I feel pretty conflicted right now because I’ve been somewhat talking to this girl K For a little bit now and I am very confident that she is interested in at least a date if not more. I feel like there are logistical reasons why I can say that this is not maybe the relationship I’m looking for, she works opposite hours than I do and so I would only be able to spend time with her on the weekend. She also lives pretty far away from me. And additionally there are a couple things that aren’t necessarily red flags but maybe more yellow for me, she isn’t in therapy, and has said a couple things that kind of feel like they aren’t indicators of emotional majority but I also could be wrong. She also isn’t really chalant or expressive the same way that I am, and that’s not necessarily a dealbreaker but I do really like it when someone can match my energy. Otherwise I feel like I’m kind of constantly fighting this pull to match their energy. Also isn’t really convinced on if she wants to have kids or not, and she really wants to travel around a lot, meaning she isn’t necessarily ready to set roots.

But at the same time she is fun to talk to, and also is pretty well established with a job and her own friend group. We do have some similar interests like certain kind of games, and the gym. She also does give off a lot of that tomboyish energy that I like, where she is competitive for stupid things.

I keep thinking about this one reel that I saw, a woman was at a restaurant and the menu only had fries. She ordered the fries, and then notices another patron had a really nice plate of pasta. When she asked the patron how she got that it’s as simple as just asking for it. When she mentions that pasta is not on the menu, the other patron says that they’re simply is no menu and what you ask for you will get. It’s just a question about knowing what you can expect. An additionally when she orders the pasta she gets fries. She has to then wait and send the fries back. Then she gets her pasta right before she starts to eat it, it turns into fries. She has to again send it back until finally she gets the pasta that she wanted.

I feel like this is almost a test from the universe, seeing if I am willing to say no and wait a little bit more for someone that I truly fall in love with. The universe has been kind to me by making it explicitly hard logistically, but also by illustrating that it’s not going to be super clear answers of someone who says that they refuse to have kids, or that they live hundreds of miles away. Often these things happen in these gray in between. And I guess in journaling here I feel like the answer is clear to me. I guess now the question is how to make sure I’m not leading someone on even though we haven’t explicitly showed interest.

I guess when I think about it a little bit more, if I visualize the person that I want to spend my life with, it’s someone who looks at me and smiles in a slightly mischievous but very grateful way. I think I could really value someone that can help me stand up when I’m at my lowest. I don’t want my partner to be my therapist or anything like that but I absolutely want them to be someone that I feel safe going to. And I know that I grew up only eating fries but maybe I would like to hold out until I can find someone that would notice the little things that come from knowing me for long enough to tell that I’m struggling and maybe give me like a little pack of candies when I get home and a hug. And the thought of that makes me wanna breakdown crying. I want to be careful of saying that I’m not asking for too much because honestly to me that’s the world. I think that being loved can look like a dollar store pack of sour patch kids. And it’s a quiet reminder that you have a place in my mind. And even if that place gets dirty and neglected because you’re struggling, that’s a place that’s worth cleaning and tidying up for you. And instead of just shutting the door, letting a bit of sunlight in and letting me know that no matter what I am loved.

I’ve gone pretty far from the original point but I guess another kind of a litmus test for me is the fact that I’ve kind of spent my entire life learning that depression was something to be hidden. And this was also because of my fault. At least in the sense of I was doing something that wasn’t good for other people, before I was properly treated I was essentially making this massive concern someone else’s problem when they would give me some space, and I would like to acknowledge the fact that that is no longer the case. But it still is something I’ve had to unlearn and relearn again, taking up space and asking for help from friends and family. And I think that is something that’s really hard for me but incredibly important, and when I choose a future partner I want someone who recognizes that that’s both a weakness but also something great importance to me. And I think you’d be so incredibly sweet and loving if a partner that finds out about my struggles work conditions doesn’t shy away from them, but rather goes inside with curiosity and compassion, the same way I would hope I do.

If I’m being completely honest I hope that I find this person sued, because I really want to meet them and I would love to be able to start spending time with them, and I know that an important thing is controlling my hunger for it because that is what blinds me into taking fries instead of pasta. But I think it would be an incredibly beautiful dish of pasta and I would be lying if I said I didn’t look forward to it.

Hello again. I hope your Monday went well.

While you were working to earn enough money so you and your family can live a better life, POTUS said “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation”. He really doesn't care if life is hard for you. He has insured that his own family including himself have garnered millions by ignoring the restrictions in our constitution.

He sells bibles and other merch which enrich himself and his family while acting as POTUS. There is no stopping his greed and he will use any power he has in order to enrich himself and his family, while you are barely covering the needs of you and your family. He doesn't care.

POTUS Roaster

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The first thing the sensor sees is the ceiling. It is an unremarkable ceiling, white acoustic tile, fluorescent strip, a slight nicotine tinge from a generation of residents who were once allowed to smoke indoors. The sensor is not a camera in the conventional sense. It does not record video; the procurement document made a point of that. It is a low-resolution thermal array, mounted in a discreet white housing about the size of a smoke alarm, and it watches the room beneath it as a heat map. When a heat-map blob detaches from the bed and crosses the floor, it logs movement. When the blob lies horizontal in a place a human body should not be horizontal, it pings a tablet at the nurses' station. The vendor calls this fall detection. The procurement notice called it dignity-preserving monitoring. The night shift on a typical residential aged care floor in Australia or England in early 2026, which is often one registered nurse and two personal care workers covering upwards of forty residents, calls it the thing that goes off.

What the thing goes off about, on the kinds of nights the Australian Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety documented across ninety-nine sitting days of evidence and that the Care Quality Commission in England continues to describe in its state-of-care reports, is the sort of incident that happens when an older resident with dementia transfers from bed, returns toward it, and falls. The sensor logs the transfer; it logs the horizontal heat signature on the floor; it pings the tablet. The personal care worker on duty may be two corridors away changing another resident. By the time anybody arrives, the resident has been on the carpet long enough for a hip to break. The sensor has done exactly what the brochure said it would do. Nobody has been close enough for the information to matter. That pattern, not any one incident, is what the evidence that regulators have taken in sworn testimony describes.

It is the gap between those two facts, the thing that the technology measured and the thing that the system did with the measurement, that a paper published in The Conversation on 24 February 2026 by Barbara Barbosa Neves of the University of Sydney, Alexandra Sanders, and Geoffrey Mead set out to dramatise. Their argument, distilled from an analysis of the marketing materials of thirty-three companies selling AI tools into aged care across Australia, East Asia, Europe and North America, is that the industry has succeeded in convincing governments and investors that algorithmic monitoring, automated care planning and companion robotics are the answer to a workforce crisis when they are, in fact, a way of avoiding the question. The crisis is structural. The tools, however clever, cannot be structural answers. “If we let AI companies define what is broken,” the authors write, “we also let them define what repair looks like. That may leave our systems more profitable, but far less caring and humane.”

The numbers behind the pitch are now large enough to set the rest of the policy debate around them. Fortune Business Insights estimated the global elderly care market at 53.29 billion US dollars in 2025 and projected it to reach 57.78 billion in 2026, on its way to roughly 114 billion by 2034. The agetech subsegment, the layer of digital and AI products sold into that market, is projected by industry analysts cited in the Neves paper to reach A$170 billion by 2030. By any reading, the next decade of aged care will be one of the most heavily capitalised periods in the sector's history, and a substantial fraction of that capital is going into systems that are designed to do things humans currently do.

The question this article is concerned with is not whether the technology works. Some of it does, in narrow ways, under controlled conditions. The question is what accountability structures would have to exist before deploying it at scale, into a population that cannot easily refuse it and cannot reliably tell anyone when it has failed, could be considered ethical. The honest answer, in April 2026, is that very few of those structures exist anywhere, and most of what passes for them is designed to manage the reputational risk of providers and vendors rather than the safety of residents.

What The Inquiries Already Told Us

The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, which delivered its 2,500-page final report, Care, Dignity and Respect, on 1 March 2021, did not lack for diagnoses. Across twenty-three public hearings, ninety-nine sitting days, 641 witnesses and more than ten thousand public submissions, commissioners Lynelle Briggs and Tony Pagone arrived at 148 recommendations. The findings were as plain as they were grim. Commissioner Briggs put the proportion of residents who had experienced physical or sexual assault at between thirteen and eighteen per cent. The report described two decades of underfunding amounting to approximately 9.8 billion Australian dollars cut from the sector's annual budget. It documented residents left in soiled continence aids, malnourished, restrained chemically and physically, and dying in conditions the Commission did not euphemise.

What the Commission did not say, in any of those pages, is that the answer to those failings lay in machine learning. The recommendations focused on staff ratios, on the qualifications and pay of personal care workers, on a new statutory framework for the rights of older people, on enforceable care standards, and on an independent regulator with real teeth. The Aged Care Act 2024, which came into effect on 1 November 2025 after a delay from its originally legislated 1 July date, codified some of that framework. From October 2024, providers had been required to deliver a national average of 215 minutes of personal and nursing care per resident per day, of which 44 minutes was to come from a registered nurse. From 1 October 2025, the Star Ratings used to grade residential providers were re-engineered to require those minutes for a three-star or better staffing rating. None of those reforms involved an algorithm.

