it was my news, my entertainment, my moral barometer, my online village.
i gave up all of it. and for the first time, i felt free.

(the breakup.)

i did not deactivate my accounts. i did not take a break. i deleted them. i could never sign back in. i closed my facebook, my instagram, my twitter, everything, + with it: all my connections, conversations, + content since freshman year in high school.

for some people i know, this was a quarterly routine, but for me, my social media had served as an archive of me. it served as a record-keeper of the different versions of myself. low-res pictures from junior year. 720p videos from my college RA days. pointless + passionate arguments, birthday messages, + a direct line to anyone i ever met + exchanged handles with. it was my news, my entertainment, my moral barometer, my online village.

i gave up all of it. and for the first time, i felt free.

(the great bait + switch.)

i made a conscious decision to take back control i had willingly given up. the social media we have now is not the social media we signed up for 20+ years ago. i joined facebook before the concept of the “like” button. the closest thing was myspace “kudos”.

(i’ve finally hit the back in my day age.)

it all started as a cool thing where you could post a picture + update your status, all starting with the word “is”.

(iykyk.)

it somehow became a psychological social experiment of addiction, power, + control.

as software engineers, we often use human behavioral patterns to create great experiences for users. if you are able to anticipate what a person would naturally do, you can create a flow that feels effortless, intuitive, + even delightful.

(well…)

those same techniques can also be used to control the thoughts, value, + actions of an entire population.

(pixel addicts.)

i think i first realized the impact social media had on me when i noticed my persistent + involuntary checking of my phone. i would open Instagram, close it, + open it again without even remembering doing it; it was near-involuntary.

i started scrolling feeling excited for fresh, new content. it quickly devolved into feeling bad about myself. i remember actively thinking “i am not enjoying this” yet i was unable to physically stop. it consumed all my downtime. it consumed my uptime too.

it also made doing anything else feel…dull. the motivation to do anything productive, anything not instantly gratifying, became imaginary.

it was the first thing i did in the morning + the last thing i did before i fell asleep, just to repeat the cycle the next day. and it was designed that way.

tech companies, which started with the goal of creating viral apps simply for social sharing, started to employ similar techniques used to manufacture addictive behavior that legacy companies have used for years. casinos are one of the most recognizable examples.

(the house always wins.)

when was the last time you went to a local casino? not the flashy tourist attraction ones you’d find in Vegas or Atlantic City. the ones that exist around the poorest parts in your hometown. they usually reek of cigarettes, watered-down drinks, + desperation. their “patrons” are normal everyday, working folk that were just looking for a break, but are now stuck in a literal game that has burrowed so far into their human psyche that they, otherwise, wouldn’t want to play.

most of the customers there do not look like they’re having a good time, yet it’s where they spend innumerable hours + money (they don’t have), to play a game that they don’t enjoy, because it gives them a hit of dopamine every now and then. this is the trick that tech companies use.

it’s a phenomenon in psychology called “variable reward”. psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered that giving a reward at an unpredictable cadence for doing an activity made subjects considerably more eager to do it than a group that received a reward every time.

for casinos, you never know when you’re going to win, but when you do, you’re always glad you played, even if the last ten rolls were craps.

(i’m sure your luck is turning around.)

for social media, you never know when you’re going to come across a post that you love, makes you laugh, or teaches you something new, so you keep pulling that social slot machine lever.1

(engineering customers.)

when TikTok hit the scene, it took the world by storm. their perfect formula of exclusively short-form content + the ability to swipe to something new the second you feel a speck of boredom took social media addiction to a new high2. other companies took notes. Facebook + Instagram have Reels, YouTube has Shorts, and the list goes on. and now everything is TikTok.

tech companies are still innovating how to keep you addicted, and they are not doing it for fun. the longer they keep you hooked, the more advertisements they can show you. the more advertisements they show you, the more billions they make.

it then moves from overconsumption of media to overconsumption of cheap stuff you really don’t need (or want, to be honest) but it has been so persistently shoved in your face, you’re now willing to go into debt for it.

for these reasons, many of the engineers who created these apps won’t use their own creations.

(nor allow their children.)

if you’re interested in some of the things that influence my decision to quit social media, check out Netflix documentaries The Social Dilemma + Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy, and the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport3

(but it’s just business, right?)

what happens when that manipulation starts to move from making a few extra bucks to controlling the thoughts of society + the governments that serve them?

