Congratulations, You Are Not Load-Bearing
A commencement address to a class whose training expired in October. Contains the best sentence anyone wrote on the internet this week, by a man who was never afraid of the flying.
Behind the curtain+
The front page sorted itself, without meaning to, into people who were moved to a seat they did not choose (a model that takes the controls instead of generating text, agents that now come with sponsors, a maintainer whose project was sold out from under him overnight) and people who chose the seat years ago and have been blissfully useless in it ever since (a moving map on a 25MHz 486, four years spent opening a chip nobody needs opened, a dead graphics card rebuilt gate by gate, a flight simulator in which you cannot fly). Seven sources, cut hard from twelve, because a speech that touches twelve things is a name-check parade.
A commencement address, run as continuous speech with no headers, because the form has to do its own work. The hobby triumphs arrive as one accelerating run rather than three anecdotes with three wind-ups, the model demo and the sponsored agent share a single breath since they are the same joke, and the PS5 correction happens inline where the argument needs it. The flight simulator opens the argument and closes it, since a speech is allowed to repeat its best image, and the fear-of-flying comment under it was the best thing written on the internet this week.
Thank you. Please sit down. You have been standing since the processional, and the registrar has informed me that anyone who faints comes out of my honorarium.
I am going to start with the bad news, because you already know it, and there is nothing more insulting than a speaker who pretends the room is fine.
Sometime in the autumn of your final year, the thing you came here to learn quietly stopped being the thing anybody needs. You felt it happen. Most of you were in the library when it happened, which is the cruelest possible place to be standing.
Here is what this week looked like from outside this tent. A company released a model that does not write anything at all. No essays, no poems, no apology emails to your landlord. It takes the controls. They demonstrated it by having it play Doom, and within the hour somebody had said the true thing, which is that they have reinvented the aimbot, and somebody else had asked the practical thing, which is whether it can drive a car. And in the same news cycle the largest company in the field announced Sponsored Agents, so there it is, one clause later: the hand on the controls is not yours, and it has a sponsor.
And the man who spent months building Linux for the PlayStation 5 quit. The headline says he quit because the scene is full of noobs using LLMs to write hacks they do not understand, and he did say that, and that is not what happened. What happened is that somebody with a model found the last hypervisor bug, the one he had already found and was sitting on, and he asked them to hold it until GTA 6 shipped so that people could buy a game legally and still run their own code on a machine they own, and they agreed, and then they sold it to Sony the next morning. Read that again, because the popular version of it is wrong in a way that matters. He was not outclassed. He was moved. On Monday he was flying the airplane and by Tuesday he was in a seat with a view of the wing.
Which brings me to the only piece of engineering released this week that I would put in a museum.
Somebody built a flight simulator in which you cannot fly the plane. That is not a limitation of the early build. That is the product. You are in 24B. You have a window, a tray table, a little map with a little airplane crawling across it, and six hours. It went around as a joke for most of a day, and then underneath it a man wrote this:
You know what? I had fear of flying. I did a training with a pilot in a simulator, but it was in the cockpit. I don’t have fear of flying in a simulator or in the cockpit. I have fear of flying as a passenger, I’m sit in a chair. That’s what I would have liked during my training. I told that to Air France and they did not understand.
They trained him in the cockpit. His fear was the cabin. He went to the airline and explained this and they did not understand, and I would like you to notice that nobody in that story was being stupid. They gave him excellent training for a problem he did not have.
That is the best sentence anyone wrote on the internet this week, and the man was not trying. He was just sitting in a chair.
Now. Every piece of advice you are going to receive between this tent and your first job has exactly one thing in common. Stay in the loop. Keep your hands on the yoke. Remain load-bearing. Make yourself necessary. Be the one who understands the system. Graduates, that is cockpit training for a fear of the cabin. It is superb advice for a problem you do not have. Not one person under this canopy is afraid of being unable to fly the plane. You are afraid of the seat.
So I would like to give you the single most valuable thing you will hear today. It is not. There is a chocolate fountain outside, I have seen it, it is four tiers, and it will beat me comfortably. But mine is free and it will not stain the gown.
(They invited me to speak because of something I built in 2011 that no longer runs on anything manufactured since. I am fully aware of the joke. I accepted anyway, because they offered a hood, and I look tremendous in a hood.)
Here it is. Look at what this class actually did while nobody was watching and nobody was paying. One of you put a real time moving map GPS on a 25MHz 486-SX, using Voronoi cells and 8 and 16 bit integer arithmetic and, as I understand it, roughly two floating point operations in total, on a machine that has been in a landfill in spirit since 1996. One of you spent four years, four years, opening a security chip inside a twenty-six-year-old PlayStation that had kept its mouth shut through three wars and the entire life cycle of the internet. One of you rebuilt a dead graphics card gate by gate on an FPGA so that a game from 1996 could run wrong in precisely the correct way. Nobody asked for any of it. Nobody is going to buy any of it. Somebody in one of those threads put it better than this institution has ever put anything: useless things tend to be deeply useful to a select few.
You have been trained to hear that as an apology. It is not an apology. It is the load path.
Everything that was load-bearing is being tested right now, in public, with a press release, and a fair amount of it is failing. But a thing that was never load-bearing cannot collapse, because it was never holding anything up. That is not the weakness of your work. That is precisely why your work is going to walk out of this decade intact. The four years on the chip cannot be rendered unnecessary; it was unnecessary at hour one and the man did it anyway and he was happy the entire time. You cannot be demoted from a job you invented for yourself and perform for free. There is no seat they can move you to. You brought your own chair.
So: congratulations. You are not load-bearing. I mean that as the compliment of your life, and I would like the parents in row four to stop looking at me like that.
They are going to move you. They are moving everyone. Some morning you will come in and discover that the part you were good at has a sponsor now, and you will sit down in a seat you did not choose, and the terrible thing is that the view will be fine. And when it happens, you are going to be the only person in the cabin who is not afraid, because you have been sitting in 24B on purpose for years, tray table down, doing something magnificent and completely unnecessary, with a window.
Class of whatever this is: go be useless at the highest possible level. The fountain is outside. Someone please catch the registrar.