brennen @brennen@mastodon.social

psssssssst unmitigated scale is toxic pass it on

percentage of persistent system configuration state derived from cat walking on keyboard as a slowly increasing determinant of end user experience

"What's the big deal about preventive care?", asks this morning's marketroid spam from my insurance provider.

i dunno - you fuckers and your ilk have made it almost impossible to obtain? is that the deal? it kind of _seems_ like that's the deal.

listening to it now is kind of like being inside my head back then, except i can see past it all to the several people i've been since then, for better and worse.

anyway, it's still a great record.

i'm listening to _yankee hotel foxtrot_ for the first time in a while.

when i bought this album, it was the soundtrack to being depressed as fuck in my early 20s, jobless and still sponging off my parents, crushing desperately on someone i barely knew (and should have known better than) from another state, and just totally lost for any idea of what to do next. i didn't have a lot of reasons for how bad i felt, besides my fucked up brain chemistry, but i didn't know that then.

"oh, these peppers were really pretty mild", i think to myself as i'm tossing various frozen vegetables into the casserole pan an hour ago.

wellllll.

"the man ain't got no culture"

update: actually it was raccoons, and they ate my corn.

(well, they didn't so much eat it as they sort of tore the ears off the stalks and partially unwrapped them and nibbled a bit and decided it wasn't really up to their usual standards.)

"Twitter asked that members of its safety team not be identified, for fear of them becoming targeted by internet trolls."

SEEMS KIND OF TELLING, DOESN'T IT

hey everybody i just went to the future and they let me know that everybody forgot about blockchain like a year from now (well actually i had to look it up, because nobody knew what the fuck i was talking about except for one history-prof looking type who was like "oh yeah, like the thing with the tulips in the 1600s, right?") so good news you can all just get ahead of the curve and stop talking about it forever _right now_ if you want. seems like a good move to me.

something in the back yard: [rustling noises]

my brain: bears are eating your corn, do something

now of course, the joke is on me, because i still don't know the first thing about what he does with his time and meanwhile all the stuff my end of the abstraction scale spent the last decade building is just apocalyptically shitty and destructive.

i got in a fight one time with this EE friend of mine when he was like "if you don't know how the hardware works all the way up from the most basic units of organization in the bare metal you're a shitty programmer" and i sort of won by being like ok, sit down and write me a website and let's see how that goes 'cause actually it turns out that there are vast abstraction differentials here and they exist for reasons.

i know nothing is ever this simple.

instance blocking blockchain cultists actually seems like exactly how this should work, more or less. they can go over there and i can remain blissfully ignorant and none of us have to fight about anything.

on a not unrelated note, it turns out that i've been a programmer for like a dozen years but i don't actually know anything about how computers work so that's also good.