Rebel
-----

It's no secret that, although my interest waxes and wanes over time, I
love programming. It's a hobby that's kept me happily occupied since I
started roughly 3.5 decades ago. I also enjoy other creative outlets.
For example, I like writing - and do it professionally to some extent.

Given this, it's been hard for me to see these and related activities
not only progressively devalued, but in some cases following
trajectories that would seem to terminate in them being effectively
outlawed.  Many others have written about the ongoing war on general
purpose computing - being able to run software on our own machines
without the blessing of their corporate masters - but I'd claim that
the war on programming our own machines has been effectively already
lost.  Who besides a vanishingly small few have anything beyond an "in
principle" ability to write and run their own code, much less compile
their own binaries?  (A common retort to this kind of argument is to
say something like, "Well, you don't know how to program your
microwave oven either." - but computation is very much incidental to
what such a device does, while it is essential to what a home computer
does.)

Okay, but what was that about writing?  Nobody's stopping me from
writing this phlog entry after all.  Well, no, they're not, but it is
certainly the case that in 2025 I'm one of a very tiny minority of
people that are publishing their own thoughts outside of the handful
of platforms owned by the usual names.  And this is before we even
mention the use of large language models (LLMs).  While nobody wants
to admit to using LLMs to generate actual content, I don't think I
have any colleagues who don't use LLMs to "tidy things up".

Of course this applies to programming too - _everybody_ I work with is
now happily using whatever the latest "coding" LLM du jour is to vibe
their way through their software development tasks.  And they're
_proud_ of this!  While I'm still here manically disabling any such
"features" as they appear in the programs I'm required to use, just so
I can continue to work with deterministic tools that don't integrate
with ethically abominable cloud subscription services.

These LLMs are providing additional strong pressure to not write and
not program, and for the first time these pressures are coming from my
professional peers as well.  And I work at a university!  I can't
imagine what things are like outside of academia.

I'm aware this phlog post is even less coherent than usual, so I'll
try to get to the point. What I'm - no doubt badly - trying to argue
is that certain human activities that have for much of history been
not only accepted but praised as virtuous have been or are in the
process of being rebranded as subversive. Abstractly these include:

- Sharing knowledge
- Owning your own tools
- Creating your own art

Here at the end of 2025, to act as a human is to act rebelliously.
.