There's a nationwide boycott of big supermarket chains this week in Sweden and it's been great fun. Probably the only downside has been all the tedious opinion pieces criticising it.

Seen a lot of people talking trash about it over the course of the week actually. The critique mostly focuses on the possibility that the boycott might not magically solve the problem in one fell swoop. And I think it's really normal for the prospect of a supermarket boycott to make absolutely anyone uncomfortable. It's not fun to confront how much structural power over society has been centralised in this handful of organisations. And taking part isn't exactly easy either. Some places even have so little competition that participating in the boycott means not buying groceries at all for a week.

So I think in a lot of cases people just don't want these uncomfortable thoughts in their heads. Then it's easier if you tell yourself that actually the boycott is stupid. Immediately you're back in the comfort zone of having permission from yourself to do absolutely nothing about the problem.

In practice the fact that it's a little bit hard is part of the fun. I've been all over Malmö this week visiting shops I'd have otherwise spent a lifetime walking past and never seen inside. Two places we got food from were even interviewed by Dagens Nyheter about the boycott – Bagdad Kött and Möllevångstorget – and they both said they've noticed an uptick in business this week.

The big chains usually work with two or three wholesalers. In the oriental food industry we have hundreds of wholesalers. So we can get better prices by making them compete with each other.

The fact that neither of the places DN interviewed were run by white Swedes is no coincidence either. That’s a demographic group I haven’t seen behind the counter of any of the new places I’ve been this week. Bit embarrassing for Sweden's ruling coalition of neoliberals and white supremacists that their fav scapegoat ethnic group has been doing free market economics better than them all this time.

Been really cool going in so many new places too. You really missed out if you sat on the sidelines of this thing. Worth having a think about getting involved next time. The fact that it's not easy really is half the fun.

Stopped using Copilot outside of work a few weeks ago. Coding's begun to feel fun again since making that change. I hadn’t even noticed the disappearance of that joy until it started coming back either.

The honeymoon period with Copilot was so cool. It was exciting to be able to blow through any fiddly little problem without needing to put in any effort. I guess the novelty wore off.

It left behind a severe dependence on this new tool too. You get proper lazy from relying on AI. The speed boost’s the selling point, and replacing your thought process and research with AI suggestions accounts for most of that. The lack of use is death for those skills.

Worse still, I noticed I was often less than proud of the work I was producing with this thing. LLMs write HTML and CSS in particular with all the care and precision of a skywriter pilot trying to hold in a poo. Bloody depressing to have worked so hard to get particularly good at those and then see this trendy new tool slowly steal that talent like the aliens in Space Jam and replace it with mediocrity-as-a-service.

So then I was randomly pissing around with MacVim the other day and didn't have Copilot configured. And it was like "Wait, what's going on? What's this funny feeling?". Turned out to be happiness. The eureka moment came when I installed the Vim Copilot plugin and the joy went away again.

From there the decision to cut this tool out of the creative process was obvious. It's dead similar to my relationship with creative mode in MineCraft actually. I find instant access to every item and block really uninspiring and massively prefer the chaos and struggle of survival mode. The struggle's where all the meaning is.

In creative mode you pick the blocks you need from the same huge menu as everyone else. Optimising how fast you can work with that UI becomes part of being "good" at the game. In survival mode you generally rummage through some kind of warehouse or bunker full of storage chests that you've built. Every item in those chests has a story behind it, so even the act of getting something out of storage replenishes the world-building magic of the game. It's slower but without it the world feels sterile.

I got into this whole career by accident. I rediscovered coding sometime around 2004, found it really fun, and next thing I knew I was doing it all the bloody time. The end of that fun was happening just as accidentally as its beginning, and I'm glad I identified it early enough to address it. Copilot suggestions will probably stay enabled during work hours for the time being while I rebuild my independent problem-solving abilities. But it's been switched off for weeks now in everything else I do and it feels amazing.