One thing I think is worth understanding about insults is that they usually do not come from strength. They often come from hurt, ego threat, or the feeling that someone "put you down." As Aaron Beck explains in Prisoners of Hate, anger is often an overcompensating response to perceived humiliation or disrespect. The person feels knocked down, and then tries to restore power fast. Sometimes that includes insults. And yes, it can feel good for a moment. That short burst of relief matters, because it reinforces the behavior. It teaches the brain: do this again next time. But that is exactly where the trap is. Insults may feel powerful in the short term, but in the long term they damage trust, damage relationships, increase isolation, and make retaliation more likely. They do not solve the real problem. They usually add a second problem on top of the first. What is happening underneath is often something like this: - Someone says something critical, rude, dismissive, or provocative - The other person experiences it not just as unpleasant, but as an attack on their worth, ego, or personal rule - Then comes the demand: "They should not treat me like this" - That demand hardens into rage - Rage looks for an outlet - The insult comes out The important distinction here is between preference and demand. It is healthy to strongly prefer that people treat you with respect. It becomes psychologically dangerous when that preference turns into a demand - when you move from "I really do not like this" to "This must not happen, and because it happened, I cannot stand it." That shift is where a lot of escalation begins. The healthier alternative is not passivity. It is this: "I want you to treat me properly, but I also accept that I cannot force you to do that." That sounds simple, but it changes a lot. It allows you to stay grounded enough to respond firmly without becoming destructive. You can say: - That was not okay - Please stop - I am not willing to continue this conversation if you keep talking like that

A lot of people talk about generative AI as if it were mainly a faster autocomplete for developers. That is part of the story, but it is not the real story. The deeper change is that software development is slowly moving away from a purely coding-first model and toward a model where developers spend more of their time directing, reviewing, validating, and orchestrating AI-generated work. In other words, the developer is starting to look less like a person who manually writes every piece of the system and more like a person who supervises increasingly capable technical agents. That shift matters much more than the productivity headlines. The Obvious Change: Speed McKinsey reports that developers using generative AI tools can complete some coding tasks up to twice as fast. Documentation can take about half the time. Refactoring can become dramatically faster too. That is impressive on its own. But faster execution is only the surface-level effect. The more important question is this: if AI takes over more of the repetitive, predictable, and boilerplate-heavy work, what becomes the real job of the developer? The answer seems to be: higher-level thinking. The Real Change: From Coding to Orchestration As generative AI becomes more capable, human effort shifts upward. Instead of spending most of their energy on manual implementation, developers increasingly need to: - define the real problem clearly - evaluate whether the AI’s solution actually makes sense - catch hidden weaknesses and bad assumptions - validate architecture and system behavior - think about trade-offs, security, maintainability, and business fit - coordinate multiple layers of tools, prompts, models, and workflows So the role does not disappear. It changes. The center of gravity moves from writing every line to making sure the whole system is going in the right direction. That is a very different kind of skill. Why This Could Be Bigger Than It Looks This is not just about helping engineers move faster. It could reshape the entire software development life cycle.

But their story is even more fascinating than that. Their lineage reaches back to some of the earliest jawed vertebrates, and over hundreds of millions of years they survived planetary upheavals, mass extinctions, and major evolutionary turning points. I wrote a new article about the evolution of sharks - not just as a biology topic, but as a story about deep time, survival, and the strange persistence of life. If you like evolution, fossils, prehistory, and the big story of life on Earth, this one is for you. Read it here: https://insightarea.com/2026/03/29/shark-evolution-from-the-first-jawed-vertebrates-to-todays-conservation-crisis/

Science fiction can be huge in scale - but what stayed with me in Project Hail Mary was something much more personal. What really moved me was not just the space setting or the survival stakes, but the humanity at the center of it all - friendship, fear, emotional acceptance, and the strange comfort of finding connection even across impossible differences. I wrote my reflection on why Project Hail Mary felt so human to me, and why its emotional core mattered more than the spectacle. Read it here: https://insightarea.com/2026/03/29/why-project-hail-mary-feels-so-human/