Midnight Pub

Don't let the sun... catch you oscillating between work dread and work guilt

~inquiry

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starbreaker

I'm only in my early forties, and I've come to see software development in a corporate setting (especially webdev) as an exercise in trying to build a cathedral on quicksand with resources better suited to building a trailer park. It's thankless work best automated or outsourced.

I'm currently trying to get my head around React to stay "relevant" at my day job, and I find myself wanting to recoil in horror. Whoever came up with JSX, which involves embedding HTML and CSS inside JavaScript, either didn't know or had forgotten how shitty it was to have style information embedded in HTML in the 1990s before CSS became a thing.

I know a lot of techies like to denigrate liberal arts education, but I think the ones who do are the ones who need it most. They have no sense of history and no grounding in philosophy, which makes them vulnerable to hucksters (like Curtis Yarvin) selling dead ideologies that we left behind for good reason.

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inquiry

I've never felt so much like an ecstatic choir, preacher! ;-)

My main, underlying issue with software development is I've long felt the species missed a huge opportunity to wind up truly computer literate, instead becoming dumbed-down-addicted to "Windows" and GUIs (browsers included, of course) in general. Rather than really understanding what they're doing in a reasonable command-line-favorable OS/environment, people have come to imagine that pointing/clicking/dragging/dropping constitutes computer prowess.

By now, most might have understood how to script/automate/integrate otherwise disparate computational thingies for themselves. Instead, unless/until a GUI app has functionality buried in some ridiculous - not to mention ever *frustratingly* changing - menu hierarchy, people are at the mercy of waiting until one does, completely beholden to someone else making such kinda/sorta/maybe/not-really what they need.

And that makes me very sad.

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starbreaker
My main, underlying issue with software development is I've long felt the species missed a huge opportunity to wind up truly computer literate, instead becoming dumbed-down-addicted to "Windows" and GUIs (browsers included, of course) in general. Rather than really understanding what they're doing in a reasonable command-line-favorable OS/environment, people have come to imagine that pointing/clicking/dragging/dropping constitutes computer prowess.

I think back to the early history of UNIX at Bell Labs and recall that the original "killer app", or at least the application that justified letting Kernighan, Ritchie, Thompson, etc. tinker with a miniature Multics on AT&T's dime was text processing and computer typesetting. Imagine platoons of AT&T secretaries and clerks, all banging away in ed to send each other email or bash out memos and patent applications that would be typeset for printing with troff.

I wonder how many of those people actually missed UNIX once they either left AT&T or AT&T abandoned UNIX. Did the ones who had their own microcomputers at home running CP/M or DOS or early Macintoshes miss the computing power they had on the job? Did they miss knowing that they didn't have to actually worry about keeping the computers running themselves because the sysadmins had it covered?

I think the problem with computing today is that the computer-literate people who have fuck you money have decided that GUIs are good enough for most people since most people would rather watch TV than read books. Computer-literate wage slaves (like us) mainly go along to get along because we know we're relatively pampered house slaves and don't want to jeopardize that position by speaking up lest we be seen as "difficult" or "not a good culture fit".

As a result we have this Morlock/Eloi division in computing. People like us, who understand how computers work and are comfortable with plain text and command-line interfaces, are Morlocks. The people who don't understand and mainly aren't interested in learning because they've been told they don't need to know, they've been told it's beyond them, or they've been told that knowing would turn them into unattractive geeks are Eloi.

Anybody who's read H. G. Wells or seen an adaptation of *The Time Machine* knows what Morlocks do to Eloi.

At risk of sounding paranoid, the powers that be are fine with the status quo. If the vast majority of people understood how computers actually worked, were comfortable with the command line and plain text, and realized that GUIs are frequently more trouble than they're worth it would crash entire industries.

Do you honestly think a computer-literate populace would tolerate adtech? Or most video games? Or an internet and social media platforms that are basically "television, but even shittier"?

By now, most might have understood how to script/automate/integrate otherwise disparate computational thingies for themselves.

I'd love to think this is the case, but what if most people make do with GUIs because they'd rather not deal with computers at all? Even I often find myself feeling like Dark Helmet when dealing with computers. "Out of order? Fuck. Even in the future nothing works!"

Instead, unless/until a GUI app has functionality buried in some ridiculous - not to mention ever *frustratingly* changing - menu hierarchy, people are at the mercy of waiting until one does, completely beholden to someone else making such kinda/sorta/maybe/not-really what they need.

This reminds me of a new app my wife told me about called NovelWriter.

NovelWriter: a Markdown-like editor for writing novels

It's implemented with Python and Qt so it runs on Windows, macOS, GNU/systemd, and OpenBSD. It tries to make writing novels easier, but after fifteen minutes spent kicking the tires I wasn't impressed because not only does it not do anything I can't do myself with a familiar text editor, subdirectories, actual Markdown files (rather than Markdown-like syntax), a makefile, and pandoc it has its own editor, imposes the developer's opinion of how a novel should be structured, and offers a limited set of export options that doesn't include DOCX, which is (unfortunately) the file format the New York publishing cartel expects.

In fairness, it's relatively straightforward to convert ODT (which NovelWriter does offer) to DOCX, but pandoc lets me convert Markdown directly to DOCX; I know this because this is how I created drafts for the publisher from Markdown sources when I published *Without Bloodshed* and *Silent Clarion*.

Even if I wasn't familiar with the command line and Unix dev tools from over 20 years of running GNU/Linux and OpenBSD at home, I think I'd still find using NovelWriter a frustrating experience because it's a halfassed Scrivener/Ulysses clone. If I wanted somebody else's idea of "easy" I could just make do with Word on Windows.

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inquiry

Were that any better put, I'd be in the hunt for the killer app called "Noose"....

NOOSE(666)                Desperate Commands                NOOSE(666)

NAME
       noose - end computer illiteracy frustration

SYNOPSIS
       noose [OPTION]...

DESCRIPTION
       Move user executing the command to a better place.

       -d [[HH:][MM:]SS]

              delay execution for specified time (default: 23 seconds)

       -f     notify family

       -m     post parting farewell to the Midnight Pub faithful

;-)

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starbreaker

I suspect you're probably joking, but...

Are you OK over there?

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inquiry

Quite! Just a rough work day followed by the realization I've never made a man page.

The '666' was a wisp of reference to a brief fundamentalist Christian stint ages ago. The '23' was in memory of a favorite book that I'd not thought of in quite some time ("The Illuminatus Trilogy").

The rest was just whatever else came to mind.

I appreciate you asking, though.

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