“You may stay here, my friend. This doctrine is such that a wise person can soon enter & dwell in his own teacher’s knowledge, having realized it for himself through direct knowledge” (Mn. 26)

Here is the about page of a blog about software!

To me, software is a story; code sitting static forever is the tiniest and least interesting part of this peculiar work! To tell software like a story is the first step toward teaching software like it’s actually done.

Who am I to tell such a story? Not really anyone of importance, just your storyteller here. I’m going by the pseudonym “Barzai” as a reference to a Lovecraftian cautionary tale: Stare at it for too long and this stuff will drive you nuts! Take a break; get a nice cup of tea.

My IRL identity is as an engineer of some experience across half a dozen or so different companies and thirty years and perhaps three dozen programming languages, from angry bits to buzzing wires to microwaves and spinning disks and flashy phones and scary trucks and pointy robots.

The administrative details of that same IRL identity could be easily deduced from what I post here, so I’d like to ask that we all observe some rules of sportsmanship. I’m from the old internet of dial-up modems and message boards, after all; in those days it was polite to refer to people by username and, when given the opportunity to learn more about them, to politely decline to do so, and politely to forget what you did discover. I can’t stop you from doxing me, but i can tell you that it’s a shameful habit and you should know better.

(As a corollary to this, I’ll refrain from shaming private figures by their public names. Fair turnabout: Wallet-names are for praising, at least for people who don’t take power.)

You are free to repost these materials anywhere you like – I couldn’t stop you anyway! – and to argue about them or disparage them or use them to train an AI to act like a late-forties grouch. I will actively avoid hearing or knowing about large discussions of them, both because that’s bad for my socially anxious brain and because it would influence my writing style toward stilted and noncommittal corporate-speak. In the end we would both be worse off, wouldn’t we?

So you may repost this to the orange site, and you may dox me, just as you may publicly insult your neighbor’s loud and unlovely toddler; the defense is merely your own sense of decency, and if you don’t have that then what basis of communication would we have anyway?

Now go and drink that nice cup of tea. It settles the mind, and you’ll feel better afterward.