Notices by brennen (brennen@mastodon.social), page 20

is a young person in your life at risk of exposure to ayn rand?

give them a copy of _the dispossessed_. you may save them years or an entire lifetime.

nothing i can say that hasn't been said better. _left hand_ helped rewire how i thought about being human while i was still a kid, and _the dispossessed_ did the same all over again years after i probably should have read it.

i can still feel the sensation of sitting in an arm chair in a shitty apartment a decade ago, finishing that book in tears and wishing fiercely that i could live the kind of life it said was both vital and possible.

@webmind @neil it's a long ways from general adoption, but i'll note that the scuttlebutt folks are doing some pretty neat work on events.

@wohali @tindall @nolan yeah, i think it's worth observing that a big percentage of "open source" these days is de facto a corporate product, effectively owned by a google, oracle, facebook etc., or some startup trying to leverage open licensing to capture a chunk of the market.

chrome, android, etc. red hat's increasing capture of desktop linux system design.

there's still no good reason to be a dick to people, but i think this partly explains some attitudes.

@jk @friskywhiskers yeah. the weird thing is that i have a lot of respect for the properties of actually-working systems that have evolved over time, even though they usually have absurd complexities that no one would ever have designed in on purpose if they had been able to tell what was going to happen.

but the software of now has become something way above and beyond that. we are extruding totally ludicrous intentional complexity at a rate that's almost impossible to fathom.

@ink_slinger yeah, i can definitely read those positive aspects of what it's saying, but it's hard for me not to feel like they're situated in a framework that has a bunch of subsuming both personal critical thought and the wellbeing of others to an imposed dogma / power structure in it. it almost feels like it could be re-written into a certain kind of christian tract about holding others to account for adherence to biblical law...

@cypnk yeah. i feel like printers are an unusually clear example of all the ways that the market slowly but irresistibly unsolves a class of solved problems.

@djsundog @squirrel 1995 here i come.

the current x86 situation demonstrating at least three of the three hard problems in computer science:

naming things
cache invalidation
off-by-one errors
capitalism fucks everything up