The same pattern recurs in every comparable jurisdiction. The Care Quality Commission in England, which by the summer of 2024 was being publicly described by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting, as a failing organisation, commissioned the Dash Review of its operational effectiveness; the full report, published in October 2024, found that the time taken by the regulator to re-inspect a service rated “requires improvement” had risen from 142 days in 2015 to 360 days in 2024. The CQC's chief executive, Ian Trenholm, resigned that July. Skills for Care reported that as of March 2025 there were 111,000 vacant posts in adult social care in England, a vacancy rate of 6.4 per cent against a labour-market average of 2.2, with care worker vacancies running at 8.3 per cent and homecare vacancies above 10 per cent. Annual turnover sat at thirty per cent. In May 2025 the UK government closed the international recruitment route for new care workers, cutting off a pipeline that had been delivering an average of twelve thousand recruits a quarter into the independent sector. None of those problems have algorithmic solutions.

In the United States, the federal minimum staffing standard for long-term care facilities published by the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services in May 2024, requiring 3.48 hours of nursing care per resident per day and twenty-four-hour onsite registered nurse coverage, was repealed in December 2025. Section 71111 of Public Law 119-21 then prohibited CMS from implementing or enforcing the rule until at least 30 September 2034. Public Citizen and the Center for Medicare Advocacy estimated that the original rule, had it survived, would have prevented approximately thirteen thousand deaths a year. In Canada, the May 2020 Canadian Armed Forces report on five Ontario long-term care homes, which described cockroaches, rotting food, ulcerated bed-bound residents and staff cycling between units in contaminated personal protective equipment, prompted no national workforce reform of any depth; provincial inquiries in Ontario and Quebec produced more recommendations than implementations. The same picture, with local variations, holds in the Nordic countries, in France and in much of east Asia.

What the inquiries documented, in other words, was not a sector that had failed to adopt the latest technology. It was a sector that had failed to be funded, staffed, regulated and respected. The premise of the agetech pitch, that AI can plug the gap, is in this light a category error. There is no reasonable reading of Care, Dignity and Respect in which the missing ingredient is more sensors.

The Pitch And The Products

Walk the floor of any of the recent agetech expos, the SilverEco Forum in Cannes, the Aged Care 2026 conference in Melbourne, the Health 2.0 trade fair in Tokyo, and the categories repeat. There are passive monitoring systems, of which the thermal sensor in the opening scene is one example. There are wearable fall detectors that combine accelerometers and machine-learned gait classifiers, sold by firms like Vayyar, Kepler Vision and a long tail of European start-ups. There are continuous bed and chair sensors, marketed under names like SafelyYou and Tellus You Care. There are automated care-planning platforms that ingest electronic health records and generate suggested daily routines, hydration prompts and bowel charts. There are medication management dispensers. There are predictive analytics layers that promise to flag clinical deterioration days before it shows up in vital signs. There are companion robots: PARO, the harp-seal-shaped therapeutic robot developed by Takanori Shibata at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, in clinical use since the mid-2000s; ElliQ, the desktop social companion built by Intuition Robotics in Israel; SoftBank's humanoid Pepper, repurposed from retail receptionist into care-floor entertainer; and the various lower-cost robotic-cat and robotic-dog products that proliferate at the budget end.

The evidence base for these products is uneven and almost always thinner than the marketing implies. A 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Innovation in Aging by Hung and colleagues, “Effectiveness of Companion Robot Care for Dementia”, found that PARO produced statistically meaningful but small improvements in agitation, depression and medication use across pooled trials, with the authors noting that most studies were small, short and unblinded. A 2023 systematic review in the International Journal of Nursing Studies reached a similar conclusion: a possible benefit, evidence quality low to moderate, no demonstrated long-term effect. A pilot randomised controlled trial of a different companion robot for community-dwelling people with dementia, published in 2017 by Moyle and colleagues, recorded engagement with the device but did not show robust effects on the primary outcomes.

ElliQ has produced more uplifting headline numbers, largely from one programme. The New York State Office for the Aging began deploying ElliQ in 2022; by May 2025 the agency reported 834 active clients, with 94 per cent saying they felt less lonely, 97 per cent feeling better overall, average usage of forty-one interactions per day, and a customer satisfaction score of 4.6 out of 5. Those are the figures Intuition Robotics quotes in its marketing decks. The peer-reviewed literature is more cautious. A 2024 review by Broxvall and colleagues, “ElliQ, an AI-Driven Social Robot to Alleviate Loneliness: Progress and Lessons Learned”, described the deployment as “promising” and explicitly called for randomised controlled trials before efficacy claims could be considered established. The NYSOFA outcomes, reassuring as they are, were collected from a self-selected user base that consented, that engaged voluntarily, and that retained the cognitive bandwidth to fill in a satisfaction survey. They tell us very little about what would happen if the same device were deployed by default to a less able population.

Fall detection is the category in which the gap between vendor claim and operational reality is widest. A 2025 scoping review in Applied Sciences, “AI-Driven Inpatient Fall Prevention Using Continuous Monitoring”, examined the evidence on continuous monitoring systems in hospital and long-term care settings and reached a conclusion that vendors do not put on their websites: while sensitivity for detecting falls can exceed ninety per cent, false-positive rates of thirty to forty per cent are common, and across the evidence base detection systems “did not consistently reduce fall incidence or the occurrence of injurious falls”. The same paper, like a closely related 2025 review in Medicina, found that reporting of “implementation-critical metrics” such as alert burden, response times and downstream actions was patchy. Studies of clinical alarm fatigue across acute care have repeatedly found that as many as eighty to ninety per cent of audible alarms in monitored wards are non-actionable. There is no plausible mechanism by which adding more alarms to an understaffed care floor improves outcomes, and reasonable mechanisms by which it makes them worse.

Predictive analytics for clinical deterioration carry a related set of problems. Algorithms trained on the electronic health records of one population have been shown repeatedly, including in a much-cited 2023 JAMA Internal Medicine analysis of the Epic sepsis prediction model, to perform worse than advertised when deployed in different populations. Aged care residents are an unusually heterogeneous group, often with multimorbidity, polypharmacy and cognitive complications that distort the signals the model was trained to detect. The risk is not that the model produces nothing useful; it is that it produces enough useful output to displace clinical judgement while the genuinely unusual cases, the ones a human carer would recognise on sight, slip past unflagged.

The Advocacy Gap

Across all of these tools, the same population variable does most of the moral work. The people on whom the sensors and dispensers and screens are aimed are, by definition of the sector they are in, frail. A substantial proportion are cognitively impaired; the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimated in its 2024 dementia report that more than half of permanent residents in Australian aged care had a diagnosis of dementia. Many are socially isolated; the loneliness data that companion robots cite as a justification is real. Many have limited or no digital fluency; older Australians in residential care are dramatically under-represented in surveys of internet use, smartphone ownership and the everyday literacy that allows a person to interrogate, refuse or modify a digital tool. And almost all of them sit in a profound power asymmetry with the people on whom they depend for daily care.

The implications for consent are not theoretical. The standard model of informed consent in healthcare assumes a person capable of understanding the nature of the proposed intervention, weighing it against alternatives, and communicating a decision. A 2025 review in Frontiers in Digital Health, “Designing for Dignity: Ethics of AI Surveillance in Older Adult Care”, catalogued how badly that model breaks down in practice when the intervention is a continuous, ambient monitoring system and the person being monitored has fluctuating capacity. Many older adults in care settings, the authors noted, have “no knowledge about what data is being harvested” and lack the cognitive or technical capability to adjust settings. Consent is typically obtained at admission, signed by a family member acting as substitute decision-maker, and never revisited. The system that the resident did not knowingly agree to becomes the system they live inside.

The asymmetry is sharper still where AI is making, or shaping, allocative decisions. Australia's new Support at Home programme, introduced in November 2025 to replace earlier home-care packages, uses a rules-based algorithm called the Integrated Assessment Tool to convert assessor responses into funding entitlements. As reported by The Conversation in March 2026 in a follow-up piece by Sebastian Cordoba and colleagues titled “First Robodebt, now NDIS and aged care: how computers still decide who gets care”, neither assessors nor participants can clearly see how the algorithm converts answers into funding levels. Departmental officials told a Senate inquiry that there is “no discretionary element” in the process; an override function present during testing was removed before the system went live. Evidence presented to the inquiry suggested the tool was systematically underestimating need, with reports of older Australians, including those with serious or degenerative conditions, having their support reduced. The Robodebt scandal, in which an automated debt-recovery system run by Services Australia issued more than 470,000 unlawful debt notices between 2016 and 2019 and was the subject of a 2023 Royal Commission, is the cautionary tale every Australian policy commentator now invokes. The aged care sector's algorithmic infrastructure is being built by a state apparatus that demonstrably has not learned its lesson.

