U7D
Ineffable
Off and on, I tried to capture what it is I love about working with computers in one way or another, kind of the feeling of it, of what got me into it, and it's a mishmash of many different things, like hacker aesthetics and counterculture and all of that, but also the actual thing you get to do with a computer where you can make it do a thing, and it's as easy to make it do it a hundred times as it is to do once. And the fact that you stare long enough, you start to generalize everything. Oh, everything's a variable. All the code could be replaced with code that brings in code. Like this is not a, this is not advice about development, but this is, I think, a fundamental thing that is different in our craft, and it's hard to transmit kind of how it feels to be able to make the computer do thing. And I think there's, there's a great lack of good art on this, or there is definitely good art that captures that sense, whether it's the vibes in a Gibson piece or if it's like the very, sometimes hand-fisted aspects of core doctorate approach and like little brother, but that very much captures that youthful enthusiasm and the sense of possibility, or if it's something more like softer, like maybe serial experiments lane, which captures some of the aesthetics, some of the obsession, but also veers off in weird ways. I remember two scenes from battle programmer Shirase, which was a deeply problematic anime in some ways, and also not terribly good, but it did have the main character hacking some kind of mainframe or massive computer by typing binary into a like Nokia phone. It also, the other scene is when they, when he brought out more keyboards and connected them in a special way so that he could type faster. I think he was hacking a satellite at the time. There's like blinking lights, there's data centers. You can do a bunch of kind of aesthetic things that gesture towards what it is, but I think it's kind of like the trappings of the thing because it's hard to express the thing itself. It's hard to help someone see the number of files you are slinging across the world. It's hard to make someone see the kind of nuanced, meticulous, weird movements of the machine. It's hard to show the difference in elegance between a heavy, overwrought solution and something that someone made artistically perfect in C or whatever. This is hard to capture because it's all very abstract, and I think I want to try to a larger extent, but I don't think I'm going to, so I think I try to do some of that when I speak. So my talks are generally very much steeped in the enthusiasm of the craft. The frustrations, the triumph, the complexities, the silliness, and the creativity. But I think I want to try to capture the aesthetic as well more often and try to kind of circle that unspeakable, ineffable quality. I think it's a challenge. I think it's something I want to do. I'm going to take a bunch of time. I'm not sure how to swing that, but I have some ideas and it correlates with my previous rant about aesthetics, because a lot of tech gets to be described by kind of tone-deaf corporate stuff. It's like, "Oh, this is a cool looking aisle in a data center." This is minimal. This is clean. This is high-tech innovation. Yeah, this is architecture and suits. This is diagrams. This is how data flows. It's like, "Hmm, that can be there, but that's just the corporate side of it." I guess I always care more about the hacker side or the counterculture side or the sort of messy human side, and there's so much messy human in code and in programming. Cyberpunk's not dead, I guess. (sighs)