(a virtual reality.)

the final straws for me were the control i realized that social media companies had over the perception of truth.

see, almost everything you know about the world, you were told. even the most basic things that you KNOW to be true came from other people telling you with absolutely no self-verification. i wanted to reject this idea as someone who believes himself to be a free-thinker, but humor me with a thought exercise.

how do you know China exists? what about Nigeria? Australia? Iran?

it’s an odd question, but think about it. have you seen it on TV? read about it? heard stories from other people who have been or are from there? even on the rare chance you’ve been to all of these places, you haven’t been everywhere you believe + KNOW FOR A FACT is a real place.

so much of what you know about the world has come from someone else. typically we corroborate it with different sources because they all can’t be lying, right?

(right?)

but what happens when the few channels we have to communicate information, especially on a global scale, are controlled by a few interested parties that can decide what information does and does not get to you? the concept of “truth” becomes a lot more…malleable.

we have to believe the word of other people about the very existence of a place, let alone what’s happening inside of it, and we haven’t even touched on the injection of mis- and disinformation.

2016, 2020, + 2024 elections were the last straws that prepared me to click the close account buttons. Elon Musk’s ownership of X (fka Twitter) gave him direct control over large information pipelines. not that i was a huge Twitter user to begin with, but his increasingly fascist + racist rants, coupled with his apparent determination to undermine the democratic process made any participation in any activity that supports him utterly revolting.

(RIP Model X dreams.)

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, + WhatsApp, made his stance clear when Meta announced it was ending third-party fact-checking in the US during the misinformation epidemic.

reality had become a plaything of the elite, and i just didn’t want to play anymore. i was complicit with my voluntary participation on their platforms that gave them direct access to influence me + line their pockets with advertisement dollars. so, i decided i was done. but for good this time.

(the leap of faith.)

see, i had taken breaks from social media in the past, especially when the negative effect became palpable. but they always were temporary. a deactivation at best, but the thought of permanently deleting them scared me, despite knowing the great cost of it. this time was different though. the disgust of what i saw happening in the country made it this nerd’s form of activism, my rebellion, my revolting, my way of fighting the power.

(✊🏽.)

i opened my browser, + tab by tab, i created archives of everything i posted, everything i ever shared, + clicked delete on my accounts.

• Facebook.

• Instagram.

• X.

• (i almost created a TikTok, just so i could delete it!)

it felt great. i felt free. the constant distraction that plagued the majority of my life was…gone. i could hear my own thoughts again, no longer with the barrage of others' eXpErT opinions on topics they couldn’t even pronounce. i had finally rid myself of a lifelong addiction that others tried and failed to.

(wait for it.)













and now i have accounts on all of them again.

(well, look who came crawling back…)

why?

one word: business.

my wife and i opened a private event venue in Sacramento + per conventional wisdom, we needed a social media presence. additionally, i started a business + technology consultancy that creates automates systems for business4 that required me to begin building an audience + “become an expert in my field”.

and now i have to start from zero.

a part of me still wishes that i had my old accounts since i already had built a network for almost 20 years. but the peace that i gained over that period is worth the work.

so now, i have to rebuild my networks, followings (though i never had that many to begin with), + remind people i’m still alive.

but my relationship with the platforms is different. i’m primarily a creator now, instead of a consumer. i sign on to post, interact with engagement, maybe check out a few close friends’ stories + bounce.

because of that, in some ways i’m happy to be back. social media now becomes a place where i can become my best self by pushing myself to share my experience + expertise with the goal of helping people, not just to be entertained. it allows me to live in my potential, conquer my fears + do it publicly.

but social media companies are still investing billions of dollars trying to hack back in, which most people have little chance of avoiding their trap of mindless consumption. but i have a few tools up my sleeve, this time.

(bring it on.)

(how i still fight back.)

to help make sure i don’t fall back into the dopamine snare of social media, there are a few rules that i abide by to not create the habit i fought so hard to break.

(1. no notifications.)

you’d be surprised about how aggressive i am about notifications5. an app needs to be informing me about something either important or urgent. social media does neither, so it is an automatic “NOPE” when i get that prompt about turning on notifications.