The classic argument for surveillance and substitution technologies in care is that the people receiving them benefit, and that any inconvenience to autonomy is outweighed by safety. The problem with this argument is that it cannot be tested by the people on whom it is being made. A resident with moderate dementia cannot reliably explain to an inspector why the sensor in the corner of her room makes her feel watched, or whether she would prefer a human attendant to a tablet that pings someone who arrives nine minutes later. A non-verbal resident with advanced cognitive impairment cannot tell a researcher whether the companion robot is comforting her or merely keeping her quiet. The marketing literature sometimes claims that residents prefer the robots; the more careful research, including work by Neves and her collaborators in the Journal of Applied Gerontology in 2023, “Artificial Intelligence in Long-Term Care: Technological Promise, Aging Anxieties, and Sociotechnical Ageism”, finds that older adults' attitudes towards AI in their own care are considerably more ambivalent than the agetech sector implies, that they are acutely aware of being positioned as objects of management rather than subjects of care, and that they often experience monitoring as a loss of dignity rather than a gain in safety.

Cost Reduction Or Outcome Improvement And Who Carries The Risk

The business case for AI in aged care, in board meetings rather than press releases, is largely about labour. A monitoring system that allows a single night-shift carer to cover sixty residents instead of forty is, on paper, a workforce multiplier. A medication dispenser that prompts a resident through a regimen reduces the registered nursing time required for medication rounds. An automated care plan reduces the documentation burden on personal care workers. A companion robot, if it can hold attention, reduces the demand on staff for the relational work that has historically been the floor of dignified care. Each of these is a legitimate engineering goal in a sector where workforce shortage is real, severe and not going away. None of them is the same thing as improved outcomes for residents.

The distinction matters, because the risk of miscalibration falls asymmetrically. If a fall sensor's false-positive rate produces alarm fatigue and a real fall is missed, the cost is borne by the resident on the floor, not the procurement team that signed the contract. If a predictive deterioration model misses an unusual sepsis presentation in a resident with atypical baseline observations, the resident dies. If an automated care plan recommends a hydration schedule calibrated to a baseline weight two years out of date, the resident whose actual weight has dropped sharply goes thirsty. If a companion robot becomes the dominant social contact for a resident whose family visits have tapered, the human relationships that aged-care research consistently identifies as protective against decline are the ones that quietly disappear.

This asymmetry is what makes the cost-reduction framing dangerous. In a properly functioning market, the people who bear the risk of a product underperforming push back. In aged care, the people who bear the risk are very often unable to. The carers who notice that the system is not working, who see a resident on the floor long after the sensor said so, are positioned several layers below the procurement decisions that put the system there. They have, as the Neves paper notes, taken on additional cognitive labour interpreting the data the system generates, but they have lost discretion over whether the system should be used at all. The families who pay the bills are typically not on the floor when the system fails. The regulators who would, in theory, audit whether the technology was performing as advertised lack the technical capability and, increasingly, the inspection cadence.

A 2024 paper in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications titled “Paternalistic AI: the case of aged care” framed the underlying ethical structure crisply. AI systems in care, the authors argued, function as a particularly powerful form of soft paternalism. They purport to act in the interests of the person being cared for, but they remove from that person the practical opportunity to refuse, modify or contest the intervention. In the context of cognitive impairment, where soft paternalism shades into hard paternalism almost imperceptibly, the absence of accountability structures around the technology means that the ethical work that would normally be done by consent simply does not happen.

What Accountability Would Actually Look Like

If AI is going to be deployed at scale in aged care, the question is what would have to be in place before such deployment could be considered ethical. The honest answer is a layered structure, none of whose layers currently exist in anything like a complete form in any major jurisdiction.

The first layer is consent that is genuine, ongoing and revocable. Admission paperwork signed by a substitute decision-maker is not consent to a continuous monitoring regime. A robust framework would require that residents, where they have any capacity, are walked through what each technology in their environment does, in plain language, with the right to refuse specific elements without losing access to other care. Where capacity is absent, substitute decision-makers should be required to revisit consent on a defined cadence, and to weigh the technology's use against alternatives that include increased staffing. The recommendation, drawn from the 2025 Frontiers in Digital Health paper, of “easy-to-visualize dashboards and plain-language explanations” should be a procurement requirement, not a research aspiration.

The second layer is independent auditing, with statutory backing, of the actual performance of deployed systems in their actual settings. Vendor-supplied performance figures are, as the scoping reviews on fall detection make clear, systematically optimistic. An accountability regime worth the name would require providers to log false positives, false negatives, response times and downstream actions in a standardised format, and would require regulators, not vendors, to publish the resulting performance data. Australia's Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, the CQC in England, CMS in the United States and their equivalents would need substantial additional resourcing and technical capability to conduct such audits credibly. None has it now.

The third layer is algorithmic transparency. Where an AI tool affects the allocation of care, including hours of staffing, level of monitoring, eligibility for funding or assignment to a particular care pathway, residents and their advocates should have a legal right to an explanation of how the system reached its conclusion, expressed in terms an ordinary person can understand. Article 22 of the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union already prohibits decisions based solely on automated processing that produce significant legal or comparable effects. That principle needs to be operationalised specifically for aged care, with explicit recognition that algorithmic recommendations that substantially shape human decisions count, and that the convenient fiction of “human in the loop” cannot be used to launder automation.

The fourth layer is incident reporting. When an AI tool contributes to harm, whether by missing a fall, misallocating medication, displacing human contact or generating an unsafe care recommendation, the incident should be reportable, on the same statutory footing as a medication error, to the relevant regulator, with public aggregate reporting. The current regime, in which AI-related incidents are typically classified as either workflow events or clinical errors and never as software failures, makes systemic learning impossible.

The fifth layer is a hard ban on substitution where it matters most. The question of whether a companion robot should ever be the primary social contact for a person with dementia is not a question for procurement officers. The position taken by Sherry Turkle of MIT in her 2011 book Alone Together, and elaborated in subsequent work, is that the deployment of robots as substitutes for, rather than supplements to, human relational care is an abdication. That position should be encoded in regulation. Companion robots may have a role; they may not have a role that displaces the requirement for staffed human contact. Procurement should require evidence that a tool augments rather than replaces the relational work, and operational data should be auditable to confirm that what was contracted as augmentation has not, over time, drifted into substitution.

The sixth layer is procurement conditionality, and it is the lever that actually moves the others. Public funders of aged care, which in most jurisdictions means the state, have far more bargaining power than they currently use. Every procurement contract for an AI system in publicly funded aged care should carry conditions on consent processes, audit access, transparency, incident reporting, anti-substitution and a ceiling on the proportion of care time that may be displaced by the system. Vendors that decline to meet those conditions should not be funded. The market will adjust quickly when it has to.

The seventh layer is the one that the agetech sector finds least convenient to discuss. None of the above is a substitute for adequate staffing. Every accountability regime for AI in aged care has to be built on top of, not in place of, the staffing standards, pay levels and workforce protections that the Royal Commission, the Dash Review, the CMS rule and the Canadian Armed Forces report were calling for. AI deployed into an under-staffed environment cannot be made ethical by audits alone. The ethical baseline is a staffed floor.

A Reported Ending

It is tempting, when writing about technology and vulnerability, to land on a hopeful note. The honest reading of the evidence in April 2026 does not really support one. The Aged Care Act 2024 in Australia is in early implementation; the staffing minutes are being met on national average but missed in many individual facilities. The CQC in England is mid-restructure following the Dash operational review. The federal staffing rule in the United States has been repealed and is statutorily prohibited from re-implementation until at least 2034. The Canadian provinces have made limited structural progress since 2020. The agetech market continues to grow. The companies whose pitches Neves, Sanders and Mead analysed are not slowing down their fundraising rounds because the academic literature is cautious about their effect sizes.

What the Conversation article points at, and what the evidence on every category of agetech tool quietly confirms, is that the question of whether AI in aged care is ethical cannot be answered at the level of the individual product. PARO has uses. ElliQ helps some lonely people in Buffalo and Albany. A well-calibrated fall sensor, in a building with enough carers to respond inside three minutes, may well be a net good. None of those local truths bears on the systemic question, which is whether the deployment, in aggregate, is being driven by considerations that the people on whom it is deployed would endorse if they could.

The resident whose hip breaks while the sensor pings an empty corridor does not appear in any vendor case study. Her mobility does not fully return, in the way ninety-year-old mobility rarely does. The room in which she fell still has a sensor on the ceiling, and the sensor still pings when it sees a heat-map blob in the wrong place. The night shift on her floor is still, in April 2026, one registered nurse and two personal care workers covering upwards of forty residents, the kind of configuration that the inspectorate reports from three continents have documented as standard. The vendor's quarterly filings continue to note strong growth in the Asia-Pacific market and new partnerships with major residential care operators. None of those facts, on their own, is scandalous. Together they describe the architecture of a sector that has decided, without ever quite deciding, that the cheaper option is also the wiser one.

