In the future there will be techno.

[foone]

A fun thing about computer skills is that as you have more of them, the number of computer problems you have doesn't go down.

This is because as a beginner, you have troubles because you don't have much knowledge.

But then you learn a bunch more, and now you've got the skills to do a bunch of stuff, so you run into a lot of problems because you're doing so much stuff, and only an expert could figure them out.

But then one day you are an expert. You can reprogram everything and build new hardware! You understand all the various layers of tech!

And your problems are now legendary. You are trying things no one else has ever tried. You Google them and get zero results, or at best one forum post from 1997. You discover bugs in the silicon of obscure processors. You crash your compiler. Your software gets cited in academic papers because you accidently discovered a new mathematical proof while trying to remote control a vibrator. You can't use the wifi on your main laptop because you wrote your own uefi implementation and Intel has a bug in their firmware that they haven't fixed yet, no matter how much you email them. You post on mastodon about your technical issue and the most common replies are names of psychiatric medications. You have written your own OS but there arent many programs for it because no one else understands how they have to write apps as a small federation of coroutine-based microservices. You ask for help and get Pagliacci'd, constantly.

But this is the natural of computer skills: as you know more, your problems don't get easier, they just get weirder.

[captainkirksspaceunderwear]

There's a sweet spot where you know enough about what's happening behind the scenes to be able to try and actually trigger new problems.

[captainkirksspaceunderwear]

No one ever really talks about the fact that WebKit comes from KDE.

KDE had/has a rendering engine called KHTML. They used it in the DE and for their Konqueror browser starting in the late 90s. When Apple released OS X, most of the userland was FreeBSD derived. OS X was a full fledged Unix, and the BSD license doesn't require source code release so it made a handy repository for most of the behind the scenes utilities that didn't require releasing their changes. When Apple was developing their own browser, they wanted a good starting point like that, something they could build off of and extend rather then reinventing the wheel. They went with humble little KHTML. Unlike the BSD license, KHTML was under the LGPL. The LGPL allows you to link libraries without making the entire project open source, but still requires you to release source code for the library itself. So Apple's fork of KHTML was released to the public as WebKit, an engine that now powers the overwhelming majority of web browsers. That's quite the glow-up for a little library coming out of a Linux desktop environment.

[captainkirksspaceunderwear]

Me: I hope I never turn into my father.

Also me: Man, the Talking Heads absolutely slaps.

[captainkirksspaceunderwear]

[captainkirksspaceunderwear]

There's something romantic about being young and broke in a city. Just the experiences you have and the shit you get in to, the little tricks you learn. Nothing to lose and just taking life one day at a time. Like I've got a wife and kid to worry about now, but there's always a part of me who's 24 in Oakland, laptop hanging out the window by it's VGA cord to better steal the neighbors wifi so I can stream choppy Daily Show videos on a 900 mhz Celeron eeePC laptop.

[captainkirksspaceunderwear]

The level of appreciation for Lynx you have utterly depends on when you started using Linux. Younger folks think it's the dumbest thing in the world. But if you were around in the xfree86 era when it would sh*t itself if you so much as looked in the general direction of it's config file and installing proprietary GPU drivers was legitimately an entire weekend activity that had a 50/50 chance of ending with no GUI by Monday, then you will forever cherish the one rescue rope that is Lynx and the search of shame you could just about do with it to find out how you screwed up and what would fix it.

[captainkirksspaceunderwear]

It's kinda wild to me how for my kid computers are magic boxes or slabs with arcane magic happening behind the scenes that no human could possibly understand when for my childhood the closest thing you got to an operating system was an interpreter for a programming language and a note that said 'lol hope you read the section on how to poke specific memory addresses'