As you seem to know, it is an anticholinergic drug and they have been linked to faster dementia onset. The original study lumped them all together. This study suggests anticholinergic antidepressants and bladder antimuscarinics might be the ones to blame and antihistamines not so much. I am not a doctor but I’ve taken 25mg of benadryl or a melatonin at bedtime for a long time so I’m watching these. I switched to taking melatonin exclusively because of the dementia thing.

uh oh

This era of Microsoft made me finally make the full switch to Linux and I’m really happy about it. Linux is just great now.

inb4 some evil demonrat amerikkkan president puts a 500 million percent tariff on Chinese memory to look stronger than Trump on trade.

I got a new job in the last year and my boss is … friendly. He owns this small business, so he is what he is. There are a handful of people at this company with decent programming skills. It is not a software company, but has a few internal tools and small web applications. I am one of the programmers. Lately he has gotten the AI bug quite badly. He thinks the old way of software is just going to go away and AI just going to do everything in the future. Honestly, I have used Claude Code to vibe some stuff for work that I hate doing and I can get pretty decent results, but I am sort of operating as a senior developer giving assignments to a junior, reviewing its decisions, giving feedback, giving goals and requirements for maintainability, making sure each iteration is on track, stuff like that. I have a lot of experience so I know what the results should look like. But I also like to write good quality code, so I still write a lot myself.

So because the boss/owner thinks Code is Solved with AI, we’re giving a bunch of people at the company with no programming skills and frankly average at best basic computing skills Claude Code and asking them to try having it write tools to automate parts of their workflow. IT is horrified. I am morbidly curious. Like I said, I can get it to do things because I am guiding it at every step. The boss is simply not going to understand that the shit they’re generating is unmaintainable trash and that code that nobody can understand is a liability. He once showed me something he had it write and it was like a browser mockup of a user interface that obviously did nothing pertaining to the task it needed to do.

He thinks basic software engineering fundamentals are The Old Way. But computer science is real. Code generated by AI is still subject to the same principles as human generated code. No matter how good it gets at generating code, it will still need structure. The potential meanings of a certain quantity of lines of unstructured slop is still intractable for any computer humans could ever potentially build. Code needs to be verifiable in some way and made of components that can be understood individually. Algorithms have provable properties. Not to mention that the end result of success here is a company with no institutional knowledge of the business or skills. There is no reason for such a company to exist. Anyway, I love being essentially told that the entire field of computer science is The Old Way.