The accountability structures that would make AI in aged care ethical are not technically difficult. They are politically expensive. They require regulators to be staffed and funded to a level that no government has yet been willing to fund them to. They require public procurement to drive standards in a market where vendors have grown accustomed to selling unvalidated tools into desperate buyers. They require a public conversation about the proper role of human contact in care that the sector and the technology industry have, between them, been content to defer.

Until those structures exist, the most defensible position is the one Neves and her colleagues argue for: that AI in aged care, deployed primarily to manage the consequences of under-investment in human care, is not a solution to the crisis the Royal Commission documented. It is a way of making the crisis less visible. The sensor sees the ceiling. The ceiling is white. The blob on the floor is logged at a particular minute, and again two minutes later. Somewhere down the corridor, somebody is doing the work that the technology was sold as a substitute for, and somebody else is doing without the work because there was nobody to do it for them. The accounting we owe the residents is the one we have, so far, declined to do.

References & Further Information

1. Neves, B. B., Sanders, A., & Mead, G. “AI companies promise to 'fix' aged care, but they're selling a false narrative.” The Conversation, 24 February 2026. https://theconversation.com/ai-companies-promise-to-fix-aged-care-but-theyre-selling-a-false-narrative-275822
2. Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. Final Report: Care, Dignity and Respect. Commonwealth of Australia, 1 March 2021. https://www.royalcommission.gov.au/aged-care/final-report
3. Aged Care Act 2024 (Cth), Federal Register of Legislation, Australia. Commenced 1 November 2025. https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2024A00104/latest
4. Australian Government. “Changes to Staffing rating for Star Ratings.” My Aged Care, October 2025. https://www.myagedcare.gov.au/news-and-updates/changes-staffing-rating-star-ratings
5. Fortune Business Insights. “Elderly Care Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report, 2026-2034.” https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/elderly-care-market-111477
6. Dash, P. “Review into the Operational Effectiveness of the Care Quality Commission: Full Report.” UK Department of Health and Social Care, October 2024. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-into-the-operational-effectiveness-of-the-care-quality-commission-full-report
7. Skills for Care. “The State of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce in England 2025.” https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/Adult-Social-Care-Workforce-Data/workforceintelligence/resources/Reports/National/The-state-of-the-adult-social-care-sector-and-workforce-in-England-2025-Executive-Summary.pdf
8. Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “Medicare and Medicaid Programs; Minimum Staffing Standards for Long-Term Care Facilities.” Federal Register, 10 May 2024. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/05/10/2024-08273/medicare-and-medicaid-programs-minimum-staffing-standards-for-long-term-care-facilities
9. Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “Repeal of Minimum Staffing Standards for Long-Term Care Facilities.” Federal Register, 3 December 2025. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/03/2025-21792/medicare-and-medicaid-programs-repeal-of-minimum-staffing-standards-for-long-term-care-facilities
10. Canadian Armed Forces. “Op LASER: JTFC Observations in Long Term Care Facilities in Ontario.” Public Safety Canada, May 2020. https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/trnsprnc/brfng-mtrls/prlmntry-bndrs/20200831/069/index-en.aspx
11. Hung, L., et al. “Effectiveness of Companion Robot Care for Dementia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Innovation in Aging, 5(2), 2021. https://academic.oup.com/innovateage/article/5/2/igab013/6249558
12. Yu, C., et al. “The effectiveness of a therapeutic robot, 'Paro', on behavioural and psychological symptoms, medication use, total sleep time and sociability in older adults with dementia: A systematic review and meta-analysis.” International Journal of Nursing Studies, 2023. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0020748923000950
13. Broxvall, M., et al. “ElliQ, an AI-Driven Social Robot to Alleviate Loneliness: Progress and Lessons Learned.” 2024. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10917141/
14. New York State Office for the Aging. “ElliQ Proactive Care Companion Initiative: Project Update 2026.” February 2026. https://aging.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2026/02/nysofa-elliq-project-update-2026.pdf
15. “AI-Driven Inpatient Fall Prevention Using Continuous Monitoring: From Early Detection to Workflow-Integrated Decision Support: A Scoping Review.” Applied Sciences, MDPI, 2025. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/16/7/3383
16. “Digital Healthcare Approaches for Fall Detection and Prediction in Older Adults: A Systematic Review of Evidence from Hospital and Long-Term Care Settings.” Medicina, MDPI, 2025. https://www.mdpi.com/1648-9144/61/11/1926
17. Wong, A., et al. “External Validation of a Widely Implemented Proprietary Sepsis Prediction Model in Hospitalized Patients.” JAMA Internal Medicine, 2023.
18. Neves, B. B., Petersen, A., Vered, M., Carter, A., & Omori, M. “Artificial Intelligence in Long-Term Care: Technological Promise, Aging Anxieties, and Sociotechnical Ageism.” Journal of Applied Gerontology, 2023. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/07334648231157370
19. “Designing for dignity: ethics of AI surveillance in older adult care.” Frontiers in Digital Health, 2025. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/digital-health/articles/10.3389/fdgth.2025.1643238/full
20. “Paternalistic AI: the case of aged care.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2024. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03282-0
21. Cordoba, S., et al. “First Robodebt, now NDIS and aged care: how computers still decide who gets care.” The Conversation, March 2026. https://theconversation.com/first-robodebt-now-ndis-and-aged-care-how-computers-still-decide-who-gets-care-280711
22. Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme. Report of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme. Commonwealth of Australia, July 2023.
23. General Data Protection Regulation, Article 22, “Automated individual decision-making, including profiling.” Regulation (EU) 2016/679. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/
24. Turkle, S. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books, 2011.
25. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Dementia in Australia 2024. https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/dementia/dementia-in-australia

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * Today has been a low energy day in the Roscoe-verse, thanks to late season allergies. Listening now to WFAN's pregame show wind down ahead of tonight's game: New York Yankees vs Baltimore Orioles. I'll stay with WFAN for the radio call of the game. After the game I'll wrap up the night prayers and head to bed early.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 239.86 lbs. * bp= 146/86 (66)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 05:30 – 1 banana, 1 small cookie * 06:45 – sweet rice * 10:00 – chicken casserole * 11:00 – 2 small cookies * 15:00 – garden salad * 16:45 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:30 – listening to local news talk radio * 05:10 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:50 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap, * 15:00 – listening to the Jack Show * 17:00 – listening to WFAN New York Sports Radio broadcasting the pregame show ahead of tonight's Yankees vs Orioles MLB game. I'll stay with WFAN for the call of the game.

Chess: * 08:55 – moved in all pending CC games

This post is Part 3 of a series on social revolutions of the past 30 years — where public consciousness has massively shifted in favor of liberation. My aim is to create space to pause and acknowledge how things have changed in ways that once felt impossible, remind us that things can always be otherwise. It is inspired in part by Rebecca Solnit’s 2016 edition of Hope in the Dark and David Graeber’s 2007 essay “The Shock of Victory.” Feel free to check out part 1 and part 2.

When I was a kid, growing up in the early 2000s USA, the words “communist” and “socialist” were pretty much equivalent to “Satanist.” (okay to be fair my parents may have been a bit more extreme than most: they also thought Yoga was inviting demonic possession and Harry Potter was converting children to witchcraft, but I digress).

But as of 2026, both New York City and Seattle elected self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist mayors: Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson, respectively.

Mayor Katie Wilson of Seattle, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City

Although both have faced criticism from Right as well as Left wing sources (either for their espoused views or failure to follow through on them), the fact two major US cities were able to elect openly socialist candidates is a major milestone in public perception.

In this post, I’ll explore a brief history of socialism in US culture and analyze some of the trends over recent years which show movement toward popular awareness of the fundamental problems of Capitalism and increasing willingness to experiment with alternatives.

Class consciousness? Hardly know her.

People who work for a living vs. people who own stuff for a living have very different interests: think about an Amazon warehouse worker vs. Jeff Bezos (or more accurately Andy Jassy, but he doesn’t have his own Bo Burnham song).

I would trace contemporary class consciousness in America in part back to the Occupy Wall Street movement in early 2010s, where de-centralized protestors took over Zucotti park in New York City in opposition to the rule of finance capital over our lives and popularized the slogan “We are the 99%.”

protestors on the steps of London Stock Exchange in 2011, source: Ilias Bartolini

Protestors were bringing to light the fact that, at the time, the top 1% of the population owned 43% of wealth. Since then, things have only gotten worse, with just 3 people owning more wealth than the bottom half of the country, and there is widespread despair of class mobility.

chart source: wikipedia contributor RCraig09 based on World Inequality Database

Speaking shifting perceptions of the ruling class, we can look at the public reaction to alleged assassination of the CEO of United Healthcare, which makes hundreds of billions annually off denied insurance claims, by a certain Italian-American individual.