(i’m lowkey offended you even asked.)

they will use every trick to drag you back to the app. this cuts their most direct method off at the knees

(2. no phone apps.)

if i can help it (which sometimes you can’t; see #3), i will not have a social media app on my phone. it makes accessing them a worse experience, inconvenient, + exactly what i need. my rule makes me use a computer when i need to post, engage, etc. creating as many barriers between you + an unwanted behavior as possible can stop unconscious actions, giving you a chance to think “do i really want to do this right now?” but sometimes, you might need the phone for things such as posting, editing, or other things that matter to creators, which brings me to my next rule.

(3. hidden apps.)

if you have an iPhone + want to stop the impulsive checking of social media, but don’t want to delete the app, the hidden app feature is your best friend. it’s not just for hiding that app you don’t want your girlfriend to find 👀. it hides it from your homescreen, app drawer, AND from search. instead you have to swipe over to the last page where all your apps are, scroll ALL the way to the bottom, click the folder of gray squares, scan your face, + then tap the app. and by the time you do that, you don’t even want to scroll anymore. it’s great!

what’s even better is that, on my iPhone, i’ve noticed the app disappears from my app switcher after i switch apps for only a few seconds. to reopen it, i have to do it all over again.

(who knew a feature for hiding dubious apps could actually help you get your life together?)

(4. no scrolling + feed blockers.)

most of my interaction with social media is via my laptop’s browser. and the great thing about browsers is that you have more control than you do in the apps. this includes extensions that will completely remove certain parts of certain websites (let’s say, the feed on IG). it allows you to go in, do what you came to do (e.g. post), + close the tab. the Chrome extensions that i use are Antigram to remove my IG feed, UnDistract for Facebook, + Unhook for YouTube.

(because i’m apparently addicted to YouTube, but that’s a story for another day6.)

(conclusion.)

this setup has been working for me, + i feel like i have a healthy relationship with social media, despite their best efforts. in all honesty, i do scroll sometimes, but now it’s closer to a couple of times a week vs. like a couple times a minute like before. mostly, i will view close friends’ stories, or look for some content about creating content or building a brand, but i really don’t have a desire to scroll any more. i still somewhat resent helping these companies by creating content that will, in turn, create more advertising dollars for them, but hey, we all have to choose our battles. does that make me a sellout? perhaps. but i hope the ideas, education, hope, + value i produce will make up for it tenfold.

what is your relationship with social media? is it the same social media you signed up for, or were you bait-and-switched too? how do you fight back against algorithms designed to keep you stuck? i’d love to hear!

(and to all the humans + robots, i love you.)

(other places me + the robots roam.)

(subscribe to my YouTube channel.)

(follow me on Instagram.)

(follow me on Threads.)

i expected AI to make me faster. i didn’t expect it to make me slow down.

(“chat, explain it to me like i’m five”)

Google made the world’s knowledge searchable. ChatGPT made it approachable. before AI, i could find information about almost anything, but finding it wasn’t the same as understanding it. search results often dropped me into explanations written for people who already spoke the language.

“explain it to me like i’m five” is a common prompt people use to make complex subjects understandable without requiring years of background knowledge. the point isn’t to talk down to someone, but to meet them where they are. i’ve learned a lot from that approach, especially because it works both ways.

“prompt engineering” sounds technical, but most of it is learning to say what you actually mean. the problem is that many times, i don’t know exactly what i want. AI makes that obvious very quickly. as i get better at using AI in my everyday work, i’m becoming more precise with my words.

when i explain the cloud to my dad, and why a million USB drives may not be the best long-term strategy, i have to start with what he already understands. he is a brilliant man. he just knows different things than i do. i have to remember that when explaining things i now take for granted.

we recently hired our first two employees and had two months to prepare them to run the business by themselves while Bailey and i were unavailable on our honeymoon cruise around the Aegean Sea. for one of them, this was their first job.

we had to take everything that lived in our heads and put it somewhere they could use it: instructions, checklists, event briefs, and what to do when reality ignored the plan.

(they killed it, btw.)

even while writing this newsletter, i am carefully choosing how much to explain. too little, and i lose you. too much, and it starts to sound like i actually think you’re five.

misunderstandings still happen. i just respond to them differently now. when AI gives me the wrong result, i start by looking at what i failed to explain. increasingly, i do the same with people. i take ownership, clarify what i meant, and start again.

talking to robots has made me better at talking to humans.

