Oh this is good.

Um. Lots of questions, but none are important, because TBH if I don't know then it is probably stuff that does not personally matter to me.

What and where are or were Vibecamp and Vibegala? Never heard of them.

What does "harm reduction" mean? What does "SA'd" mean?

I loved this.

A few simple rules explain so much of the world, and they are not the nice clean rules of logic, but the Peter Principle, Hanlon's Razor, the Laws of Parkinson, Murphy, and Sod, and a few other such things.

Also, I still find this one amusing:

Wednesday, December 01, 2010: Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery.html

I read this yesterday with the most remarkable mix of emotions for a tech post: astonishment, revulsion, traces of hilarity, mounting disgust and disdain, shock, fear, dismay, pity, sadness.

For those who don't know the name... Yegge has been writing (very very long) blog posts about tech for about 20 years now. In his early days he wrote some of the most insightful stuff about Lisp I've seen anywhere. One of his similes is an all-time favourite tech quote of mine that I have quoted before:

Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio.

Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: "the car that's always in front of you."

Common Lisp is Howl's Moving Castle.

Source: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/11/ejacs-javascript-interpreter-for-emacs.html

Yes, this bloke wrote an Emacs addin that lets it run Javascript. That has implications: it's important, it's almost guaranteed to infuriate the Emacs purists, so he wouldn't get much help, had to do it solo, and fast.

He got all excited about moving to S.E. Asia somewhere a bit before COVID. From a mention in this piece, I guess he married a local woman. That might explain it.

It didn't pan out and he came back. He's worked for a few of the FAANG type giants. Then he was going to revive his hobby videogame and make his millions from that.

Now he drank the Koolaid and his brain's run out from his ears. It's a damned shame. I didn't agree with him about many things but he was very smart and really could write -- text, not code, but code too.

There are a lot of highly opinionated people in tech. Few of them can write. Fewer of them can write short (it's a real skill, hard to learn and hard to do) and few have the sheer patience and stamina to write long (which is the next best thing).

Yegge wrote long, and it was worth it.

Oh that is splendid. Thank you.

TBH this reminds me of the people who say they've given up (e.g.) using Facebook because "fsck Zuck" and then they still use Instagram and Whatsapp. Still Meta.

Look, sorry dude, but if you vape, you haven't given up smoking. If you take nicotine pills, you haven't quit.

Don't make BS statements. QUIT ALREADY.

If you use Windows for your toys, you're still using Windows. If you need Youtube so badly you haven't quit brainrotting online media. If you use VPNs then you are still playing pretend.

Just bloody stop, or shut up about it.

I don’t care about websites.

Agree, in spades.

Writing a program in C that finds a shortest path in a graph and dumps it to the terminal?

Disagree, although I am not immune.

Graphics. That, for me, is key. Drawing pretty pictures (procedural stuff, like Logo; fonts; and teenage me's particular crack, fractals) was where it was at.

Fuck C and everything it spawned. Give me a Pascal-family thing that doesn't have so much fucking syntactically significant punctuation marks FFS. WORDS, mthrfckr, words not code-breaking types of bloody parentheses.

a Visual Basic program that had no graphical user interface.

I approve of this sort of thing.

I hadn't seen this post of yours before. I like it. I like it a lot.

My $SPROG can't really read very well yet but she can open a saved program in Scratch and run it and show off the results, in SUGAR. I was so proud.