Carragee Consulting

Years ago when I went to Argentina on a project for 3M I got to work in their office on a canal in a new construction area of Buenos Aires.

Much of the city has European style buildings that are well over 100 years old. I read a bunch of the economic history of international power, the disappearings, and the austerity policies of the Chicago boys.

I was struck by how successful and wealthy the city had once been, but how it had become overrun with feral cats and household trash .

It was recovering well circa 2011 when I was last there, but the most beautiful parts of the city, like la Boca seemed vestiges of the past.

My heart hurt when I saw las Madres with the head scarfs memorializing their lost sons and thinking of what it must have been like to fall from middle class, educated lives of relative calm to authoritarianism and hyper inflation.

Inflation now is at a 32 year high, and again the savings of middle class people have been obliterated seemingly over night.

It would be easy to come back to the US and think we are impervious to a fall from global political and economic power, but history shows all empires eventually decline and some do so spectacularly quickly.

There is some appeal to a bunker with supplies to live self sufficiently, but really we would want to include our families and friends and quickly it scales to wanting to preserve the status quo.

Currencies, technologies, social norms are all constantly changing. It’s an absurd idea that anything in our lives can be “future-proofed”. We can only build to withstand some of the known shocks and risks, not the ones we haven’t thought of.

With LLMs, a recent news cycle shows how the training data can be irreversibly poisoned or prompt injection used to extract sensitive information. It’s an arms race of developers against malicious intent and inadvertent misapplication.

There’s a 60’s style vacant building in Palo Alto with the “For Lease” sign next to the former bank’s “Focused for the long term” marketing banner. The irony struck me one day when we were reviewing the conference claims from Dataiku.

We can plan to swap out databases in a flow, or swap algos if performance tanks in production, we can maintain access to the rapidly developing open source ecosystem, but there’s nothing future proof about software.

Where did I read that “all code is technical debt”?