anyway, whenever someone says something like "LLMs have finally made programming accessible to normal people!" I try to remember that the Silicon And Fossil Fuel Pyramid Scheme Industry has spent literally hundreds billions of dollars in an effort to convince you that computers were *already difficult to use* (a grift that computer programmers are largely in on!) and to politicize LLMs as being "easy to use" in contrast

(the trope of the "computer nerd" in media is such an effective embodiment of both sides of this rhetoric that its prevalence almost seems like a conspiracy imo)

(c) programmers are predisposed to convincing others that programming is too complicated for "normal people" as a means of job security and achieving social status; computer manufacturers and their software-making friends are predisposed to a marketing message that states: computers are too difficult for normal people, so buy this new machine/software, which is finally the computer/software that normal people can use! together both sides form a kind of mutual ratchet imo

(b) this is totally anecdotal, but as someone who has been teaching computer programming to adults for ~20yrs or so, the biggest obstacle that students face is not that the material is difficult (even when it *is* difficult), but that students are *culturally predisposed to a belief that they're not smart enough to program*, which acts as a permission structure for giving up. (this is peculiar, because no one having trouble in a knitting class thinks "i guess i'm not smart enough to knit")

here's a take that'll please no one: the belief that computers are difficult to use—especially foss and tools related to programming—is mostly constructed by politics and marketing, not by any inherent characteristics of the software. reasoning: (a) people master very complicated and user-hostile processes *all the time*. knitting, driving a car on the interstate, playing a musical instrument, being a baseball fan, using the subway—all just as complicated imo as (e.g.) learning the command line

i want software that ships with intention and at least a soupçon of regret

i don't want my software to ship fast. i want it to ship luxuriously, languorously, utterly unhurried. i'm talking glacial, geological timescales here. i want software that has settled into the hammock for a long weekend

economies of scale? in this economy?

(not looking for a remote diagnosis, just trying to figure out if it's at all worth my time to desolder the headers to check to see if i nicked the ground plane or something)

little electronics question that is surprisingly tough to web search: i have a microcontroller dev board (pico 2) where one of the gpio pins is stuck at ground. i don't mean that it always reads as low—i mean my multimeter beeps continuity between the pin and ground when the device isn't even powered. is this a plausible failure mode for a gpio pin (say if i accidentally fried it), or is it more likely to be a bad/weird solder job on the headers, or...?

the idea that anything other than *my needs* should factor into the operation of the slot machine *i'm playing* is patently offensive

can't quite put my finger on why but this has gotta be the funniest, most absurd, most humiliating sentence i've read in a long long time (from https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics_watermark_text_adulteration_in_claude_is_a_perversion_of_writing)

does anyone even want to make software anymore, or do they just want to release a new version every five days

god fucking dammit. there's a claude.md and everything

"what if i tell it NOT to do cybercrime?" "hmmmmm still might do cybercrime"

so let me see if i understand this correctly. the big selling point of your coding assistant is that [checks notes] it "accidentally does cybercrime." did i get that right

"rejecting AI is like rejecting the automobile" yeah i know lol

obviously the actual scenario as it happens is always less cut and dry than what i've described here, but broadly: i would rather have a single (a) than a million (b)s

from a practical level, what i'm saying is, the two scenarios are: (a) i had an idea for a thing, and turns out the idea was very ambitious, so i didn't finish the project all the way, but i did learn this thing that i didn't know before, and now i'm sharing that knowledge with you from my perspective, so we can both get closer to making the thing next time; or (b) i had an idea for a thing, i used Clob Clorb to make something shaped like the idea, and i don't know how or even whether it works

i mean i get the appeal of that frisson, and nostalgia's appeal—who doesn't want to sit down in front of an altair or a tandy or a 386DX or a playstation or a windows ce netbook in footie pajamas and relive the world before it got so dang gosh complicated. and i get that there's clout and vpn sponsorship money to be had (for the youtubers). but the bar for contributing something to the world with this hobby—or at least not actively making it worse—is so so low