Nothing Is Easy

Computers used to be so easy. We could stuff them into a corner on the desk and use them when we wanted to and ignore them the rest of the time. Maybe no one who sees this will remember a time when checking email was optional. It’s not now. Capitalism in the USA has blurred the lines between personal and professional tech. It is almost impossible to keep the two apart.

Oh? What’s that? It’s not difficult? Ever get a text from your boss on your “personal” phone?

Yeah. That’s right. Sit down.

The very naive view that we can somehow keep things in little compartments like a bento box is funny to me in early 2026. There’s very little we can do to stay “clean” in our computing practices and still participate in things like, I dunno, making a living or having kids or a doctor.

The Big Shift

We went from a society that got queasy about cookies (remember that?!) to people who grant access to directories on our computers to LLMs. What in the hell happened? It all changed. It evolved. We hit another lurch forward in tech and what it can (and certainly cannot) do. Sure, there are people out there who swear they will never let an LLM run on their local machine. They’ll keep it in a browser. Nice and safely in its box. But for some of us, that will go from optional to required very quickly. What do we do?

We build fences. And maybe they hold?

My Decisions

I’ve been experimenting with Claude. I have to. The only way to have a serious conversation in any tech in any discipline right now is to have an opinion on “AI”. And it can’t be from the latest tech hot take. The more I watch, the more I see zealots driving away from The Point. “NEVER AI!” and “I NEED AI TO MAKE LEMON CHICKEN!” are making it impossible for a good number of people to carefully look at the reality of where we are.

All LLMs were trained unethically. All of them. They use too much energy and data centers are a blight. All of them. CTOs and CIOs are builing all kinds of short-sighted implementations of LLMs in “The Enterprise”. All of them.

So-called Knowledge Work jobs will require the use of LLMs. All of them.

I’m not exactly embracing it, but I’m studying the tools. Learning to use them. Figuring out where the sharp edges are. I have to. That much is unavoidable.

And so I sacrifice my Mac.

The Future

My toolchain post-career is going to involve a notebook, a fountain pen, and a tiny laptop running Debian sync’d to my personal Nextcloud server on my home network over Wireguard. I will probably have an Apple Watch with cellular data so that I can make calls, etc. from the field, but I don’t even want a phone in my pocket.

That’s it.

So I start building for that future today.

The Now

The Mac gets all of the commercial software. I do all of my experimenting there. I let LLMs run amok. I subscribe to Apple services. I do all of my consuming there.

Meanwhile, on the “clean” side, my Debian running laptop and servers get hardened and kept free of the nonsense. I start building my tools there. I will keep living some form of commercial life with the Mac and Xcode and Apps for a bit yet. But the clean side will be clean. And I will feel good about that.

That’s It.

It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than it already is. So I’ll drop it there.