Luigi Mangione in court in 2025, source: Steven Hirsch/New York Post via AP

The popularity of the alleged assassin, dubbed by Forbes as a “social media folk hero,” certainly demonstrated a massive shift in consciousness away from a world where billionaires and CEOs were seen as untouchable, aspirational figures to a world where the actions of individual, determined people can reach them.

It’s debatable whether one call call this celebration of alleged vigilante justice by hot guys “class consciousness” per se, but it is certainly a shift in public perception against the ruling class, which shocked many news outlets at the time.

If we look beyond individual actions though, we can see shifts toward more large-scale collective organizing.

Our rising labor movement

Perhaps the most public recent labor rights struggle is the four month-long 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, focused especially on putting protections in place to defend creative workers against exploitation and replacement by AI.

SAG-AFTRA strikers on the picket line in Los Angeles in 2023, source: Ringo Chiu/Shutterstock

Although labor union membership been sharply falling since the 1980s (mainly due to shipping US manufacturing jobs overseas and prolonged repression of organizing by capitalists), the year 2025 marked a 16 year high in union membership, increasing from 14.2 million to 14.7 million people compared to 2024.

That’s an extra 500,000 people who joined unions last year. Public approval of unions is at 70%, which is the highest it’s been since the 1960s. Labor organizing has long been seen by leftists as a crucial part of any revolutionary strategy, with the General Strike being considered “the most powerful weapon of the working class” by the International Workers of the World (IWW, sometimes called “the wobblies”).

If we starting thinking of militant unions as part of a broader strategy to build socialism, we can look to the past to see how things have unfolded in this area.

Why was socialism ever unpopular?

If you ignore the half-century long conflation of communism and socialism with authoritarianism, it seems like a pretty easy sell (capitalist pun intended): who wouldn’t want to live in a society where we don’t have to worry about basic needs like housing, healthcare, and public transportation, where we get to directly control their own workplaces and decide what happens in our communities?

People generally don’t like feeling exploited or spending their lives under the thumb of one unaccountable boss after another. Most people recognized this in the early 20th century and were prepared to do something drastic about it.

Jumping back in time to 1912, dues-paying members of the US Socialist Party reached a peak of 113,000, while a massive series of worldwide strikes and militant labor actions forced governments and capitalists into compromises that led to the eight-hour workday and many of what are commonly called “New Deal Era Reforms” (which is a moniker that conveniently leaves out the labor struggle that was fought to win them).

Tobacco Strike, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1910s”)

Tobacco Strike, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1910s, source: Walter P. Reuther Library

These reforms no doubt improved lives, particularly in establishing the US social safety net during the FDR era, and expanding to include Medicare during Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” era. (and which both parties have been gradually eroding since 1970).

But as positive as they were, these Democratic Socialist reforms of the New Deal represented a significant compromise against full-worker democracy and overthrow of the government, as was carried out in the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Although the USSR eventually descended into authoritarianism, the initial February Revolution was led by village “soviets”, meaning council or assembly in Russian: hundreds of autonomous, grassroots local community assemblies who revolted against the Tzar to redistribute land and self-manage their own communities. The Bolsheviks seized power later that year, claiming to represent the soviets and co-opting their slogan “all power to the soviets,” then proceeding to systematically squash them, suppressing hundreds of peasant revolts against the Bolshevik government which continued well into the 1920s.

Workers strike in 1917 on the first day of Russia's February Revolution in the capital Petrograd, now known as St Petersburg. source: Getty Images.

The US government and its capitalists really didn’t want to risk a repeat of that.

The Spectre of Communism haunted many Western powers over the rest of the 20th century. Socialism as an ideological position has been strongly repressed in US culture since at least the 1950s, particularly with the COINTELPRO, where the FBI infiltrated and intentionally sowed distrust and disorganization in US Leftist organizations, sometimes engaging in agent-provacateur methods to entrap organizers and discredit groups centered on grassroots social change as violent radicals.

Or other times they just straight up murdered revolutionaries in their beds.

What really frightens the ruling class

Fred Hampton speaks at a rally in Chicago's Grant Park in September 1969. source: Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Perhaps the most famous FBI assassination (that is, if you skip over the speculation that the FBI killed Martin Luther King, Jr.) is that of Fred Hampton, Chairman of the Chicago Black Panther Party — who was murdered at 21 years old, asleep next to his eight-month-pregnant fiancée, along with a friend who was attempting self-defense.

At the time, Fred Hampton was spearheading the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Rainbow Coalition — which included recruiting from Black and brown faith communities, white Appalachians, labor unions, and Puerto Rican street organizations like the Young Lords, altogether aiming to demonstrate how much stronger we all are when we unite across difference.

I think often of my favorite Audre Lorde quote, from her famous The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House speech:

Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future in being.

Audre Lorde, photo source: La Critica

Together, when we reach across difference, we can find a shared power in the gaps: an emergent property of coming together with openness and integrity.

The Backlash

The backlash against class consciousness — against the awareness of the obvious injustice of the economic order — has historically been distraction and misdirection. Lately you have the rise of “hustle and grind culture,” where the global problem of capitalist exploitation is to be solved by just “getting on your grindset:” working yourself harder than some hypothetical other who is presumably less deserving.

Despite 70% of Americans approving of labor unions, only ~10% of US workers are unionized. This is due to a deeply unfriendly regulatory environment, including gig work replacing much full-time employment, “bossware” and algorithmically driven labor management, and the large-scale shift away from traditional workplaces (like an office or factory floor), where workers could historically spend time with one another in person, making it much harder today to form trust and a sense of solidarity.

A whole ecosystem of hustle culture grifters has grown up to try to convince people caught in this trap that they have the secret solution that can get their followers out of this rigged game. Many such grifters, like accused international sex criminal Andrew Tate, appropriate the metaphor of “escaping the Matrix” as a way to describe getting yourself out of a position of exploitation… so you can become the guy stepping on the other guy’s throat.

It’s Deeply ironic to see the allegory of The Matrix accurately clocked as a depiction of Global Capitalism, but to envision not the destruction of the Matrix or building something beyond it, but simply becoming the oppressor yourself.

The gig economy has positioned itself in terms of “being your own boss,” we have mass proliferation of get rich quick schemes like NFTs and now AI, and above all the sheer overwhelming distraction of the internet, with hundreds of thousands of accounts trying to convince you they have the solution to your individual problem. Some of these solutions are relatively harmless (if pseudo-scientific), like those peddled by the manifestation and crystals crowd; but others are the virulently corrosive, like QAnon.

The Mirror World

There’s a famous saying in leftist circles that “anti-semitism is the socialism of fools.”

Essentially, what it means is this: many people are able to correctly identify that the world is run by a small number of elites with fundamentally unjust economic control and exploitation of everyone else. Buuuuttt, there is a large number of people who will then incorrectly identify the cause of this state of affairs as “THe JEwS!” — with many uncountable dog-whistles like “George Soros” or mentions of “shekels changing changes.”

Many other forms of scapegoating have analogous roles in distracting from the structural causes of harm: blaming immigrants for economic crises, Black mothers for crime, trans people for harm to children, Iran for a war the US started, and on and on.

In her excellent 2023 book Doppelganger: A trip into the Mirror World, writer and activist Naomi Klein explores the contours of this alternate reality which many right-wing people seem to live in, where they come right up to the edge of an accurate systemic critique, but then veer off into moon-logic and end up blaming a marginalized group for problems caused by the ruling class and centuries-in-the-making structures of global oppression.

What is on the horizon

Along with recent increases in union membership and plans for a possible General Strike in 2028 spearheaded by the United Auto Workers, there has also been a 34% rise in worker cooperatives in the US since 2020, more than doubling their workforce!

Cooperative economics have long been proposed as a way to establish dual power: spaces of greater autonomy and freedom which coexist in the cracks of capitalism and the State, where we can practice the kind of relations we want to have with each other right now. On the housing front, more people are joining tenants unions, and more people are realizing housing is a human right and shouldn’t be left to the whims of the market, that unhoused people are not the cause of homelessness. Neighbor unions are digging into the radical potential of place-based community organizing.

Even less explicitly radical trends like “quiet quitting” and “I don’t dream of labor” discourse show people understanding their interests are not the same as their bosses’ interests, and taking steps to reclaim autonomy.

Where will the next developments in anti-capitalist organizing bloom? Radical labor unions? Solidarity Cooperatives? Workplace occupations? Neighbor unions?

Let’s try em all and see what sticks.

