Tinkering can be therapeutic, and there is nothing wrong with playing on a piece of old kit for a few hours while reminiscing about that first computer or handheld received as a birthday present. Retrocomputing can be an interesting hobby. It does not mean everything was better in bygone days.

I love this. One of the things vilmibm shared about ~town is that it's not retrocomputing. It's about the future and the present, not just reliving the past.

It can be easy to think that it's about the past, to the degree some of us fetishize the "old" ways of doing things. But often those old ways are ... current ways, that fewer people use. Using a CLI. Editing HTML instead of Markdown or using a GUI. Those things aren't "old" in the way that formatting a floppy disk is old.

I couldn’t help but marinate on the entanglement between fears about screens, repression of knowledge, disgust towards children, and conflicted visions of happiness. I also kept thinking about how different the theory of change is in this book compared with how these conversations go in the present. In short, Montag (and the various foils he works with) aren’t really focused on destroying the screens – they are wholly focused on embracing, saving, and sharing knowledge from books. Here, I’m reminded of an era in which education was seen as a path forward not simply a site to be controlled.

However, there are plenty of places where you are socialized into a profession through menial labor. Consider the legal profession. The work that young lawyers do is junk labor. It is dreadfully boring and doesn’t require a law degree. Moreover, a lot of it is automate-able in ways that would reduce the need for young lawyers. But what does it do to the legal field to not have that training? What do new training pipelines look like? We may be fine with deskilling junior lawyers now, but how do we generate future legal professionals who do the work that machines can’t do?

I got to live through "servers are rare and multi-purposed" (pets) to "servers are common and single-purpose" to "servers are easily replaceable and probably virtual" (cattle) -- and it forced me into learning debugging and recovery skills that aren't commonly needed any more. But they're not never needed. It's just that when you need those outdated Unix skills the people who have them are the 40+ year olds or people who came up through under-resourced companies (or countries, even).

I think AI will rapidly increase this cycle but it's interesting to also think about how it encourages the atrophy of existing skills as we outsource the rote and easy parts of our jobs.

But all these platforms and attendant dipshits will be replaced, eventually, and what happens next isn't guaranteed. The British East India company was a commercial atrocity factory at near-global scale; what came after it was direct colonial rule. The assumption that "Twitter but decentralized" or "Facebook but open-source and federated" will necessarily be good—rather than differently bad—is a weak one.

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And most of all: The social internet should be a forest—not The Dark Forest, but something much more like a real one: Interconnected from the densely mycelial underground to light-filtering overstory but also offering infinite niches and multi-scale zones of sheltered exchange and play. Deeply human in the way that real forests are the result of human and other-than-human collaboration running back into unrecorded time. Balanced, neither extracting too much from its component organisms nor pretending that a pantomime of a return to a pristine and ungoverned state will solve any problems at all. (Predation is inevitable in any system, but a working ecosystem starves out the ones who overfeed and provides cover for growth and for the long, continuous experiment of evolutionary change.)

While I could terraform my professional and adult life to work with my brain quirks and preferences, terraforming my wife and children wasn’t an option. Children are quite inflexible in their needs, and it was difficult for me to adapt. I’m generally meh at doing mundane and basic things but then will over-compensate by knocking a handful of really difficult (and interesting) things out of the park. You can’t do that with kids. All their needs are primal yet basic, and it doesn’t matter how well you can change a diaper - there’s no way to do it so well that your infant says, “Wow, that was great.”

This was a touching post to read and the kind that contributes back to the web. But it was a little disquieting to read this from an ADHD sufferer and compare it to what I wrote about my own habits a few years ago.

I don't have ADHD but I often feel lazy. I've made a good career in computing and I obviously do get things done, or else nobody would employ me, but my career has been one long square wave -- where I oscillate between doing almost nothing and bouts of intense productivity. Good news: you can be successful doing this! Bad news: it's really fucking taxing on your well-being.

It's not rare to spend four days of a work week getting almost nothing done, finishing several 8 hour days exhausted and frustrated, blaming this lack of progress on interruptions or succumbing to shallow work. Then, when I'm lucky, I nail things in the last day and it averages out to an okay week and I can start the cycle again. Sometimes that four days is more like 8 days, and that one "good day" is one sleepless night. It's not always like this, but ... it's not uncommon, either.

Oh, and as an external consultant, I'm not allowed to know some of the trade secrets in the documents. The internal side of the team needs to handle the sensitive process information, and be careful about how that information crosses boundaries when talking to the external consultants. Unfortunately, the internal team doesn't know what the secrets are, while I do. I even invented a few of them, and have my name on some related patents. Nonetheless, I need to smuggle these trade secrets back into the company, so that the internal side can handle them. They just have to make sure they don't accidentally repeat them back to me.

Bluesky may follow the same path that destroyed Twitter, and we may have this very same conversation fifteen years from now, but that's a pretty good run. You adopt a pet accepting that someday it will die. Don't focus on how it ends. Make the most of the time you have.

This is a good post about Twitter and what comes next but I also wanted to pull out this quote which encapsulates how I've been thinking (or trying to think) lately. Literally nothing is forever and a lot of unhappiness can come from trying to create the perfect thing that will never fail but that's just not how things work.

Even if something were to last your whole life, that's so far from forever that it's not funny. From hobbies to homes to relationships not that many things last your whole life -- you can be sad about that, or you can recognise it as true and enjoy things while they are enjoyable and reminisce about them when they are gone.

The literary critic Edward Said expanded on the notion in his posthumous book On Late Style, discussing how some artists, when facing impending mortality, reject traditional artistic closure and instead embrace fragmentation and unresolved tension.

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And with that, they rest their case. I suppose that’s where some people do end up: completely, even plainly, at ease with their work. To know it’s possible, someday, perhaps, is a balm.

I enjoyed this essay about Go, comparing its verbose style to neoclassicism and its authors desires as a kind of closure of their careers in programming.

it's a good anti-perfectionist manifesto, as avoiding things you can't do well enough to present for credit is stultifying. but moderation is key.

the secret to SOFA may be to STFU about it, as if you're the person who talks about things they've maybe done once or are going to do but never finished, you're kind of dumb, but if you just do stuff, you end up having some surprising skills.

the effect of not talking about it also creates an attribution bias in your favour, where after pulling a few surprise rabbits out of hats, you become the magic hat guy. if you talk about all the things you have kind of done, you're just opinionated. I've been both, and after more than a decade of being conscious of mostly STFU'ing, I can say that some humility can be a superpower.

As someone who recently made a fan-fare about starting a thing, then left it four months in, there's a lot to be said for not announcing your intentions until you know it's going to pan out (if then!)

Customization is the equivalent of a coat of paint or rearranging the furniture; it’s certainly not poking holes in walls and running new wiring.

Low Road tools aren’t just customizable. They are also extensible. To borrow from Dan Hill, their “seams” are purposefully exposed.

Extensibility implies the ability to change a software’s capabilities in amount, but not necessarily in kind. An extensible software architecture typically provides an API surface upon which extensions may be built. Such API surface carefully limits the scope of what can and cannot be done.