Timezones and Compliments

02 May 2026

I happened to see my random example Timezone PowerShell module has way more downloads (5459, small to the world, big to me!) than I thought and felt weird about it. The one thing I’m absolutely certain of:

I don’t take compliments well.

I work in a pretty high-stress technical field, I’ve made and supported (very minuscule) open source software and I always feel bad or weird whenever someone thanks me, compliments me for a job well done.

What’s up with that?

This is definitely something I need to get over. It’s stupid and probably (definitely?) problematic.

One odd place where this does seem to work for me is LLMs. Because of the sycophancy, or the need to please, or whatever it is, none of it really clicks with me as it hits that compliment ‘nope’ button. It’s an interesting, but dumb tool.

That’s not saying that I don’t use them on occasion, I do attempt to sanity check existing work, or some things like basic reorganisation, but it’s not something I do a lot of.

I think if it was less try-hard to please, I’d probably use it more, or have fallen into the overwhelming heavy use where people seem to outsource their brains (which I have seen!).

Some of those people are scary, well into the process of outsourcing their critical thinking to generative programs. It makes me think the ‘dead internet theory’ has become infectious and is spreading into the physical world, instead of being stuck behind glass.

Now I hear the other side of this opinion a fair bit, I don’t get it, or I haven’t tried X, but I just don’t see it. It might be that I’ve inoculated myself with podcasts and other writing like:

• Nikhil Suresh/Does a Frog have Scorpion Nature
• Ed Zitron/Better Offline
• Tech Won’t Save Us
• Kill the Computer
• System Crash (Paused)
• TRASHFUTURE (This episode is insane!)

I don’t think it is an inoculation (although it might be like antibiotics, flushing the system if you need it), I have colleagues and friends that have the same sort of opinions and they’ve not heard of these.

Is it due to my suspicion of compliments? That started rolling the ball for me, but it’s not all of it.

Instead of outsourcing to other people, outsourced brainpower, decision-making and expertise drained away by generative systems opening the door to the dead internet leaking into real life is wild.

I will figure out what it is that seems to shield me from some of this and I’ll shout it from the rooftops, before the dead internet takes us all!

Maybe I just don’t trust easy answers?