On the acceptance of GenAI

Joep Schuurkes — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:00:00 GMT

By using GenAI:

I accept the models were trained on stolen data.

I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers.

I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models.

I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company.

I accept these companies don't have a viable business model.

I accept that I am granting more power to big tech and their vision for the world.

I accept that I am granting more power to the United States.

I accept that all this effort could have been spent elsewhere.

If any of these facts are new to you, you haven't been doing your due diligence.

I have the deepest respect and sympathy for people who are forced by circumstances to accept these things.

I acknowledge that people's ethical behavior is neither deterministic, nor consistent.

But yeah, GenAI radicalized me.

Thinking about quality: choosing your value system

Joep Schuurkes — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 19:09:08 GMT

On 30 January 2021 I participated in the Quality Acceleration Peer Conference organized by Huib Schoots and Joost Voskuil. Participants were Alan Page, Areti Panou, Ash Winter, Bart Knaack, Conor Fitzgerald, Rouke de Jong, Gwen Diagram, George Dinwiddie, Janet Gregory, Joost Voskuil, Joost van Wollingen, Martijn Meijering, Rob Meaney, Vincent Wijnen - with Huib Schoots facilitating the peer conference. The main topics mentioned in the invite were: "How can you sell quality?", "How can you convince people that quality can accelerate software delivery?", and "What limitations or barriers do you hit?"

Reflecting during and after our discussions on these topics, I realized there are some interesting things going on about how we talk about quality and how to sell it. Enough interesting things to fill more than one blog post, so this will be a four-part series. And I might expand on some ideas in the series after that.

Quality has two different meanings

On the one hand, we use quality when we talk about things that are obviously better. A $3500 coffee grinder is obviously better than a £50 one. An application that does not crash on you is obviously better than one that does. Almost all other ways to input your phone number are better than these.

Joep Schuurkes (Posts about value systems)

On the acceptance of GenAI

Thinking about quality: choosing your value system

Quality has two different meanings