#pontification

https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2026-04-15/thinking-about-how-things-change/

Getting laid off just before the holidays has given me time to think about some things that, somewhat paradoxically, don't have anything to do with looking for a new job, doing paperwork, or worrying about insurance. Specifically it's given me time to reflect upon a conversation I had some months ago about how people relate to computers has changed in the last thirty years or so.

I'd been in a discussion about computers, how technology has changed over time, and how people have changed in how they interact with technology over the same period of time. Specifically, it involved folks - college grads, most of them - who had the weirdest blind spots any of us had seen. I'd had the same kind of experience some years ago with folks who didn't know what files were. Now, I'm not trying to turn this into an "old man yells at cloud" kind of post; that's not my intention and I hope it doesn't come off that way. What I am musing about is what folks are being exposed to in school and during their off-hours. In the context of the discussion I alluded to, my response was pretty succinct and said in all sincerity: "A computer science education is what's missing."

This is what I mean: Manuals used to be a thing. In-depth documentation of things (vis a vis, computers at home) used to be the norm. Once upon a time (when I was a kid growing up) you pretty much got the beginnings of a comp.sci education (at the 100 level (the sort of elective a freshman in college might take), if not 101 (freshman comp.sci student in college)) just by leafing through the pages. By way of example this is what manuals used to be like. (local copy) On the intro page the manual talks about arcade-style sprite graphics and how you (yes, you!) can program them yourself with just that book. A few pages after that the manual describes in detail what each of the keys do (from RETURN to RESTORE to the CRSR (up/down, left/right) keys) and how to use them. A few pages after that it teaches you how to load and save programs to and from cassette tapes and floppy disks. It told you what to do, what it meant, what to expect if it worked, and what was going on if it didn't work.

Shortly after that the book showed you (not told, showed) how to use a Commodore as a calculator if you wanted to. If computers were not something you had any experience with chances were that you did with a calculator. And then it eases you into BASIC if you keep going. Elementary logic like IF..THEN decisions and greater than/less than/equal to/not equal to comparisons. Doing things a number of times with FOR..NEXT loops. And a couple of pages after that the manual demonstrates in a handful of lines of text (which you can type in or not as you will), in simple words (not technical jargon) how to do basic animation by moving characters around. Then how to prompt the user for input and what to do with it. In the next chapter, more graphics, only they're a bit more complicated. Then how to program simple music and sound effects, roughly equivalent to poking at a piano with a pamphlet in front of you. All of this stuff used the Commodore BASIC programming language built into the firmware.

All of this knowledge came with the manual, a spiral bound book less than 200 pages long which accompanied every C64. You didn't have to buy other books to learn how to do anything (though you could if you wanted to). You didn't have to hunt around at the local library to find a programmers' handbook (local copy) (though you could if you wanted to). This was, if you'll pardon the term, 101 level stuff. You bought a computer and you got an introduction to computer science course for free along with it. You didn't have to go to a store and drop an unexpected amount of money on a programmming language 1 because you had a useful, featureful programming language that you could learn at your own pace if you wanted to. Even if you didn't become a coder it still gave you an introductory understanding of how computers work and what you can do with them, and that, I think, had a great deal to do with how computer technology took off in the 1980's.

Of course, I can only speak to my experience - I had a Commmodore growing up. I am vaguely aware that the Apple II had something similar, and have no idea what the Macintosh computers of the time had in the way of what came out of the box with the unit. The Atari 8-bits (which I got into when I was in high school) were similiar in many respects to the Commodore 8-bits, from the detailed documentation to the built-in BASIC interpreter. 2 The IBM PCs of the time (the XT and AT) had (I've read) BASIC in chip ROM but I've ony ever seen GWBASIC.EXE and BASICA.COM which came with DOS, also for free.

The point I'm trying to make is this: Documentation is largely a joke these days, an afterthought at best. Manuals - actual technical information - are something you don't get with the hardware anymore, and finding them sometimes requires a quest worthy of Indiana Jones. Once people could tinker with their computers - see what they were capable of and discover what they as users could do. The resources were there because they came with the machine. At some point, maybe late in the 1980's or early in the 1990's that changed. Documentation got skinnier and skinnier, the page margins larger and larger, and the amount of information smaller and smaller. It wouldn't surprise me if people had Opinions about this, some of them informed, most of them not. I think all I'm qualified to say on the topic is this: Where once the curious could find answers to their questions with very little effort, many people don't seem to know that there are questions that can be asked anymore. And web search going to hell in a handbasket doesn't help matters any.