Suggested reading

• Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, by Ward Churchilland Jim Vander Wall
• Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, by Kim Kelly
• Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter, by Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor

#socialrevolution #writing #revolution #education #essay #socialism #communism #capitalism #DSA #seattle #NYC #Mamdani #coops #NaomiKlein #AudreLorde #anarchism #wearethe99percent #occupy #SAGAFTRAStrike #generalstrike #neighborunion #laborunion #strike #IWW #quietquitting #idontdreamoflabor #COINTELPRO #solidarity #community #history #radicalhistory #TheMatrix #BlackPanthers #BPP #FredHampton #RainbowCoalition

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A few months ago our boss challenged us to adopt the Dark Factory pattern for agentic software development. Inspired by the work of Justin McCarthy at StrongDM, where they committed to producing software where humans neither read or wrote the code, we started to explore this exciting and daunting technique.

I'm someone who's always taken pride and enjoyment in crafting solutions in software. I remember reading Mary and Tom Popendick's book, Lean Software Development, where they talked about conceptual integrity and how the internal design quality of a piece of software is reflected in its usability and ultimately its value to its users. If the code is shit, that leaks out. You can feel it when you use it.

When I first started at Mechanical Orchard, in February 2024, I'd barely even used AI. At that time the best you could do was copy and paste a snippet of code into a ChatGPT window and roll the dice to see whether what you got back was just a hallucination, or something useful. At the time I was pretty sceptical and just kind of buried my head in the sand and hoped that it would all go away.

A year or so later though, it was clear that it wasn't going anywhere. I started to turn towards this technology, really try to understand it and figure out how to make it useful to me.

As the models got better and the tools like Claude Code came out, my confidence in using them increased, and I really started to enjoy it. I played with Ralph Loops and eventually built a tool for myself using a language I'd never read or written before. I’ve still never read the code, but I use that tool every day.

But how can non-deterministic coding agents possibly be trusted to produce entire systems where nobody has read the code? Won’t it be garbage? I think a lot of my friends in the agile/XP community still feel like this, and I understand why. Friends, this post is for you!

Let’s get into what a dark software factory actually is, and why you shouldn’t be afraid of it.

At its heart, any dark software factory is just a really simple loop.

Each of the nodes is an agent session. By putting them into a loop like this, with a well-designed validation harness, and a good quality seed as input, you facilitate these non-deterministic agents to naturally converge on the solution you want.

Now it's important to consider scale here. We're not talking about a factory where metal comes in and cars come out. Not necessarily anyway. We're talking about automating mundane, repetitive processes that would normally need a human in the loop, but where the desired outcomes can be judged by clear heuristics.

The better and braver you get at this, the more ambitious you can be about the scale of those processes, or composing them together. But it's perfectly fine to start with something small and boring.

For example, on the yaks project, I have a series of ADRs, architectural decision records, that describe the architectural structure I want the application to have. Periodically, I run an architectural review where I ask an agent to compare the actual code with those ADRs and notice where they are incoherent. It comes back with a list of recommendations, and we pass that list of recommendations to another agent to implement the first one. We run our automated tests of course, but we’re not valid until all those recommendations have been addressed. So we loop.

I can leave this thing grinding for an hour or more and when I come back the integrity of the code has been improved according to my design heuristics, with me barely having to lift a finger.

So we don't just have to use dark factories to generate even more implementation code. We can use them to perform maintenance tasks that actually improve the quality and integrity of the code we're writing, provided that we know how to provide that harness that will guide the agents towards what good looks like.

You can still write the production code by hand, if you like! Then have a factory grind on mitigating the security vulnerabilities, or merging dependency upgrades, or running and triaging mutation tests.

Of course you absolutely can have a factory that writes production features for you too, but that’s only one way of using this pattern.

This is where the whole thing starts to remind me of learning test-driven development. When you first start to learn TDD, it's hard when you're used to starting from the implementation to have to think about where you want to go before you go there. It's hard to describe in a test what you want because you have to think about what you want without having had the chance to explore the path towards it.

In the same way, designing a dark factory is challenging because you have to create this validation harness, and that forces you to think about what you want, before you have it. This still feels a lot like TDD to me, just on a bigger scale.

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No tokens were spilled in the writing of this post. This is entirely hand-crafted, artisanal writing.

Between the Mountains

Between Tahoma and the Thunderbird's Lair I watched a salmon leap and bait disturbed the glassy top of the water in a slow ebbing tide

She stared across Judging my progress up and down the island's side To the narrow in the reach

On hitting rock bottom while sober

A year ago, I discovered I can drown just as easily on dry land. It wasn't a bottle or a pill that took me under, but the sheer, suffocating weight of FEAR. Watching the people I love marginalized beautifully broken gathered like kindling under a political inferno I couldn't look ɒwɒγ. Though these flames were not new, they seemed to reach a new scale one that couldn't be suppressed, a heat so consuming it left no room for life. With smoke fogging my vision, stifling any sense of self-preservation I succumbed to the heat a surrender, unholy. I let the dark sit on my chest until we were the same shape. No movement. No resistance. Not a bottom, a vortex. Not a final crash, a s l o w deliberate decay.

The truth is eight years of sobriety is futile amid a lifetime of hiding. They tell you to prepare for the feelings that resurge once you stop numbing, but they don't tell you how loud the world can get when you are finally able to listen.

Today I know if I continue lying to myself about my transness, I’m going to die. I know I must honestly face my past if I want to free myself from the weight of SHAME I know If I continue letting fear run my life perpetually chasi n g validation, acceptance I will remain stuck, a stagnant loop of suffering. Still, it is no easy endeavor, unwriting a story wrote when you were three. There is one consistent question haunting the minds of all foster children, the same lingering apprehension: “Am I going to wake up in this same bed? With the same family? Will I be in a car? A hospital? A new home with a new family?” Today I do not question where I’ll wake up and still my body is terrified to get close to anyone the dust of desertion fossilized inside me. It was never my fault that, as a child, my birth parents hurt me. that they couldn’t choose me over drugs or alcohol. It was never my fault I was moved from home to home, a “challenging case” when my nervous system prevented me from being quiet or still or any of the things children whose parents keep them are meant to be. It was never my fault that my baby brother, the only human who could unconditionally love me, died that the next five years I collected losses like shells on the beach, each wave pull in g me further into the belief that everyone I get close to will slide like sand through my fingers.

The truth is at some point, it did become my fault. Maybe I unintentionally pushed away the people I loved making my fears a reality, or I tested boundaries, created impossible expectations Maybe I consumed all I could until they had nothing left to give a pacman propelled by scarcity The most probable story: It was never about me. The truth is, I couldn’t accurately tell you what’s different today. If you stand in the right spot it’s everything zoo m ing in you will see my brain chemistry is different, my habits, the stories I tell myself, the resentments I hold onto, the media I take in, the people I stopped expecting to provide things they never had. Any of these answers wouldn’t be wrong. But it would be foolish to think it was anything I did alone. I am here because other people showed up because somehow someone at exactly the right time did something that caused someone else to do something who was exactly in the right place and none of it happened within my control or in the way that I was certain it was supposed be.

I hate the pain I see around me, that people I love, even those I have never met are suffering because of who the world is telling them they are. And I cannot change it. Nor do I know that the changes I would make are the right ones. The truth is I don’t know anything except I am still here. And while my brain is an expert at convincing me with absolute certainty that death is my only option. Those thoughts are quieter than ever before. I want to live more than I can ever remember. Even seven year old me, begging my brother to pu s h me out of the tree has tightened their grip. I wish I could tell others a million earlier versions of myself across time what exactly has changed, what exactly is working I can never know. A clue though: It has something to do with me spending a lot less time alone in my head. The only thing I’m sure of (besides the certainty that the way society talks to children is wrong) is that the only way I’ll ever be safe is by staying connected to others helping them to be safe because there is noseparation. There is no story that has ever been mine. Every plot I write has been written a thousand times and could never exist without an entire library before me.

If you are sure today that there is no other options left, that dying is the only way please CALL ME: (734.474.9906)((maybe text me first as one of the reasons I was sure I had to die was the literal price of staying alive— so I’m 100% more likely to answer if I know you're not a debt collector.)) And if you love someone who is suicidal, know it’s never one thing that drives people to end their lives, and it definitely has nothing to do with you. Though it may have been challenging to persuade me I had other options, in my experience, there were several things that kept me alive l o n g e r. 1. Someone really listening (not fixing or convincing) but small actions that helped me feel seen, heard, and valued. 2. Eating, sleeping, or moving (any change of environment, especially outside, especially with others). 3. Words: “I know it feels… and it won’t feel like this forever.” “I’m here.” “You’re not alone.” “Remember that time…” “Let's go for a walk” “Can you just wait until tomorrow?” “I’d rather have you hate me and be alive then...”

And if nothing you say or do seems to help or you feel overwhelmed. Get help. Get them to a hospital, even if it requires force. The people I hated a year ago today I am incredibly grateful for because circumstances are never permanent and emotions move and I can give you my word It wont feel like this forever

~N~

In the wake of my buying some South African jazz a couple of weeks ago, YouTube, in amongst the usual stream of audiovisual slurry, proffered up a few more pieces of fine music in a similar vein. This prompted me to place a couple of orders for old vinyl via Discogs. One of those records arrived on Friday: Cape Town Fringe by Dollar Brand (aka Abdullah Ibrahim), a 1977 American reissue of a record first released a few years earlier in the pianist’s native South Africa under the title Mannenberg ~ ‘Is Where It’s Happening’.