(reading at human speed.)

the good thing about AI is that you can get an answer at the speed of a supercomputer. the bad thing is that you still have to read it at the speed of a human. short answers are easy enough to skim. but when the subject becomes complicated, there is no shortcut. i have to slow down, read carefully, and occasionally read it again.

years of feeds, videos, reels, and shorts trained me to expect the point immediately. somewhere along the way, reading more than a few sentences started to feel like work.

(ain’t nobody got time for that.)

the trade-off has been missing out on deep exploration of topics in long-form books, articles, and editorials.

as i work more with AI, i’ve been forced to read more than ever before, and it’s translated into me reading more off-screen too. i’ve read more books in the last couple of months than i had in the last couple of years. that includes the books that i am now applying to the new consultancy i am building.

(the latter is what told me to start this newsletter.)

AI got me reading again. once i rebuilt the patience to sit with its answers, i found myself bringing that patience back to books written by actual humans too.

(attention is currency in the land of the robots.)

reading requires focus. lately, mine has become harder to keep. using AI also involves a surprising amount of waiting. i give an AI agent a task, and it thinks.

(and thinks.)

most times i spend more time watching status updates about what the agent is doing than i spend typing.

(what am i to do?)

there is always something more dopamine-rich waiting one tab away: Instagram, YouTube, or a notification that has absolutely nothing to do with the thing i am supposed to be doing. but checking one thing is never just checking one thing. if i break my state of flow, a task that should take a few minutes can somehow take all day. sometimes several days. so i fight the urge.

(and wait.) (and wait.) (and wait.)

(most of the time.)

AI makes work faster, but it also creates more opportunities to abandon it. when output is abundant, focus becomes scarce, and attention is currency in the land of the robots.

staying with a task while the computer works has become its own practice. focus is resisting the impulse to leave. patience is staying present without resentment. every time the machine makes me wait, i practice both.

the strange part is that the practice does not stay at my desk. when someone takes longer than i think they should, i am a little less likely to become anxious. when something doesn’t click as quickly as i want, i can slow down.

(breathe slow.)

(start again.)

(it will take as long as it takes.)

that patience is showing up with my parents, my sister, my wife, and Tiny Dogge (our toy poodle). the tech is getting faster. somehow, it is teaching me how to slow down.

(judgment is at a premium.)

recently, i showed some colleagues how i have been using AI to make my work more efficient. i created an interactive mockup for a product we were designing in a fraction of the time it would have taken before. it was polished enough to click through and convincing enough to make one of them nervous.

“if we could build something this quickly, what would stop the customer from using AI to build it themselves?” they objected. the notion didn’t faze me at all.

(i had my AI existential crisis years ago.)

it was a fair question, but the mockup was never the whole job. the work was knowing what to mock up, what problem we were trying to solve, which decisions we could make quickly, and which ones we would have to defend later. AI could generate the interface. it could not take responsibility for the judgment behind it.

this has made me think about extreme ownership differently. AI can take on more of the production, but none of the accountability. if the answer is wrong, the recommendation is harmful, or the thing simply wasn’t worth making, “the robot made it” is not a defense.

the faster AI becomes, the more important judgment becomes. when making something is cheap, knowing what deserves to be made becomes valuable. i can use AI to write, research, design, and build, but my name still goes on the work. that means the responsibility is still mine.

the robot may have generated the answer. i am still the one who decided what happened next.

so this is the question i am asking myself. and now you. as AI makes you more capable, how is it changing you? is it for the better, worse, or something in-between. (or totally different.)

i’d love to hear from you.

the concept of AI is not a new one. like, not at all. Alexa and Siri have existed for decades. childhoods of playing Pac-man and Galaga have been thwarted by aliens and ghosts controlled by AI. IBM’s Deep Blue AI defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. in fact, the modern idea of “artificial intelligence” has existed over half a century, coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956. so what is different about this AI?

(GPT has entered the chat.)