Or maybe, and I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up the possibility, it's always been this way. For starters, I was a kid at that time. I got my C64 at the age of five. This means that my exposure to lots of things was inherently limited by where my folks took me, what they could afford, and what they were willing to expose me to. 3 Additionally, the usefulness of documentation or lack thereof is irrelevant in some respects because not everybody is innately curious about computers (which is a given that isn't brought up often enough). The case can be made that folks who aren't all that inclined to treat a manual as anything more than a reference for a handy tool didn't simply because they're not inclined to become computer nerds, so they don't need anything more detailed than that. Not everybody is. Just like not everybody is inclined to be a gearhead who can tear down and rebuild an engine in a weekend for fun. And that's okay! Everybody is different, with different innate strengths and interests.

Maybe it's worth a study, if there's still room in the world for such things.

It wasn't easy to find other programming languages back then. Most of the time folks ordered them out of magazines (for example) for anywhere from $70us (which was quite a bit to drop on a piece of home software back then) on up. I don't have a reference handy right now (it's probably in storage back home) but I do recall stumbling across a C compiler for the Commodore back then which sold for somewhere around $250us (a considerable chunk of change then as now). In later years (around the mid-1990's) when computer stores were more common it was significantly easier to buy programming environments for PCs but they were about as expensive. I knew that there were other languages available as ROM cartridges from reading about them in magazines, but I don't think I ever saw one until I was old enough to drive to and look around in thrift stores many, many years later. Again, please remember that I only speak from my experiences. Other folks have had their own experiences and opportunities. ↩

Atari DOS took a lot of getting used to, though. ↩

To the point where we can make jokes and explore kink concepts in ways that aren't just p*rn.

In a world where Assassin's Creed: Valhalla's nudity option literally only allows for one nipple in the entire game, because nudity itself, even in a game filled with blood and death, is such a taboo concept to mainstream society.

If we just do enough and make The right noises to get by

Then we do not have to worry About the madness of our minds

And yet some inappropriately do.

If you are such i would suggest To keep your draughts below the surface-

There is in all of us from time to time A need to make an impression of weight

To gain the hand of employment To keep the going straight To get back home in time to find a mate To show the young to be,

At every opportunity, a candidate.

To undermine this, well, It could send us back To the days of full redundancy And romping in caves

Tumblr's API is really pissing me off....

It's been a long few weeks for everyone, and I don't think I have to recap all of the fucked up stuff that's happened in the world. It's a lot. It's everything. There's little point in recapping everything because by the time I have a list Satsuma Harkonnen and his cronies will have done even more fucked up stuff.

Keep an eye on disppeared.us, yeah? Sooner or later you'll start seeing names you recognize. And if that site stops being updated, worry.

For some reason my shower thoughts lately keep being drawn back to what a scam recycling is and how we were pretty much forced to play along with it. I definitely don't have a problem with minimizing waste, it goes against everything I was taught growing up. But I do have a problem with being forced to do stuff that's straight up bullshit. I am reminded of a thing that I saw many years ago back home.

As a bit of backstory, where I grew up in Pittsburgh mandatory recycling started some time in the mid-1990's. I recall helping my folks get geared up for it by setting magnets aside to test cans (because we were told that we had to separate magnetic and non-magnetic cans), bolting a can crusher to a scrap 2x4, making sure there were enough paper shopping bags to hold the separated stuff (paper shopping bags were required), and making sure that recyclables were sorted out of the trash before it went to the curb for trash day (because, we were told, we'd be ticketed and fined if recyclables were found in our trash). It seemed pretty heavy-handed, but the grumbling in our neighborhood stopped after a couple of folks got $200us or $300us tickets for not having their recycling organized. 1

All of that said... a few years went by. I started college in 1996. Two or three years in I was home for summer break and one morning, sitting at the kitchen table drinking my morning coffee I happened to glance out the window. It was garbage day and I saw the garbage truck cruising slowly down my street and the workers walking alongside picking up trash and throwing it into the back. The thing I hadn't expected was the workers grabbing the carefully sorted recycling in our blue plastic bin and throwing it into the back along with the stuff in garbage bags. Unusual, to say the least. I watched them do this at the house across the street. And our next door neighbors' house. And their neighbor across the stree. And so on down the street.

I made sure to watch next week. The same thing happened. And so on.

A couple of years later there was a minor scandal in Pittsburgh where the company that had been contracted to pick up and handle the recyclables had never actuallly taken any of the recycling material to the facility. They just hauled it to the dump along with everything else. I say it was a minor scandal because it was in the news for all of two days before it was never mentioned again. I never did find out why, I always figured it involved large sums of money and phone calls placed through the usual network of business contacts and post-collegiate old boys' networks. So, I guess it's because I saw that happening in a large-ish city and surrounding suburbs that I've always looked at recycling with a somewhat jaundiced eye. If it can happen in a place like Pittsburgh, it can happen on a much larger scale, yeah?

Before I forget, because of everything else going on, I also updated my .plan file for your amusement and edification.

There's something fucked up with the Tumblr API gem I use to crosspost ordinarily, so it's cut-and-paste time.

