patterns - a fictional story

Ever since ARPANET, cyberspace tech (aka the stuff that runs the
internet) is decentralized by nature and by default—not by accident,
but by design—so it cannot be entirely taken down by anyone,
ever. Technology that is built on top of that will always inherit
these features from the underlying architectural design.

Observing a pattern in society: cycles of re-centralizing followed by
breaking up into pieces, followed by re-decentralizing followed by
centralizing again.

Observing a pattern in computer user interfaces: also going full
circle from TTY "output screen + input line" (funny: it's also called
"PROMPT") to the horrible Desktop metaphor, a narrative that only
exists to enforce meaning. To touchscreen interfaces that still use
the mechanical typewriter layout to "web-OS" / "browser-OS" and the
Google main site prompt which is again the same—just one input line
and a big output screen... and weakened from some sidetracking like a
bad fever from the worst that could happen after going from the
desktop to the web and pulling the desktop into the web, we pulled the
web back into the desktop with audacities such as Electron apps and
slightly less atrocious Chrome apps...

```
git add . \
git commit -am'feat(inconsistency)!: rareNonsense® -- because commonSense needed some serious refactoring for "make sense" buildscript.' \
git push --force
```

"big output screen" + "input line / textbox" — remember that for the
next time we go full circle.

What if we hit the reset button on all of it and start again from
scratch, solve everything again for all OSI layers?

Today I woke up and I want to hit that reset button and reboot the
tech universe straight from UEFI into Emacs. Today is the day that I
finally conquer MacOS. According to current trajectory and velocity,
predicting final takeover during the next decade, roughly around the
year 4 P.I. (year 4 post-Ignucium).

**Remaining blockers:**

- Physical keyboards
- Touch screens
- Voice recognition
- ...

They all suck.

You don't get Emacs pinky from Emacs. You get Emacs pinky from having
to use a keyboard.

Emacs's way of potentially giving you an amount of Aleph-1 shortcuts
mapped onto a space of 104/105 keys on a physical keyboard is not due
to Emacs. It's due to the existence of the keyboard. [Inspirational:
Take a good look at how T.V. Raman uses Emacs a decade before Siri and
Alexa even exist. Just sayin'... but this is in brackets because it's
sidetracking. Back to the topic..]

Functions are everywhere. Russian Doll nestception all the way down to
the Kernel. Underneath the shortcuts. So, in effect there is only one
shortcut: M-: ... the "eval" or maybe: M-x to execute interactive
functions that are meant to be run by a human so they have UX/UI
integrations, again wrappers around wrappers around wrappers. More
functions.

When everything feels like you are someone else's MCP server—get used
to it and own it.

Repeat after me: this whole thing is nothing but a very fancy abacus
that works with 1's and 0's.

.... it's nothing more, nothing less; but what we decide to do with it
as humans—that is the thing we must be observing. I mean we humans as
a collective, what we decide to see in this giant abacus and what
interpretive realities, enrollments and personifications are
happening. Which metaphors are used in which social context in which
discourse and where.... so many factors. Unmeasurable in meaningful
ways through Quantitative Methods. Describable at best through
Qualitative Methods.

We refer to the artificial thing as if it's a human but we actually
mean the other human behind that thing. DO NOT FORGET THAT. There is
no sense talking about trust or not trusting anything other than human
beings and their intentions. You can't really say trust or don't trust
technology. Don't trust hardware. Don't trust software. That's
completely misleading. More correct is: trust or don't trust
humans. For everything else, there is the GPL v3 to make sure that the
word "trust" even means anything, because the words "open source" in
software usually mean bullcrap. Openness of source matters not. What
matters is what you may or may not do to / do with it legally... a
strong restrictive copyleft license is the only way to ensure a
positive end game.

:-)

I hope you guys get that. I don't want to see printed-out ebooks in
shelves of an offline reference library that gives you copy machines
so you can scan in your prints and make a .docx photo slideshow from
it and OCR scan that into your Kindle App. But the "AI" version
now....

We have the technology already. But collectively, we are just using it
in very very stupid, strange and clumsy ways for the very very
complex, stupidly needless and wrong reasons... and we insist on doing
it this way, because that's the way we have always done things here.

In very rare moments, sometimes, a member of a previous generational
tribe goes on a pilgrimage and during their journey sometimes finds
themselves stuck in repeating cycles of doing the same thing over and
over again no matter where they turn. This is not the difficult
phase. That phase is passed. This is where you can shine. If
everything around you is new, and you are all too familiar, that means
you basically traveled back in time—use that to everyone's advantage,
not for your own. If everything around you is old, and you are
completely unfamiliar, then you haven't stood still, but you have made
regress instead of progress and you've been absent from productivity
for quite some time while everything around you has evolved. The
moment you wake up you realize you are now a stranger in your own
home. If everything around you is new AND it feels completely
unfamiliar even though it's actually one and the same thing... then
THIS is the moment to start learning again. When you reach this
point... make a mental note, or pin it into a calendar, because this
is the definite flag for a watershed moment coming towards
you. Germans say: waving at someone with a fence post (giving them a
broad hint). It means after that learning phase is completed, during
which you will learn (again and again) how to follow.

After that, it's time to lead or retreat.