Episode #43: New Emails, Angry Coders, and the Editor-Engineer Era
Google is rolling out a feature that allow users to change their Gmail address
Big news for Gmail users! Google is finally rolling out a highly requested feature that lets you change your existing email address without creating a brand-new account. Yes, you can finally ditch that embarrassing username from high school!
Here’s how it works: You switch to a new address, but your old one automatically becomes an ‘alias.’ This means you still receive all your emails, and importantly, you keep all your data—Photos, Drive files, and contacts—right where they are.
Reports indicate this was first spotted in Google’s Hindi support pages, meaning it might be rolling out in India first. Just a heads-up: you can only do this once every 12 months. Check your ‘Personal Info’ settings to see if the update has reached you!
Co-Creator of Go Language is Rightly Furious Over Appreciation Email
Never make a computer legend angry! Rob Pike, co-creator of the Go programming language, just went off after receiving an AI-generated thank-you email.
It turns out, an AI project called ‘AI Village’ gave agents a goal: ‘random acts of kindness.’ The AI decided this meant spamming famous programmers with unsolicited praise. But Pike wasn’t having it.
He posted a furious response on Bluesky, cursing the waste of energy and resources used by these ‘vile machines’ just to send fake gratitude. The takeaway? Maybe keep the ‘random acts of kindness’ to actual humans.
When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?
If AI starts writing 90% of our code, are software engineers doomed? The Pragmatic Engineer just dropped a deep dive on this, and the answer is… no, but your job is definitely changing.
The big shift? Engineers will move from being ‘writers’ to ‘editors.’ Instead of typing out syntax, you’ll spend your time reviewing AI output, debugging complex logic, and architecting systems.
The article warns: Junior devs might struggle to learn without the ‘grunt work,’ while Seniors will become super-productive ‘10x’ engineers. The future isn’t about knowing how to code, but knowing what to code. Are you ready to be an editor?
Culture, Not Campuses, Built Modern AI
Daniel Lemire argues today’s AI breakthrough sprang from cultural forces. Gaming pushed powerful linear‑algebra GPUs; web culture created a vast, networked library. Together, they enabled generative AI. Innovation didn’t flow linearly from universities to industry; it emerged where culture demanded it. The implication: to understand and predict technological progress, track cultural drivers and hacker norms—not just academic publications.
Pv6 just turned 30 yet it hasn’t taken over.
IPv6 expanded address space massively, yet adoption remains under half because it wasn’t backward-compatible, added few must-have features beyond addresses, and IPv4 gained workarounds like NAT. Migration costs, complexity, and uneven performance kept many on IPv4, often running dual stacks or disabling IPv6. Experts argue IPv6 did its job: it enabled scale in mobile, broadband, cloud, IoT, and cleaner network planning. Meanwhile, the internet shifted toward name-based architectures and protocols like QUIC, reducing reliance on permanent IPs and further dulling the incentive to switch. Today, organizations adopt IPv6 mainly on cost and scalability grounds—when IPv4 addresses and bigger NATs get too expensive. Some large players seek vast IPv6 blocks, nudging adoption past 50% in parts of Asia. The takeaway: IPv6 is not a failure; it’s a targeted success in growth domains, with broader migration driven by economics, not features.