It is highly unlikely that you've missed the events of the last month or so. If you were sufficiently fortunate to have been in a medically induced coma, you missed Donald Trump not only alienating every possible ally the United States still had on this planet but starting a trade war by enacting a tariff policy which appears to have been generated by an LLM which, predictably, fucked up badly.

Bangladesh - 37%

Bosnia - 35%

Cambodia - 49%

China - 34%

the Falkland Islands - 41%

Fiji - 32%

India - 26%

Iraq - 39%

Liechtenstein - 37%

Norfolk Island - 29%

Sri Lanka - 44%

And, of course, not Russia.

Look, I'm not an economist. I don't claim to be. But I will say that people who are economists (you know, experts - remember those?) are saying that this makes no damn sense. And if experts from multiple institutions scattered across the political spectrum in this country are in agreement and getting each other medical attention because they gave themselves concussions by smacking their foreheads extremely hard, it's safe to say that this this biggest fuckup since Dubya and Dick Cheney lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In just forty-eight hours (as I write this on 4 April 2025) the stock market has gone off a cliff. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2231 points, Nasdaq fell 962 points, and the S&P 500 fell 31 points. Trump, of course, says the stock markets are now booming... and if he happened to mean "boom" as in "detonation" he's not lying for once.

I offer some free advice, which as we all know is worth exactly what you paid for it: Don't pay attention to the stock market or your retirement fund. It's bad enough that the various retirement fund companies are sending out "Yeah, this is fucked" e-mails to customers. It won't be good for your mental health and there isn't anything that you can do about it. Looking at everything from what may as well be MEO there's sweet fuck-all that anyone can do about the situation we're in.

In the last couple of days I've been re-reading The Shockwave Rider (affiliate link I think 1), and recent events have given me new thnigs to think about. I never really stopped to consider what the "progress at all costs," "there is no stability," "by the way, everybody in power gives more of a shit about their social engineering projects and computers than actual people" world of the novel would look like. The state of the world in 2025 is uncomfortably similar to the world of the novel in many ways.

I could prattle on about companies going head over heels about LLM technology and using it to lay off organics because software constructs are cheaper (or so they think), people having so many things to keep track of (some of them out of necessity, some of them voluntarily 2) that they start freaking out, folks moving because there is almost no safety net where they live (for example, insurance companies refusing to honor their disaster insurance policies), and people being treated as inherently disposable components 3 for crappy wages and zero benefits. But if you're paying attention to the world, you get this.

Here's the thing: There is no stability anymore. There's almost no predictability beyond the short term (and I'm not referring to "That Fucking Guy did something stupid again") because the world and everybody in it is so densely networked that the ripple effect may as well be called the tsunami effect. Consider the last couple of rounds of layoffs in the USian business world. For all we know a CEO in Texas has a bad drive into the office and decides to fire some folks that they never liked anyway. There would be no way to know if that was the case (sure, you can guess, you can say that's what happened, but can you prove it to any extent that you could do something about it?) Point being, you can't know if or when such a thing is going to happen these days. Not with everybody in the world not just keeping their heads on a swivel but getting whiplash from things changing so much, so fast, so often.

In this sea of chaos, I think the best thing that any of us can hope for is keeping our heads above water. Bob like a cork on the waves rather than try to swim against them. I'm sure there are plenty of criticisms of this (and there bloody well should be, it would mean that people are actually thinking about something rather than reacting) but for the vast majority of us down at street level who are not wealthy, well connected, well resourced, or sufficiently well informed to know ahead of time what to invest in and what to sell off trying to stay the course just doesn't work anymore. There is a time for acting and a time for reacting. And this doesn't seem like a time to act (because it's going wrong more often than not these days). To put it another way, adaptations rapidly become maladaptations when the environment changes too radically.

It makes sense to want to cling to some kind of order - procedure, policy, process, plans, some other words that start with 'p' - but ultimately whether or not they're appropriate remains a matter of question. There is one more word that starts with 'p' that comes to mind, however - principles. While having principles is a good and decent (and increasingly difficult to find) trait in people these days, I meant the fundamental assumptions underlying things. Don't worry about knowing how to fix an F-150, but understand how to fix pickup trucks in general. Don't learn how to use vue.js, learn how to use Javascript frameworks. Don't memorize where everything is in a library or garage, learn how to find what you need.

In other words, learn how things work, and you can figure out the specifics when you need to. Because it's pretty much the only way these days to keep our heads above water.

And be ready to switch up your plans if they go south.

Amazon changed their user interface again. That might be an affiliate link or it might be a plain old shortened link. I figured it couldn't hurt to flag that in case it was the former and I didn't realize it. ↩

I am, unfortunately, prone to trying to keep track of too many things at the same time. Every few months I have to pare things down because managing the input from them starts taking up so much time it eats into significantly more important things. Time management and ADD being what they are, the anxiety is decidedly not fun. ↩