i actually forgot i had written something called technology before. maybe it says the same things im saying now, but probably not.

technology two

one of my biggest issues with technology is that it feels exactly like some medieval "we will not teach the peasants to read and write because then they might obtain knowledge and control" cult. talking to computers is easy, at least if you delete your standards, but we pretend its not and we gatekeep and how dare the peasants try to talk to the computer in our sacred tongue.

talking to computers is an essential skill for any amount of digital liberty, and we should be encouraging liberty instead of limiting it. you dont need to know how a sorting algorithm works to make a website. making a website is incredibly simple: you talk english with some added vocabulary like "<p>" for a new paragraph. to make it be online you learn the sentence "python -m http.server". and the best part is, you can compose all of these words and phrases into basically anything if you know the grammar that computers use, which is not a particularly complex grammar. a book seems unbelievably complex too if you cant read, but in reality it is pretty doable with a few months of light practice.

there is no user, the user must be the same as the developer.

in a similar way it is becoming ever-more apparent that it is time to stop assuming privilege in those who make use of technology. CPUs die, RAM dies, both are expensive, neither will forever be available. the internet will die. github will die. if we assume that everyone has access to these, we will not only exclude those less privileged than us, but we will also exclude our future selves when we become less privileged. nixos assumes i will always have 16GB of ram and a good cpu and good internet. how about no: flaky or no internet, 2GB of ram, and a CPU from 2008. now what? this is a thing that can actually happen in times of war or some other large scale problem. one solar flare of significant size and the internet is gone for a few months or more. technology dies, most people are one dead hard drive away from having no working personal computer, and we will have to scavenge and/or go back to much older hardware when the fog comes.

a thinkpad from 2008 has a replaceable CPU. does the new one?

and thus we must consider the 2008. there is a real problem with relying on privilege this much, and it will bring trouble to even those who have it now. windows 11 will be useless. nixos will be useless. if you want to use a computer after shit hits the fan, you will need to know how to talk to it.

just as i was in the middle of writing the last paragraph, i was told that the war in iran is bringing down most high density microchip production due to a looming helium shortage. this proves my point exactly. the fog is going to come.