It’s a short album with a single track on each side and a total running time of less than 27 minutes. The title track, occupying Side A, is the main attraction. It begins with a beguilingly bright-sounding piano, sooned joined by lilting saxophone melodies over a rolling rhythm. According to Wikipedia, the piano's metallic timbre was due to its having been ‘prepared’ with thumbtacks in its hammers. Side B contains ‘The Pilgrim’, which is also good, just less memorable.

‘Mannenberg’ became a surprise hit in South Africa, and later (in large part due to the efforts of the saxophonists on the record – Basil Coetzee and Robbie Jansen), an anti-apartheid anthem.

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In a slightly regrettable instance of on-line shopping without due care and attention, I ordered what I imagined to be a box of vintage Swiss-made ‘Elco’-brand writing paper & envelopes from an ebay seller. Had I properly read the listing I would have realised that there were only envelopes in the box; nothing else. I am very far from being short of envelopes. Moreover, I failed to appreciate until they arrived (Fig. 20) exactly how tiny these envelopes were: a mere 10½ x 7 cm, even smaller than the relatively seldom-used C7 format, smaller indeed than one could reasonably expect to survive a trip through what's left of the postal system. The ebay listing had been up-front about these diminutive dimensions & hence I've no-one to blame but myself.

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When I first started reading literary fiction in the late '80s, Julian Barnes was already a well-regarded author, much praised in the broadsheet press. I persuaded myself, however, on no stronger evidence than the reviews I skimmed through of his novels (and the blurbs on the backs of them) that his work wouldn't be for me. Decades passed and my outlook and tastes changed, but it never occurred to me to re-examine my prejudice about Barnes until I saw a TV interview with him a couple of months ago.

The interview had a promotional dimension, tying in with the recent publication of his fifteenth (and ostensibly last) novel Departure(s), but it was a leisurely and wide-ranging enough discussion that conjured up an intriguing portrait of the author. His spoken words struck me as a good advertisement for his written ones. When in Thornbury on Saturday morning I spotted a second-hand paperback copy of his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters at the Oxfam shop & it came home with me. By Sunday evening I'd finished it.

Although I'd finished the book quickly, it hadn't been an unalloyed pleasure. After the first two underwhelming chapters I'd begun to believe my youthful suspicion of Barnes had been well-founded. Things took a turn for the better after that, however, and I found myself actively enjoying chapters 5, 6 & 7, though there was further fluctuation later on. My copy had been marked up in pencil by a previous owner. Among their additions were what I took to be approval ratings for each of the book's chapters (Fig. 21). Their assessment wasn't so far different to mine, though if anything my feelings were perhaps less positive overall. To my mind, Barnes' efforts at the jocular & colloquial often fell a bit flat, whereas in his more formal and essayistic modes I felt on safer ground. It wasn't a bad enough reading experience to put me off his work altother, but if I proceed further, it will be cautiously.

Ankara’nın Beypazarı kazasında 1889 yılında geçen kısa bir ceza davasına bakıp eşi Fatmayı darb eden Mustafa’nın aldığı cezayı görelim. (Karar No 28, Tarih: 29 Mayıs 305. Defter Bilgisi: Beypazarı, Eski No: 12, Mikrofilm No: 7328).

İki taraf da duruşmaya gelmiş.

Muavin vekili (sanıyorum günümüzdeki karşılığını savcı yardımcısı olarak düşünebiliriz) Tevfik efendi iddianamesini mahkemeye vermiş ve mevcut evraklar zabıt katibi Mustafa efendiye okutturulmuş. Özetle, Mustafa, eşi Fatma’yı darb ettiğini ikrar (kabul) etmiş ve iddia isbat olunmuş. Kanun-u Ceza’nın 179. maddesine göre de muhakemesine karar verilmiş.

Belgenin içeriği taraflara sözlü olarak aktarılmış ve olayın nasıl gerçekleştiği şikayetçi Fatma’ya sorulmuş. Fatma da Mustafa’nın kendisini maşa ile darb ettiğini söylemiş. Mustafa ise maşa ile değil destiyle darb ettiğini itiraf etmiş.

Muavin vekili bu ikrar üzerine Kanun-u Ceza’nın 179. maddesine göre cezalandırılma talep etmiş. Kanunun 179. maddesine bakıyoruz:

Tarafların başka diyeceklerinin olmadığının anlaşılmasıyla duruşma son bulmuş.

Mahkeme, özetle, darb eyleminin Mustafa’nın ikrarıyla müsbet bulunduğunu, eylemin kanunun 179. maddesine, yani hafif yaralamaya, temas ettiğini söylüyor ve kararda bu hükmü alıntılıyor.

Sonuç olarak mahkeme bu maddeye dayanarak Mustafa’nın iki hafta hapsine ve mahkeme masrafları olan 85 kuruşun kendisinden tahsiline istinaf yolu açık olmak üzere karar veriyor.

Karar tarihi olarak 29 Mayıs [1]305 okuyoruz, bu da TTK’nın çevirme programına göre 10 Haziran 1889 oluyor. Bugünkü anlamıyla “iddianame” olarak isimlendirebileceğimiz mahkemeye sunulan belge ise 21 Mayıs [1]305 tarihli yani 2 Haziran 1889. Neredeyse 1 hafta içinde ve tek duruşmada karar verilmiş.

Böylece Osmanlı’da aile içi şiddetin o zamanki örneğinin, 1889 yılında bir taşra ilk derece mahkemesine nasıl yansıdığını ve mahkeme tarafından nasıl cezalandırıldığını görmüş olduk.

Da eine Freundin vom Freiwilligendienst gerade in Vinnytsia ist, mache ich eine kurze Pause von Berschad um sie zu sehen. Das Wiedersehen ist schön, und hat sich definitiv gelohnt. Seit der russischen Invasion wohnt sie bei ihrem Freund in Frankreich, gerade macht sie 3 Wochen Urlaub bei ihrer Familie, die nicht weit weg von Vinnytsia wohnt. Dort hat sie an ihrem zweiten Tag eine Explosion am Himmel gehört, eine abgefangene Drohne. In der Region wurde ein Haus beschädigt, eines Zerstört, aber es gab keine Verletzten. Dass das auch schon hier regelmäßig passiert überrascht wenig, in Anbetracht, wie sich die Angriffe intensiviert haben im letzten Jahr. Und trotzdem lässt es mich nicht kalt.

Sonst habe ich das gute Wetter genossen und bin durch die Stadt spaziert. Es fühlt sich noch nach zuhause an. Nach den vielen Eindrücken und dem vielen Programm in den letzten Tagen tat das richtig gut. Immer noch habe ich ein großes Bedürfnis nach Schlaf und Erholung, dem ich auch nachkomme. Ich habe mir auf dem Markt eine Schale Erdbeeren aus der Region Odessa gekauft, und am Vyshenka See gelesen und gechillt. Am Abend war ein lautes Dröhnen vom Himmel zu hören, aber kein Luftalarm. Die anderen schauen auch zum Himmel, reden darüber, dass kein Alarm ist. Dann sehen wir einen Jet vorbeifliegen, ein ukrainischer. In diesem Moment freut es mich richtig ihn zu sehen, und dass er da ist. Gleichzeitig fühlt sich das komisch an, wenn ich doch vor der russischen Invasion so kritisch gegenüber den Waffenexporten aus Deutschland war. Was sich grundsätzlich nicht geändert hat, nur dass für die Ukraine im Verteidigungsfall einfach alle Ausnahmen gelten.

Am nächsten Tag treffe ich noch eine andere Freundin, Mary, nur kurz weil ich Gepäck bei ihr zwischenlagern möchte. Da ihre Nanny ausfällt, biete ich an ihre Tochter zur Tanzstunde zu begleiten. Mary ist Englischlehrerin, und ihre Kinder sprechen fließend englisch, das macht die Sache einfacher ;) Auf dem Weg frage ich sie, was für Fächer sie heute hatte. Nur eine Stunde ukrainisch, am Rest des Morgens war Luftalarm, in der Schule gehen die Lehrkräfte mit den Kindern streng in den Luftschutzraum. Heute morgen ist auch durchgehend Luftalarm, noch ein Schultag an dem sie nicht viel lernen wird. Der Angriff ist so heftig, viele Drohnen fliegen in diese Richtung, dass Mary sich nach mir erkundet, und detailliertere Infos schickt, ich hänge unten einen Screenshot an. Das ist schon viel gerade. Auch um 15 Uhr hält der Alarm noch an. Auf dem Weg nach Berschad bin ich trotzdem, lieber jetzt als wenn es dunkel wird. Aber gut fühlt es sich nicht an. Auch meine Gastmutter erkundigt sich nach mir. In Berschad angekommen, erzählt mein Gastvater mir, dass sie 8,9 Shaheds am Himmel gesehen haben.

