💾 Archived View for tilde.pink › ~emily › log › on-computing.gmi captured on 2024-05-26 at 15:14:40. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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"this thing claims i have mail"

this thing claims i have mail. dude! now i'm reading it!

this is a quote from "scott pilgrim vs the world", a comedy film that my brother showed me; it was a hilarious movie, and the pacing was perfect for me. in the scene i'm referencing, scott is at the computer, where he asks his roommate "what's the address for amazon.ca?" followed by other humourous quips.

but, as funny as it was, i couldn't stop thinking "that's the life i want". to care so little about the endless expanse of the sea of software configuration, and operating system design principles. to not only not /care/ about those things, but to not even know about them!

humans are unevolved; we suck. we don't know how logic works, or how shapes work, or how numbers work. thus, we don't know how computers work. programming languages are "okay" at best, accessibility barely exists, documentation barely exists, everyone gets mad at you no matter what you use, and abstraction feels less like laying bricks and more like /throwing/ them.

maybe throwing my life towards computer science in a desperate attempt to understand it was a bad idea after all, because it just made me bitter. i'm scared now, though; i'm getting into the field of music, but i have the same feeling of awe & excitement that i had when i first started programming, and i wonder if experience will take that feeling away yet again.

i can ramble on a bit further by referencing a quote i found on the fediverse, by a user i can't remember:

i didn't want to become an expert at systemd; i just wanted to do one thing, but here i am

the quote is very true; most of the time, when you want to accomplish a simple task, you need to know where all the wires lead, and they lead down a long path.

i wonder how one could ever find peace in these circumstances.

i just want to turn on my 90's pc and say "dude, this thing claims i have mail!"

p.s.

i have created a horrible habit out of using semicolons; i don't know how to use them, though, so i apologize.

april 19, 2021