#337

Time marches on, they say. I wonder, to what beat? What sets the pace?

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Saw some computer nerds for what seems like the ten billionth time in my life screaming about how stupid it is that people don't want to learn to code. Angry that people are saying "don't bother to learn code, soon AI will do it for you!". I agree with them that this is stupid; if you want to do computer science, by all means, learn to code. But motherfuckers have been on my ass to learn to code my whole entire life, and my whole entire life people have been telling me not to bother because whatever workaround will soon render manual coding obsolete. Autocode, offshored labor, whatever. However, what about the third option, which is that I have zero fucking god damn interest in coding at all, period, and wouldn't tell an AI to make a computer program even if it could make it? I don't code because I don't fucking want to. Because performing the actual process is not interesting to me at all. Because I couldn't give less of a shit about coding, code, and the coders who code it. 

Like, what the fuck? Why haven't you cocksuckers shut your mouths and gotten up off your motherfucking knees yet? I have never in my life met someone who knew how to code extremely well who was also worth knowing on a personal level, with the singular exception of my own younger brother, who is a fairly lonely man in his field. You understand what I'm saying? Stunted extensions of systems are not the same as authentic, realized individuals. You can talk about the utility of coding all day, but when I look at the world around me, the people in it, and what they have to deal with on a daily basis and in terms of their own future prospects, I see the same exact problems of history that have always existed plus a bunch of new ones that coding added to the pile. No one is happier. Indeed it could be said that everything is worse. Near as I can tell, the absolute best outcome of monkeys having learned to code is more efficient research and data access, and video games. Also word processing ability I guess. Not to discount these things, but the puff 'n cruft on top of them is just gobsmacking, let alone the facilitated rapine of our psychic and material lives. 

Apart from that, why the fuck is it okay for you to scream at me to learn to code but someone teaching you how to throw a punch or catch a baseball is such an imposition? Read more books. Go get laid. Go down to the swimming pool and jump off the diving board a couple times. For Chrissake, anything. Understand that your whole coding nonsense teeters on the good graces of systems that mobilize mass human labor and suffering, on multiple industries using up vast resources with huge footprints and we are coming to a tipping point. It is vulnerable to revolution and disaster in a way that knowing a couple of ancient skills is not. I can just see you looking a Congolese refugee with a stump where their hand used to be dead in the eye and telling them they should have learned to code. I can see you at the foot of a waterfall, banging two rocks together in the hopes that repeating the action will, eventually, generate a working keyoboard and interface. Well, it will, if they're the right type of rocks, but how would you know? And what the fuck do you know about the application of sharp edges in three-dimensional space? All you know is ones and zeroes, commands that do fuck-all when spoken to a tree or a prey animal or an individual with actual command of their surroundings. 

Learn to code? Learn to pray, asshole. Learn to think about real things. Learn to stop assuming a whole slave class and unsustainable network of dependencies will always be there to support your bullshit. And leave me alone.

You know what? I've changed my mind. I would tell an AI to make human coding obsolete. With maximum prejudice. Let the chips fall where they may. I know how to start a fire, make a shelter, cook in volume, clean and dress a cut or burn and set a broken bone, wield knife and bow, invent a myth, do public speaking, trip deep on hallucinogens, and teach all those skills and more besides. Philosophy, papermaking, heavy lifting, tool use, basic plumbing, horsemanship, gardening, military strategy, carpentry, geology, cartography, metalworking, clayshaping, irrigation. I'm set for success if society defaults to zero. I'm down for an Always Coming Home scenario.

"Oh, but coding will solve all these problems! No one will ever have to work again if everybody on the planet knows how to code and machines do every boring old real thing!"

God, if I could only help you fucking hear yourselves. If I could but force your crusty little eyes to look at the light, instead of the screen. 

I can only leave you to consider one of the more penetrating Achewood alt-texts: "You are not a powerful man if you have no power when the power is out."

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Related: saw on some kind of poll that a good percentage of people my age and a bit older--older millenials and gen x'ers--would like to go back to an era before internet. Even more than half of boomers and gen z'ers feel the same way. I do not, personally, even though one might accurately assess from the above section that I loathe computers, hate them to death.

Well, that internet was a mistake cannot be doubted. But so was agriculture and the smelting of metallic ores. So it goes. 

Part of it I guess is I was on internet when it was pretty cool, so I kind of hold out for the concept that all these hordes of no-IQ interlopers and the corporate shitfuckers and political fuckwits that farm them will just kind of, I dunno, get bored and leave.

But apart from that, which is stupid and nonsense, is the power of the blank text field, of which I am obviously a proponent and beneficiary despite the negative effects that tend to accrue. I also think that if there is potential, and we went for that potential, there's no sense sitting around sunk in regret.

Finally, simply this: if you look back, you die. We must step forward, ever forward, eyes raised, into the future. 

