Would you use it? Would you put it on your site?

Presentation on vibe coding, inside a vibe-coded slide app, instructed to "go off the rails."

Project eyes onto anything. Press space for instructions!

GitHub repo – https://github.com/doublejosh/Eyes

Subterranean Office Politics

Stuck in middle management? Go beyond your skills; obtain wealth and power without deserving it. Leverage interpersonal techniques and manipulate people into promoting you, all without having to do much work. 🫣

Every organization includes people who don’t contribute much concrete value. And everyone (even you) can’t generate max productivity all the time. That would hurt. But some folks’ main tactic to stay valuable is dark patterns to get ahead.

They usually also increase the amount of communication in an org, but the help is negligible. Ultimately these people are a net negative. They extract and waste resources, and at worst they reduce productivity under the banner of planning.

I’ve been the victim of each…

1. Spectre
   Colleagues who regularly invoke the CEO, or founder exec, and claim the project has visibility at a high-level and therefor deserves urgency, and they are a very important person.
2. Wedge
   They put themselves between two technical teams, or people, who need to communicate to execute plans. They pretend to be a conduit that protects people’s time. They are not helping.
3. Secret Council
   Regular meeting that makes unilateral decisions while keeping out voices. They make decrees and have findings that no one else can have a say in.
4. Big New Idea
   People have been griping about something that needs to change, with months or years of research. Someone repackages this and calls it their big new idea. You have done all the leg work already, but it transmutes into execution of the “new idea.”
5. Culture Builder
   Provides no concrete value but is very good at connecting teams and group with similar goals. They plan meetups and work with HR to make work more fun. They will always listen but never provide any meaningful feedback beyond praise.
6. Info Hoarder / Control Hub
   They simply collect details and access to information and don’t share it. They need to be a hub, they want to grant permission to see things, they are a secret librarian and they should be a wiki page instead.
7. Flattery Spying
   Unfortunately people who want to derail or hijack your work will often do it with a smile. This person may be genuinely curious and full of honest praise, but they may not have your best interests in mind. Keep sharing your ideas! Just be aware.
8. Wannabe VP
   They love to hear themselves talk. They have a thought immediately after anyone utters a word, and often beyond others are done speaking. They take change of every meeting. They are not your boss, but they desperately need to be. They live in world where they are already promoted, and that’s why they never will be.
9. Vision Jockey
   They never met a strategy doc they didn’t love. They float 5-year plans with nothing to do Monday. They “evangelize” and “galvanize” but never actually do. Their favorite deliverable is a keynote.
10. Risk Firewalling
    They act like the only adult in the room, endlessly pointing out risks, red flags, and reasons to slow down. They don’t fix problems—they narrate them. They call it “protecting the org.” In reality, they’re just afraid of movement. Because they don’t know how anything works, so they can’t imagine anything better.
11. Meeting Nesting
    The tactic of scheduling pre-meetings for meetings that will lead to other meetings. These pre-syncs are used to shape narratives, build alignment cliques, and neutralize surprises—before the real discussion ever happens.
12. Context Flooding
    They overload a conversation with history, politics, and irrelevant past decisions. The point isn’t clarity—it’s confusion. When everyone feels behind, they become deferential. Control moves to the person who “knows the backstory.”
13. Hyperalignment Theater
    Endless alignment sessions disguised as consensus-building. Every stakeholder is included, but no decisions are made. The process becomes the product. Action is postponed until the heat dies down—or someone else takes responsibility.
14. Microscoping
    Zooming in on a small flaw or typo to derail a broader conversation. This tactic hijacks momentum under the guise of attention to detail. Real progress is paused while the room debates naming conventions or color codes.
15. Calendar Warfare
    Weaponizing scheduling. Important discussions are “coincidentally” booked during PTO or over other critical meetings. Decisions are slipped into off-hours or ambiguous invites to reduce dissent and increase plausible deniability.
16. Deferral Loop
    Any time accountability nears, the tactic kicks in: “Let’s revisit this next week.” Delay becomes defense. Deadlines slide not because of blockers—but because the decision maker never quite arrives at a decision.
17. Status Inflation
    Turning small wins into big wins via branding and spin. A minor feature becomes a “launch.” A bugfix becomes a “system resilience upgrade.” This tactic consumes bandwidth and praise meant for meaningful progress.
18. Playbook Quoting
    Using internal docs or company principles selectively to block initiatives or ideas—especially ones that challenge the status quo. The tactic turns values into shields, using language meant for inspiration as a blunt tool for obstruction.
19. Asynchronous Sandbagging
    They respond only when a thread is cold, dropping in lengthy feedback once others have moved on. The timing ensures maximal disruption with minimal risk of debate. It’s not participation—it’s sabotage in slow motion.
20. Metric Mirage
    Cherry-picking data points to prove progress while ignoring the big picture. This tactic thrives on dashboards, vanity metrics, and slippery definitions. Success becomes a carefully curated illusion.

A brief history of website building

1. Static files manually edited over FTP
2. Dynamic files edited over FTP
3. Markdown/DB + dynamic files
4. Custom CMSs in source control
5. Browser wars + Javascript
6. Frameworks
7. Mobile
8. Dependency management
9. Headless + lean artisinal stacks
10. Visual Editors + live preview
11. Collaborative cloud stack
12. AI generated, who cares

Am I missing something?

Should I try to put approx years on it?

The WTF Spectrum of AI Understanding

We can’t escape AI’s influence, or escape the goddam conversations everywhere, especially online. The algorithms are self-obsessed. Boring robot narcissism. If you’re listening– stop it, buddy.

We’re operating at different levels of understanding about WTF is actually going on. Here’s the continuum I’ve witnessed…

1. Don’t like the idea. Fine.
2. Used it a few times. Fine.
3. Use it a lot to make things.
   - no idea what’s going on
   - generate same-old busy work, automatically
   - create crap to forward
4. Know how to use it, multi-thread and workflow tricks
   - think it’s an entity
   - say “can’t AI just do that for us.”
   - good at twisting the arm of the robot to get results
   - throwing lots of data at the AI, assume accuracy
   - no idea what the box is doing
5. Create flows, process data for others
   - still dangerous, with powerful Legos
   - write great prompts, pick models, generate insights
   - save many people time and money
   - caution required
6. Orchestrate
   - runs local models and experiments
   - heavily data flow (cuz local is cheap)
   - longer chains and processing
   - understand costs, scalability, multi-step
7. Distill
   - generate novel datasets
   - feedback loops and self-learning
8. Train model
9. Please tell me what comes next?

US elections as animated characters.

How to start a nerd war:
“Should UI tokens be documents?”

Learning React (削除) is hard (削除ここまで)

😫 My core concepts cheat-sheet

These words make sense now but at the time this tiny glossary helped me. Even the widest-adopted tools feel like jargon early on. It’s amazing how obtuse things are from the outside. This is why we must remain diligent, be descriptive, be specific, use nouns and verbs judiciously. Be excellent namers.

Dispatch - functions attached to components to allow the UI to interact with the Redux store.

Reducer - provide data to components from some source, limited to what’s necessary for this piece of UI.

Hook - borrow a convention for a common task (state variable, UI reference, contextual data).

Gameshow costumes