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I’ve been trying to understand why I trust Yegge on his calls and what my own track record is.

It was thanks to Yegge that I acknowledged my lurking realization that Haskell and niche programming languages won’t Go Big. And Go Big means something specific here—of course Haskell is great intrinsically and of course Scala advances the state of the art and all. Go Big here means it’s not something most makers like me (in the maker–hacker–poet simplex https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/) will care about.

A little after that, I realized neither emacs nor vim are high-value to new or old engineers that didn’t grow up with them. I was good at vim but around the Sublime/Atom era I stopped recommending juniors go thru vimtutor, and of course myself converted to VS Code when that dropped.

I ran Gentoo for years. But then I stopped recommending folks learn Linux and instead just Get Shit Done on their MacBooks. I wasn’t wrong and don’t think I’ll be wrong for the next five years.

I knew React and SPA were gonna be huge. I’ve built great apps I’m really proud of with it, and I’m excited about the new post-React MPA era. I think the Express.js docs still talk about templating engines. What a farce—approximately nobody built a Node.js server using a templating language, it was JAMstack all the way.

As soon as I saw that Merkle-tree-based platforms like Dat and Secure Scuttlebutt were append-only, I immediately dropped developing for them and just used Mastodon. Very little will beat a centralized Postgres database. I count this as a win.

As soon as I saw Solidity’s API and irreversible transactions, I knew cryptocurrencies were a dead end. Happy owner of US Dollars (and Japanese Yen).

Enumerating these big waves isn’t meant to convince me let alone anyone else that my opinions matter—read way too much Taleb and Kahneman and Galef for that. It’s more to convince myself that I should trust my instincts, and others with similar instincts, like Yegge (modulo the emacs thing ugh he loves his emacs). If only when it comes to making things with code. Being a code maker isn’t everything but it is everything to me, and I’m bullish on LLMs. I don’t think this is crypto or Google Glass or VR because I make shit.