GPT, not to be confused with OpenAI’s product ChatGPT, stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. to oversimplify it, it’s autocomplete on steroids, except pre-trained on much, MUCH more data that is also aware of context (it knows the difference between a date on a calendar and a date in the produce aisle).

it predicts every word (technically, it predicts “tokens”, which can be words, parts of words, or punctuation, but “words” are more human.), one-by-one, based on the words that came before it. this is why most AI apps show you one word at a time. not only do you not know what it’s going to say next, it doesn’t know what it’s going to say next!

(don’t feel bad. the robots are completely winging it too.)

the first version (GPT-1) was created by OpenAI in 2018, but GPT-3 is what caught people’s attention in 2020. it was much more than auto-complete. it could answer questions (although it hallucinated a lot more than now.), summarize text, analyze sentiment, and it convincingly sounded so much more human than any other AI before it.

i personally remember when i used ChatGPT 3, i remember it feeling so unreal. the present started to feel like the future we’ve been promised in so many sci-fi movies. the reality of iRobot was imminent!

(the agentic age.)

agent (noun.): someone (or something.) that acts on behalf of another person or group.

an AI agent is exactly what it sounds like. instead of just answering the question “what is this weird mole on my back?”, a question you could have just as easily Googled, it will access your computer, launch a web browser, open a new tab, navigate to https://google.com, click the search box, type “what is this mole on my back”, click “Search”, go to the first WebMD link on the page, and call 911 on your phone because, apparently, you’re going to die.

(stupid stuff can now be automated!)

simply put, agents are AI with access to do stuff on your computer, apps, and other devices. you can ask it to do stuff for you, and it will do said stuff.

this is why Claude Code, a ChatGPT competitor, has become recently famous for. the tool is able to create slide decks, professional designs, and create websites + apps all by itself just by typing a few poorly written sentences.

this is when AI stops being a party trick and starts changing how society looks. many people’s jobs can now be automated. it gives ordinary people more power than ever before while threatening more livelihoods than ever before. it becomes a scary + exciting proposition

(what a time to be alive.)

so what’s next?

(every bubble pops.)

many experts are warning that the AI boom could pop soon because of the uncomfortable economics. companies are spending billions on data centers, chips, electricity, water, research, and infrastructure while offering millions of people access to powerful AI tools for as little as $20 a month.

the $20 you pay each month to ask ChatGPT or Claude, “can you rewrite this email so i sound professional but not the one to play with?” doesn’t come close to covering the full cost of building the models, expanding the data centers, developing the next generation of AI, and producing the enormous profits investors now expect.

it’s like a company giving (almost.) free rides in self-driving cars while spending billions to build the roads, manufacture the cars, and convince the entire world to stop driving for themselves.

that strategy can attract a LOT of customers very quickly. eventually, though, the company has to make the economics work. that could mean higher prices, stricter limits, cheaper models replacing expensive ones behind the scenes, more advertisements, or reserving the most powerful tools for businesses and wealthy customers.

the especially troubling part is that the AI industry is encouraging the mass population, including children, students, workers, and entire companies, to become increasingly dependent on tools whose current price and availability may not be permanent.

your $20 ChatGPT subscription is not necessarily losing money because of your usage personally, but the AI ecosystem surrounding it is being heavily subsidized by investors who expect to get their money back tenfold, and sometimes a hundredfold.

(and they want it back soon.)

(my thoughts.)

the times we are living through are interesting to say the least. we’ve been given a free taste of a drug and now the bill is coming due soon.

companies like OpenAI have limited options. they either go out of business (taking ChatGPT with them.) or they have to charge prices that most people cannot afford while giving less. what was a utility given to all of us could then just be a luxury that the ultra-rich could afford, further increasing the inequality where the rich get richer and the poor, poorer.

i don’t think it’s all doom + gloom, though. there are a lot of new competitors, especially in China, that have introduced comparable AI models at a fraction of the cost. just like most of our manufactured goods, China could become the world’s primary provider of ai.

another path is that many companies, like Google, have been working to make models small enough and capable enough to run on your computer or phone. Google’s Gemma 4 is already comparable to GPT 4.1 and it can run on a laptop (albeit a powerful one.) without hitting the servers of any AI company. i think this will continue to grow, especially for the privacy-minded because they don’t trust their most personal thoughts to a young VC-backed tech company whose only concern is making investors profit.

speaking of google, they also have a chance to win the AI race. unlike OpenAI (ChatGPT) + Anthropic (Claude) who are only alive because of investor dollars, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), is already a profitable $4.3 trillion company. it could afford to bleed money on AI for a while as it figures out how to make the economics work.

what happens next, no one can truly know, but what i can promise is that it will change the world forever.

how has AI changed your life. what was the moment when you realized the potential of what it could do? i’d love to hear your experience.

thanks for listening to my rambling.