Dass am Wochenende eigentlich Waffenruhe war, haben hier schon alle irgendwie auf dem Schirm. Aber groß darüber geredet wird nicht, Russland und Putin traut eh niemand mehr, auch einer solchen Ankündigung nicht. Auf das Leben hier hatte das einfach keine Auswirkung.

Hier wurde die Generation von Kindern, deren Schulzeit durch Corona stark eingeschränkt war, und online stattfand, von einer Generation Kindern abgelöst, die während dem Krieg zur Schule geht. Ständig von Luftalarm unterbrochen, große Feiern sind seit Beginn der Invasion nicht mehr erlaubt, und auch sonst passt der Unterricht sich an die aktuelle Situation an.

Diese Tage konnte ich viel hier im Blog schreiben, was aber auch ein bisschen zu Durcheinander in der Reihenfolge geführt hat. Naja. Ist ja weniger wichtig, wann Sachen passieren, es geht ja darum was passiert. Ich freue mich, wenn du bis hier gelesen hast, was ich berichte. Was interessiert dich noch? Welche Fragen hast du an meine Gastfamilie, oder die Leute vor Ort? Auch sonst freue ich mich über Rückmeldungen und Feedback.

Nachdem ich mehrmals auf meinen Blog als erste Reaktion “Boah ist das viel Text” bekommen habe – ja, ich schreibe Volltext. In kurzen Social Media Beiträgen lässt es sich schlicht nicht ganzheitlich ausdrücken, was ich vermitteln möchte. Wer also ernsthaft Interesse hat, muss ganz altmodisch, entschleunigt, diesen Blog lesen. Keine Sucht-Erzeugenden Algorithmen und Interesse weckende bewegte bunte Bilder werden dir das abnehmen ;)

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Since a friend from volunteer service is currently in Vinnytsia, I'm taking a short break from Berschad to see her. The reunion is lovely and was definitely worth it. Since the Russian invasion, this friend has been living with her boyfriend in France — right now she's on a three-week holiday with her family, who live not far from Vinnytsia. There, on her second day, she heard an explosion in the sky: an intercepted drone. A house was damaged in the area, one was destroyed, but there were no injuries. That this already happens regularly here is hardly surprising, given how much the attacks have intensified over the past year. And still, it doesn't leave me unmoved.

Other than that, I've been enjoying the nice weather and walking through the city. It still feels like home. After so many impressions and a packed schedule over the last few days, that was really good. I still have a great need for sleep and rest, which I'm allowing myself. I bought a punnet of strawberries from Odessa region at the market and spent time reading and chilling by Lake Vyshenka. In the evening, a loud rumbling could be heard from the sky, but no air raid alarm. Others also look up at the sky, talking about the fact that there's no alarm. Then we see a jet fly past — a Ukrainian one. In that moment I'm genuinely glad to see it, and glad it's there. At the same time, it feels strange, given how critical I was of arms exports from Germany before the Russian invasion. That hasn't fundamentally changed — it's just that in the case of Ukraine defending itself, all exceptions simply apply.

The next day I meet another friend, Mary, only briefly because I want to leave some luggage with her. Since her nanny has cancelled, I offer to take her daughter to dance class. Mary is an English teacher, and her children speak fluent English, which makes things easier ;) On the way I ask her daughter what subjects she had today. Just one hour of Ukrainian — for the rest of the morning there was an air raid alarm. At school, teachers strictly take the children to the shelter. This morning there's also a continuous air raid alarm, yet another school day where she won't learn much. The attack is so intense, with many drones heading in this direction, that Mary checks in on me and sends more detailed information — I've attached a screenshot below. It's a lot right now. At 3pm the alarm is still ongoing. However I decided to go back to Bershad better now, than when it gets dark. But it does not feel good. My host mum as well checks on me. When I arrived in Bershad, my host dad tells me, they saw 8, 9 Shaheds in the sky.

That there was supposedly a ceasefire over the weekend hasn't gone unnoticed here. But it's not talked about much — nobody trusts Russia and Putin anymore, not even an announcement like that. On daily life here, it simply had no impact.

Here, the generation of children whose school years were severely disrupted by Covid and took place online has been followed by a generation of children going to school during the war. Constantly interrupted by air raid alarms, large celebrations have not been allowed since the start of the invasion, and teaching in general is adapting to the current situation.

These days I've been able to write a lot here on the blog, which has also led to a bit of disorder in the sequence of posts. However, it's less important when things happen — what matters is what happens. I'm glad if you've read this far and followed what I'm sharing. What else interests you? What questions do you have for my host family, or the people here? I'm also happy to receive any other responses and feedback.

After getting “wow, that's a lot of text” as a first reaction to my blog more than once — yes, I write in full prose. Short social media posts simply can't express holistically what I want to convey. So anyone who's genuinely interested has to read this blog the old-fashioned way, at a slower pace. No addiction-inducing algorithms and attention-grabbing moving colourful images will do that for you ;)

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My friend Alla and her Mother

Vinnytsia bei schönstem Wetter:

Beim Vyshenka Lake gibt es jetzt einen Hochseilgarten <3

Auch Straßenhunde und -Katzen gehören hier zum Stadtbild, nicht immer in so einem schlechten Zustand.

liebe Grüße aus meinem Lieblingscafé in Vinnytsia, hier habe ich währen dem Freiwilligendienst viel Zeit für ukrainisch/deutsch Tandem Stunden mit Freundinnen verbracht.

Während Luftalarm sind Einkaufshäuser geschlossen, so auch dieses Café, danach die Screenshots vom anhaltenden Angriff heute.

The (public) pianist is not like a lone barista, who sits at a shop counter, waiting for customers to approach him for a dose of caffeine (which is a legal psychoactive drug, by the way).

People gather up the courage – or recklessness – to ask the pianist to play their favorite songs. Is the pianist up to the task of playing a song that he has, quite possibly, never heard of, until this encounter with a stranger who is now gazing at the pianist expectantly?

Now, then, gird your loins, (as the writers of 2000-year-old texts like to say), and let us investigate the scary ocean of Song Requests.

1. Polski drogi (translated as: Polish Roads)
2. “She's a lady”, a song by Tom Jones
3. Theme from The Godfather (a film)
4. Aerith's Theme, from Final Fantasy VII (a video game)
5. “Tadhana”, a song by UDD (a Filipino band)
6. “Exodus”, by Maksim
7. Theme from The Bund (上海灘), as popularised by Frances Yip. A television series goes by the same name: The Bund (上海灘).
8. “Song of healing”, from Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (a video game).
9. Golden Hour, a song by JVKE.
10. Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You, a pop song.

#lists

紙コップにコーヒーを入れると、どこかベビースターのような匂いがする。 そんな感覚をぼんやりと覚えた。 それは嗅覚というより、思い出を鼻で吸い込んでいるような感じに近い。

きっと自分にしかない感覚なのだろう。 けれど今この瞬間に限っては、自分だけの感覚であることのほうが、むしろ誰かに伝わる可能性が高いのではないか、という妙な確信がある。

正確には、分からないということが分かるところで折り合いをつける、という感覚なのかもしれない。 それすらも、いずれ人類は乗り越えて、人と人との境界はさらに曖昧になっていくのだろう。 そんなイメージを先に思い描きながら、少しだけ楽しみに思い、コーヒーの続きを飲む。

今朝のことを思い出す。 最近は、自分のようにわがままな大人が増えている気がする。 それは歩き方やルートに表れている。

歩く軌道が鏡のように重なり、自然とぶつかりそうになる。 そのとき、相手も、そしておそらく自分も、どこか王様のような顔つきをしている。 同じ国に王様が二人いるような、そんな奇妙な感覚だ。

だから最近は、みんな少し歩き方がおかしい。 できれば、もう少し注意深く歩いてほしいと思う。

そんなことを考えているうちに昼になり、弁当を食べる。 結局、どのくらいの温度で弁当は傷んで食べられなくなるのか、いまだによく分からない。 入れている保冷剤がどれほど効いているのかも不明だ。

そもそも夏は弁当を運べないという現象は何なのか。 もしそれが共通認識なのだとしたら、夏は外食せざるを得ないのだから、国が補償してくれてもいいのではないか。 いや、そんな細かいことに国が関わる必要はない。 むしろ弱くなってしまう。

そんなことを考えながら、塩豚を食べる。 肉を噛むとき、自分の顔がどれだけ凶暴になっているのか気になる。

確かに、歯で肉を噛みしめる瞬間、意識は完全に噛むことに集中している。 そのときの顔がどれほど歪んでいるのか、確認する術はない。

ああ、今日も子どもの頃の夢は叶えていないな、と思う。 結局、夢を叶えていない大人はどこか不幸で、その不幸を少しでも整えるから、 小綺麗で質のいい服がどこかそれに現れていて、どこか儚く美しいのある。