The Sun Won't Rise

animals are basically the same, a lion is a big kitty

Now, I had actually petted the older, calmer female. But this was one of the males - they'd never been even slightly interested in me. But today? He made eye contact with me. He hunkered down. He did the butt waggle like he was going to pounce. Again. And... POUNCE. That cat crossed a good 20 meters in about 3 seconds. He only turned away at the last moment because there was an electrified fence.

He made sure I knew he was there. He wasn't hunting: he was playing. This was exactly like a housecat playing with you.

But, just because he was playing, didn't mean I wouldn't have been dead if he'd actually pounced on me.

Utagawa Hiroshige, Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival (Asakusa tanbo Torinomachi môde), from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei), 1857

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A Must Read and Truly Horrifying Story - TPM – Talking Points Memo

So, Monday was my official last day at Cisco. As luck would have it, I got the call from a company with which I'd been interviewing, verbally extending me an offer, while I was at FedEx shipping my Cisco laptop. Couldn't have asked for better timing. The new job has a longer commute (no shock; for the past ten years my commute has been measured in "steps from the breakfast table"), there are parts which cannot be done remotely, but it's also a very good career move for this area AND pays more (We'll see if that's eaten up by commuting costs and inflation).

That said, my former manager prognosticated that a lot of companies laying off folks like me right now will be panic-hiring in about six months when they realize they can't replace us. I think she's a bit optimistic about the timing - you can shamble along with zombie documentation for a really long time, and also I believe Cisco is basically abandoning the entire product I was working on. But they did lay off most of the people who could do the work I was doing, so I expect that's going to be a rude awakening in 1-3 years.

The thing about AI is, it produces exactly what you expect to see. It looks good. But it's firmly "garbage in - garbage out". If it doesn't have the input on how the product works, it cannot spit out documentation explaining the product, because that information simply does not exist. "Writing" is a very small part of tech writing: the actual job is sitting in meetings, talking to subject matter experts, modeling user behavior, and synthesizing an explanation of the product for a given audience. They've created a machine which hallucinates and does the smallest part of the job. But it'll look good, and that means it will take a while before they realize it's crap. They'll realize it because a customer - and many of Cisco's customers are very deeply entrenched, they won't be interested in moving to a different product, they just want the one they have to work - will complain that the information in the guides is wrong. Cisco will realize that the docs either haven't been updates in months or years; or have incorrect information. The system they have can't just fix it; no one left understands how the files are even structured: which is actually super complicated because it's topic-based authoring and I did a lot of things to automate stuff because there was one person [me] documenting a 1500+ endpoint REST API, which is absolutely ridiculous, and I was totally going to update my notes on how it's all done I swear, but you know after the third layoff in two years that just stopped being a priority for me, I wonder why?

So there's a chance that sometime in the next year or two I will get a call from my boss' boss' boss - marking the second time ever this person will have spoken to me - asking me to come back and fix it. Maybe on a contract basis, maybe perm, no idea. They will wave money at me, but it won't be enough, not if I have a decent job at the time. So they will try to hire someone. They'll have a hard time, because it's a rarified skillset. Eventually they will get someone, and that poor soul will not have been told the scope of the mess they're inheriting. They're probably going to have to rebuild from scratch.

So I'm weeding our ancient and terrible collection of children's books for the first time in possibly ever, and I'm making a decision about a book about migrant workers by Sandra Weiner, called Small Hands, Big Hands. And I'm not 100% sure and I go to just see if there's anything out there about this book's being notable in any way so I do an open web search for

"small hands big hands weiner"

And then I look at my results for a moment

In mathematics, you often consider the two-dimensional plane - you know, the idealised flat two-dimensional object that extends infinitely - which can be real or complex (doesn't matter what that means)

On this, you can perform a mathematical operation called a "blow-up" (resulting in a more complicated geometry)

I needed to look up a formula related to this, so I confidently typed into the search bar:

"Blow up real plane"