(and to all the humans + robots, i love you.)

(other places me + the robots roam.)

(subscribe to my YouTube channel.)

(follow me on Instagram.)

(follow me on Threads.)

i love technology. to a fault sometimes. having ADHD, i love new shiny things and the technosphere has no shortage of them. to be fair though, technology literally changes what it means to be human. of course, the basic underlying needs stay constant: food, shelter, love, social acceptance, but the vehicles of how we meet these needs defines the human experience completely from era to era.

for example — though i lived my entire childhood and adolescence without the hyper-connectivity of a smartphone, it’s hard to image life without it or before it. a world without the world’s information at your fingertips in milliseconds. without being able to know where you’re going at all times with GPS, or calling an Uber that’s in front of your door in minutes. now, imagine a world without social media​1​. the internet. planes. cars. electricity. we see it in movies, but image your life without it. can you? it’s hard.

our existence and what it means to be human at any moment in time, any era, is distinctly tied to the technology of that time. there is no human experience without technology. and inversely, there is no technology without the problems they solve, and consequently, the humans that possess them.

(robots need humans.)

as a software engineer, it’s really easy to want to create something that is really cool for the sake of being cool. an application that is architected to perfection. it uses all the bleeding-edge technology, follows all the best practices. it is optimized in ways wizards could only imagine and obliterates all metrics except for one. it helps no one. it provides no tangible value to the lives of the people who deal with some much on a daily basis. dealing with their families, their bosses, their love life (or lack there of), that just something that could make their lives just a little bit easier, something that they could take off of their plate and make their mental load just a little bit lighter could make all the difference in the world.

a lot of engineers, including myself sometimes, got into the career so that we didn’t have to deal with humans. and i don’t blame you. humans suck. they’re messy. they’re inconsistent. they’re selfish.

computers, on the other hand, are reliable. they do exactly what they are programmed to do.

(no more, no less.)

and because of that, in some ways, programmers have to become robots too. we have to be exact and precise. we have to be perfect logisticians, otherwise we introduce silly bugs into our code. we have to translate the messiness of a nebulous, abstract, analog world into a finite, perfectly concrete, black and white one. literally, digital means it’s either on or off. it’s either is or is not. it’s either 1 or it’s 0. nothing exist between or beyond2. and we like that. it’s clean. there’s no room for interpretation, or misinterpretation. the code does exactly what it says it’s going to do. it is what it is — a phrase i say often. anything else is a human error.

it is what it is.

(we robots are human.)

as engineers, it’s easy to forget which of the worlds we live in. we spend so much time talking to robots, we forget that we aren’t one. we are messy. we are illogical (even if we don’t admit it). we are inconsistent. more over, this is who we build software and technology for. this is whom we interceding for when we talk to the robots. we are advocates, ambassadors for the people we so often want to desperately get away from. we make software to make the lives of these fickle beings better than what they were yesterday. we are the arbiters of fickleness. we are the fickle being.

to love software, to love technology is to love humans, to love humanity. any technology that doesn’t have humans in the center is, at best, not very good, and at worst, detrimental.

i write all this to say is to any engineer who loves coding, building, architecting applications, infrastructure, devices, or technology in general, no matter frontend, backend, full-stack, database, AI, or something else entirely, get to know the humans you’re building for. not just use-cases and requirements your project manager threw over the wall, but what brings them joys. what makes them cry. what are they deathly afraid of. what do they aspire to be. their experience is everyone’s responsibility, not just a UX designer’s. this will make your job more fulfilling because this is your job. and you will make a better product by the metric that truly matters: did you make someone’s life, personal or professional, better. don’t get me wrong! maintainability, testability, and performance matter and matter a lot, but ONLY if it provides enough value to humans and their silly problems. otherwise, they are unequivocally worthless3 find the passion for the humans you’re helping again, and the robots will follow suit.

(and to all the humans + robots, i love you.)