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we would all like to get back into being better friends with computers. learning programming seems like a necessity if we're to survive the next several years because I have a feeling the landscape of personal computing is about to shatter.

we've been trying to help in the shattering process, I admit. Mono the Unicorn has been kicking away at the credibility of the "large language model", which seems like a cosmic joke of a technology, the world's most expensive Burroughs Machine. but people really do believe in it, and that's kind of terrifying actually. I'm quite prepared to believe that a lot of computer jockeys who feel like the Machine God is about to burst forth from their gibberish generator are shocked and amazed for the simple reason that they're seeing scraps of text they would never otherwise read. they're such limited people with limited intellects and a practically subliterate degree of language use because they're speaking a kind of street poetry or patois so liberally festooned with memes that you practically don't NEED to talk. it's actually sort of cool, but it's also rather obvious these people don't know how their machines work. so many layers of abstraction have been heaped atop the personal computer that these techie people plainly regard "the computer" more like a force of nature than a physical object. memory? electricity? data? surely these things merely flow like water or nitrogen.

in a way, that's delightful! fiction has met fact, in a way. where do you find such highly abstracted and stylized depictions of how computers work? in movies and games and comic books and fiction! this is how people talk about computers in stuff like Tron or Hellblazer, as if data and memory were substances, stuff. they certainly can be (in broad approximation) treated that way. but the real world is a place of infinite subtleties and these have all escaped the notice of the high-tech crowd. if they're bad at programming it's because at some level they don't even really know what a computer program is any more.

that's charming. they might even be as bad with computers as I am, despite all their bluster.

they're certainly not good with math. it's quite obvious in a hundred little ways that these programmer dudes have a mystical, innumerate sort of approach to numbers. they're numerologists though not honest ones. large numbers quite escape their grasp, but they're dazzled and impressed by them; small numbers tend to fall completely out of their sight. they love percentages so they have a habit of pretending that any fractions smaller than 0.05 or even 0.1 must not mean anything. Pfft, 5%, that's NOTHING!

anyway it would be pleasant to get that old feeling of facility back. I may have come to feel like my faith in the personal computer (it's sad to think that I did in fact HAVE one but I did) was betrayed, and thus conceive the sort of festering vengeful sense of offended justice that Emiya Kiritsugu once held for heroism. It's curious that our paths should have crossed as they did, and that we should have had so much in common, including a child's faith in a just Universe.

Apple Computer, most of all, has been like some Evil Empire in my mind, which is a bit silly I grant you, and yet...I can't let go of the feeling that they did in fact poison their tempting apple. they held out the promise of something that eventually they grew tired of trying to offer, so they settled for being COOL. but it's more than that.

think of what they did to George Orwell's 1984...they pretended it had a happy ending.

~Chara of Pnictogen
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and that's give ourselves time to be awkward with unfamiliar software. it seems like it's been forever since I felt like I could just...take in the computing experience, instead of being wrapped up in this eternal war with the enveloping Machine. there was a time when these things seemed friendly.

that spirit never disappeared exactly, but it's fled from the United States and "the West", which has gotten poisoned with the values of people who think of personal electronics and computer software as something to invest in and brag about, and who don't quite care whether it's any good or not. I've been haunted by all that and still seek to free myself from the noxious influences of decades past, influences which serve to obscure the true value of the marvels that I had seen in childhood.

Computers once did seem *extremely* magical. And then they were sin itself for a while, and I fled the Machine and sought safety in other pursuits, other disciplines. Working at Goodwill was (for a time) preferable to the Machine. I got to see the Sun and the sky and birds and other things, just enough to keep me going, until I got pulled in. I got suckered.

I don't know what I'm doing with my capitals. All I know is...I think something amazing has happened, and I can finally recover what I'd lost. The heartbreaking thing is realizing that all those Twitter people and Elon Musk himself are chasing the very same thing, the very same spark, that I once thought I saw in the possibility of personal computing. They don't know what they're doing, and I don't know what I'm doing either! But I feel like maybe it's within reach at last. I can stop fighting with these machines, who are themselves rarely to blame for the troubles they cause. (The Machine is a different matter.)

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