Yeah, we've let the absolute shittiest kinds of people ruin internet. We've let the worst in ourselves reward their depravity and cunning and now everybody's life is measurably worse. They have taken a device that might have unchained us all, freed us all, and turned it into a depression engine that runs on fear and avarice.

But it's not over yet. 

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Ok peace whatever BYE

--JL

#336

Longtime readers will have noticed that after the GREAT HY-AT-USS of 2020, the blog featured considerably fewer walks, which had once been main feature of the site. Man, 2020, though. I, who spent the twenny-teens smoking with pretty fair constancy, smoked triple my usual intake in 2020. If you might die anyway, right? Black Death Pub Moods. Boccaccio all arms folded, sighing--disapproving, yes, no doubt, but not without understanding. We were all smoking the brown paper Nat Shermans from the box, and I recently learned they stopped making them that very year; add that to the list of shit murdered by the SARS Deux. Getting bought by Marlboro is also bad for your chances of continuing to be a good product or releasing good products. I don't like to cast too many baseless aspersions, but the people who own Marlboro and make decisions at Marlboro may be sub-amphibious accretions of cellular waste product.

Anyhow, I walked home from school yesterday, as one of our cars--the one Ezra drives--was in the shop and we decided I would call off the bus job for the day and he'd drop me at adult school school on his way to kid school work. Schools...figure prominently in our lives, and this trend is set to increase. No idea how this happened; many of my younger selves would be positively aghast. Though if they're being honest with themselves, there's a tiny part of them in the back of their minds that knew it would always come to this one way or another.

Anyhow. It was quite a good walk for the most part, though my feet weren't in great shape about it and they formed some blisters, really mostly at the back of the ankle where the shoe regrettably meets bare flesh. Shouldn't have worn ankle socks. In terms of the front end of things, I stepped on a fallen branch with my left foot and the sharp end gashed my right ankle. That hurt pretty good, but I did not break step and the wound coagulated swiftly. Old marching trick? 

Finally, after I got home and was sitting playing Tears of the Kingdom, I felt an itchiness on my inner thigh and seemed to feel a flat roundness on my fingertip when I reached to scratch. Seeing nothing, I nevertheless stripped down, and found a tick tangled in the hairs of my scrotum, millimeters from plunging its beak into my ballsack. 

Into my ballsack, dear readers.

Let me tell you, it's true what they say--you can't kill a tick with just the strength in your fingers. They're apex-level threats. I drowned my would-be companion in a little jar of acid (vinegar), not without regret and admiration. They're so strong, their armor so powerful. If only they weren't wretched goddamn fucking parasites. 

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On a separate but not unrelated note, I've thought this a lot, for many years, but maybe I've never said it: if you are a person who hits possums with your car, through apathy or out of ill intent, I hope one day you too end up coughing blood and dying alone, in fear and great pain, by the side of the road, uncollected, unmourned, food for maggots and vultures. Seriously and honestly fuck you. Fuck you for killing possums, you shitfucking crapfaced vegetable-brained idiot motherfuckers. I hope your teeth and hands turn black and dissolve. May you shit great torrents of razorblades and lemon juice. Fuck you.

--JL

#335

"Why the hell do you write a blog???" a teenager asks me.

"Cuz I'm old," I reply instantly. Much the same function as your rude-assed reveal that you've read my screen from behind being because you're a twerpy little kid with half a forebrain, I say to myself--of course, to say so aloud would be bad diplomacy. Like John Adams, though it is in my nature to be as frank and forthright as possible, I am mindful--when able--of my diplomacy, my courtesy, and my respect for the infinite mystery of the other and their path in existence, so similar to and different from my own. All of us being small ships in the same stormy sea, bristling with as much cannon as we can float, fostering peaceful relations is important. Too often, interactions take the form a broadside and a fusillade right back, when tacking intelligently would be far the superior maneuver.

Perhaps I've mentioned it before--not sure, won't bother to check--my Myers-Briggs personality type is INFP, the Mediator. No matter how many sharp edges I generate--and publish on my blog--interpersonally, throughout the fracas of life, I present all smooth roundness. Honesty is the best policy, yes, but the best presentation for honesty is a gently sloping Aristotelian path towards a Nietzschean/Platonic ring/sphericity. I have always held that the Socratic method is best turned towards oneself or the abstract in a level field than applied to others; the object lesson in that was presented magnificently and unequivocally by the man himself. The polemical style is also best reserved for the written word. 

In short, you don't have to be a jerk about being right. You can be Right, which is Good, and it could get you killed, which if not strictly Bad, is for the most part at least Counterproductive.

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Rereading what I've just written, it strikes me that a Nietzschean ring interpolated three hundred and fifty-nine times one point each time around a stable centerpoint is a Platonic sphere. The centerpoint is Aristotle. The field is Socrates. Everyone else just observes and reports. Geometrically speaking, of course.

--JL