More Nonsense

2026-07-17

Wow, updating an html blog in 2026? You've been left behind bro

Yes yes, another nerd sharing their opinions in a dead world because Linus Torvalds continues to be the same person he's always been.

There are lots of things already said uncountable times about LLMs and the current state of computing, but I'm going to list a few I think aren't mentioned enough and / or that are just on my mind at the minute:

Computing is entirely a child of the ultra-privileged individuals of the past, serving military interests and the boomer-utopians' hairbrained ideologies. There's a gap between the hard logic of electrical engineering and the opinions that define a kernel. I don't know whether it's still the case today, but as recently as 15-20 years ago, Computer Science as a field was entirely gatekept by assumptions about high-school academic performance (and of course, generational wealth). That is to say - it is not a meritocracy.
The fabled textbooks of C and the Wizard Book are written in such a way that presumes a *particular kind* (not quality, or merit) of education that is not available to most people.
LLMs, by contrast, are made exceptionally accessible to the point of being forced upon us in the workplace, dominating our search engines and appearing as little buttons in every piece of "accessible" consumer software available.
This leads the average user, the average young person, the average learner to lean in to this high level of accessibility. They don't have the prerequisite knowledge (nor access to it) to be able to reason about how LLMs work, what they're actually good at, or understand why that's a tiny subset of the tasks to which they're actually being assigned. They do not understand why you call it Slop. They feel excluded. But their friendly 'Agent' doesn't exclude them. Their ego naturally reframes this as *you* being a stubborn old person who will be left behind.
Linus Torvalds is an emblematic example of the entire computing world in terms of his persona and attitudes - he is absolutely not the only one. It's a cultural issue. Elitist nerds have celebrated cultural moments that 'punch down' on the less-experienced, less knowledgable. Nerd bullying. And now the victims of that nerd bullying have a compliant sycophant who actually answers their questions in a friendly, constructive way. The answers are fucking awful, of course - but that really doesn't matter.
Maybe it's because of egoic fragilities present in nerdspace. The opportunity to digitally shove someone in a locker sublimating their own feelings of inadequacy seeded in their adolescence. I dunno, I'm straying into navel-gazing psychoanalytics here so I'll move on quickly before that becomes a problem. The real focus is that whatever the root cause, it has come back around to fuck you.

The truth is that computing was never meant for us - normal people. I'm a terrible programmer, though I can stitch tables together with SQL pretty well. And it's honestly not through want of trying. But all the resources out there for learning simply were never written for me, and it's this endless uphill struggle against forces beyond my control that stop me from writing the ideas for software in my head. I try to find a resource to learn what I need and it's written like it expects me to have been tutored by a victorian polymath from childhood. That's no good.

c0co

2025-07-28

Another victim of modern computing psychosis

Awth13 and I have been working with XMPP today. A long time ago, we spun up a Matrix server. We've been comparing and contrasting the experience and the 'philosophy' of it (if you can call it that).

I'm not intending to reinvent the wheel of the XMPP vs Matrix debate here, just reflecting on how it represents modern computing. On the one hand you have a very stable, mature old messaging protocol and parsing mechanism. Simple, highly extensible, reliable and securable. On the other hand, you have a highly feature rich "global JSON database with an HTTP API and subpub semantics" primarily deployed via Docker images, with every bell and whistle affixed to the base image by default.

Some think that Matrix is more user friendly and intuitive to set up. I think I disagree. It has so many moving parts, with the lines blurred between modules and monoliths. Someone recently said to me that containerized deployment is "as simple as it gets". I just don't understand that sentiment. Of course I understand the benefits of being able to deploy complex systems in a highly scalable and replicable way (in this case, .yaml configs). But at the same time I have to ask the question - does the system need to be so complex that it warrants this in the first place?

I'm not sure I have some clever point to make here. Just a frayed idea floating around in thought soup about the tradeoff between elegant simplicity and powerful rube goldberg machines. I just wonder how things will be if we treat the former as a first principle a little bit more and try to go back to basics on how we talk to the computer.

c0co

2025-07-27

Made some updates to this little site. Coming together nicely, in the most boring sense of the word.

Wrote up the specification for a purr for those too lazy to run dig and just take a look at the demo.

If I had half a brain - which I assure you, I do not - I would figure out a way to post to here and to my purr simultaneously. The one problem with purrs is that if you're working on someone else's DNS server and have to log in to a web GUI to enter new entries it's pretty annoying. Being able to inject to both this web blog and the rlog on my purr would be much better.

c0co

contact: cc[@]c0co.ch

purr: > dig TXT c0co.channel