Thinking Small

Even the simplest technical project requires help from others. When you have little social capital, you will find it hard to get anything off the ground. Sadly, social worlds are full of nonsense, and instead of gluing flap A into slot A, you can spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out the calculus of sociopathic human interaction. And one questions whether the project might not be conceived a little smaller, to get rid of some of the social overhead. And so the project shrinks and shrinks until you imagine it can be done alone. But even in its tiniest rendition the work remains vast. (I'm reminded of Kafka's "Message from the Emperor".) And so you look back out into the world trying to find someone. You reach out hopelessly hopeful, but it's just another slap in the face. And your world gets smaller and smaller.

Right now my ambition is to read a text file into Rust /without/ its &str type that's intrinsically UFT-8 and silently chokes on non-UTF-8 material.

That's how small my world has become.

As a matter of fact I have a social life, strange and entirely offline. Besides the occasional SMS, I never communicate with anyone I know IRL over the Internet, and I forbid people to bring their Internet bullshit into my home. I view people on social media as fundamentally psychologically compromised, like drug addicts. I've lost friends who decided they wanted to start shit over IMs instead of protecting real life relationships. I banished them.

Sadly, none of my IRL friends understand the Linux kernel, or can even type commands into the terminal. They are not going to help me.

Besides Gemini, as a kind of experiment, I do not sustain any kind of social media presence. I've never had an account on Facebook, or Twitter. I've never had a Google account. I've never owned a smartphone. I have viewed the sweeping transformations of big tech social media entirely from the outside, /as an outsider/. I know the rules, but they are not in me. Social media seems like such a disease, but the disease is /people/, the people I need to get my project off the ground, people I am hopeless to communicate with. Well meaning people who live on the other side of the glass, beyond the fun house mirror of the Internet that has corrupted everything. Who are these people? I will never know.

And so in the end it's just me and the cursor, blinking in the void.

This is one reason why Gemini has been so revolutionary for me. It proves the value of thinking small.

Gruber's Markdown is another revelation: Regex is enough. No you don't need a fancy parser to get good ideas off the ground.

Gruber did it on his own. Gemini was solidified by two people (Solderpunk and Sean Conman). Lagrange (and Bubble) are one person.

You /can/ work (more or less) alone and reach your technical goals.

You can dig a trench in the dark. You can fight invisible wars.

It's just going to take time.

And thinking small.

🚀 blah_blah_blah

May 10 · 3 weeks ago