i am a lazy piece of shit and my computer reflects that
A blog post on my relationship with computing
okay so people always get confused when i say i hate coding but also my entire life is automated. they think that's a contradiction. it's not. the answer is extremely simple and a little humiliating:
i am lazy as fuck.
that's it. that's the whole reason i learned to code. i live on a computer. not in a "i'm a tech guy" way. in a "i am physically on this machine most of my waking life and if i don't control it completely i will lose my mind" way.
things i do with a computer
i see my relationship with computing as a tool for thought and leverage, not as a career identity or a personality. i have zero interest in it as something that makes you interesting. you know the type. "founder. builder."
So what i actually do?
i do everything. mail. files. writing. reading. and mostly math.
My actual interests lie in ideas. physics, philosophy, and the abstract models that describe reality. Code is simply an extension of my own brain and the fastest way to turn a thought into something tangible. if i want to test an intuition, i build it. if building it is annoying, i automate it. if automating it is annoying, i simplify the underlying thing until it isn't.
what that actually looks like: simulating life like Conway, deriving the einstein-hilbert action in LaTeX, or rendering boobies with math papers on Riemannian geometry lol. I just want to have fun.
what i admire about Turing is that computation began, for him, as a consequence of a mathematical question. he wanted to understand the limits of formal reasoning and the machine followed naturally from that pursuit. he didn't set out to build a computer. he set out to answer something, and the answer required a machine, so he built one.
the relationship feels familiar. i care about foundational questions too. when an idea requires computation to explore, i write code. when a proof needs experimentation, i build a model. the machine is never the point. it's what the question demands.
he answered this, then moved immediately to the next: can machines think?
that one's still open. we've built systems that can imitate parts of thought well enough that nobody agrees on what to call them.
i find that fascinating for the same reason computation interests me. both force us to ask uncomfortable questions about what reasoning actually is. mathematics gave us a language for formal thought. AI is forcing us to confront how much of our own thinking is formal in the first place.
TL;DR
i build exclusively to have fun
simpler processes = more time for shit you love
being a minimalistic freak and using emacs makes automation easy. navigation in your file explorer is easier when it's your terminal. when your editor is emacs, you can extend it to do literally anything you want. tools being simple text in, text out, the whole computer becomes composable and clicking on buttons makes me feel like a retarded ape.
i have a single keystroke that compiles my latex, archives the output, and syncs my notes.
you are living in other people's computers and paying for the privilege
owning your machine is part of owning your thinking and I don't like software making decisions on my behalf.
when you use proprietary software, you are a tenant. Microhard and CrApple owns your stuff. How? think about what a normal web browser is actually doing. a normal web browser, loading a webpage, runs javascript, sends your behavioral data to different advertising networks, fingerprints your device, and delivers you a paragraph of text wrapped in megabytes of surveillance infrastructure.
designed to extract attention and money from me
and the worst case is some bureaucrat in a building you've never heard of deciding what you're allowed to see and what quietly disappears.
i don't accept it. not because i'm principled. i'm not especially principled, i'm lazy. we established this. having things done to my computer without my knowledge makes me feel cucked. i am the only one who should be deciding what runs on my machine.
so fuck them, run linux.
simple machine. complicated questions.
that's the whole setup.
i'm not a computer person. i'm a person who needed to think, and the computer was the best tool for it. that's all this ever was.
written in emacs.