

They used to say that war was “Months of boredom interpspersed with moments of sheer terror”

That’s been work since I got back from Universal.

It’s been so…eerily normal. Daily standups. Sprint planning. Bug fixes. Small, slight Operations changes.

Honestly, it’s like we looked at December when everyone was on leave and said, “Umm….yeah, just do that for a few weeks. We’ll get back to you.” Product Managers have been kibbutzing away from the rest of us. Plans within plans within obscure plans.

Contrary to popular opinion, I do go on vacation. This is a narrative of what happened and what I liked and didn’t like.

Introduction: Universal Orlando & TLDR

I haven’t had a family vacation since June 2019. We haven’t taken a Florida vacation since 2016, two weeks before I joined Amazon. It’s telling I have blog entires about neither. Both were PM (Pre-meds) and I went kicking-and-screaming. With my wife and I finally on the same page about finances, we agreed to take a trip to Orlando before Maria was out of our house.

What happened in 2025?

Family

My Dad is still alive and doing well. My mother died December 8, 2024. The next 30 days were a complete blur, so one could consider all of 2025 the hangover. Dad has a girlfriend, is working every day, and continues his building projects on the 92-acre farm where I grew up. Yes, even at 73.

Personally, I hear half the things he does and at 47, I need a nap.

Some people mark milestones of the “Christmas they got a bike,” or “Christmas I got an XBox.” That never mattered to me, particularly. My spoiled self often got those things too, but my real, burning desire was computers.

As a member of GenX, I was fortunate enough to surf the tidal wave of personal computing. From my earliest memory in the mid 1980’s, we had a “keeping up with the Joneses” TI-99x in our household. I remember it having a super-clicky keyboard and playing games on cartridges. But that one wasn’t mine.

College barely makes sense these days. In particular, Private colleges are utterly preposterous.

This isn’t about “marketable degress” or pedagogy or woke/MAGA or any such crap. I’m talking about MONEY. Those decades of cost-of-college outpacing inflation have come home to roost, and combined with the demographics crash of the post-2008 cohort going to college, I’m seeing a death spiral.

A Worked Example

My daughter went Early Action at several colleges starting in August, getting a jump on the enrollment process and working to function as a “driver” not a “passenger” in her collegiate journey. She’s been incredibly active since her Sophomore year, and we’ve visited most colleges in Texas that might even be of interest. See some of those details in college search.

“Huh. Looks like rain.”

Indeed. We had a catastrophic flood this summer, and as we sit we’re still at about 40" of rain for the year. Average annual is about 35", and most years we’ve lived here, it’s been more like 25-28". Any way you slice it, it’s been a good year for rain.

So off-and-on today, it looked like low clouds, bright sunshine, thunderstorms, and everything in between.

Book: Embers of War

So after I couldn’t retain the will to live (see next review), I switched over to Gareth J. Powell’s excellent “Embers of War” book, the first of a trilogy

So, by end of week Amazon May Be Smaller. No idea if I’m affected, but it helps me to write about it, so here we are.

I spent seventeen years at a place with only one strategic move: Downsize. In that 17 years, there were constant rumors about “rightsizing”, “downsizing”, “aligning headcount”. The constancy made it gallows humor. It also made me erratic and flinty at home. As sole breadwinner–by choice–I knew that my growing family required me to have a job. There was no plan B.

This is going to be a boring review. I listened to this audiobook, got to the end, found it so utterly unsatisfactory that it deleted itself from my memory.

That’s Katabasis for you.

Let’s begin: I have a soft spot for Hell. I read the Cliffs Notes for Dante’s Inferno when I was 10, then the actual work many times since I was mid-teens. Orpheus, Hades Town, you name it–I like people’s takes on Damnation.

I don’t know where to start.

Politics

So the US Government shut down at the end of the fiscal year, midnight on October 1st. Auspicious beginning, that. Both sides blame one another, and I’d give a slight edge to the R’s blaming the D’s for refusing to pass a continuing resolution. Neither side has its stuff together, particularly, but at least one side was going to keep public employees…well…employed.

Our infant-in-chief has done other things since then but it’s more “flood the zone” crap. Demolishing part of the White House to build a gaudy ballroom named for himself on donated funds from those who bent-the-knee. Canceling negotiations with Canada (Canada?) because they ran an ad he didn’t like. Blowing Venezuelan boats out of international waters because we feel like it. Shelling California from the sea during the 250th Marine Corp Birthday, causing traffic on I-5 to back-up. Threatening to “cancel NASA”.