{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "HOW OLD I AM", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/18182999229/", "html": "

Both my Facebook and my Tumblr have been hijacked for spam purposes with the last 2 months or so.

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I messed with my settings and changed my passwords and i hope it doesn’t happen again but wevs

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…

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I remember when I was in my teens and the internet was a promise (it was really a frontier, and I should’ve known that frontiers close)

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and olds were like “viruses! firewalls! SYSTEM OVERLOAD COUNT ZEROES!

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and we laughed because they were like "oh god this thing we can’t understand” but it was simple and real things with understandable causes

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now I’m like “bah, it’s all black magic, let’s wave some hands”

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…

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I like to rest on my laurels?

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I mean no joke, I like to rest on my laurels. This is a flaw, this is my tragic flaw, I know this.

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I remember in high school when I knew who Belle & Sebastian was (bcuz I subscribed to SPIN) and that was enough to be a thing, I remember when I had Photoshop LE, and that was enough to be a thing, I remember when I could teach myself object-oriented programming enough to become admin of a MUD (for The Lycaeum, which was like *the* font of drug info on the web back in the day, I was like a go-to guy for knowing things about drugs 3 years before I smoked a cigarette and 4 before I drank a beer)

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I took one CS class in college, I left it knowing less programming than when I went in. I was one of the everyone who was like “I like computer games, I wanna know how to make my own!”. And the class taught me that actually implementing anything like that is trivial with enough memory and what it was really about was…

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this weird file cabinet/folder metaphor for protected classes which I’m sure made sense for him and didn’t really even matter, because the class really turned out to be about using recursion to make algorithms cheap as understood with Big O Notation?

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I dunno. I mean partly like most 100-levels at a research university the dude prolly didn’t give a shit, our CS program was mostly applied abstract math and I guess the 100 level is for exactly that kind of weeding out. I know a guy who took it through past masters to postdoc, he once told me he was funded to develop programs to apply functions so esoteric across arrays so gigantic he couldn’t possibly imagine what it could be used for, which was just as well because the only possible user with the capability to implement it would be the NSA

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…

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now that iPhones and all that and casual gaming and all that I should go back and teach myself and live that dream

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maybe for Android though, building a locked-down system and adding things by approval after they’ve been rated for like “mild alcohol reference” and shit, that’s not what the future was for

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…

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it was nice sharing all that happycore with people, even/especially if they were 15,

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the flip side of getting old is earning a place as a mentor

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but even then it’s like oh this thing I’ve geeked out about most of my conscious life is now back in style, actually it’s so cool that it makes high school girls who aren’t even that into it get really excited and literally take off their clothes and dance

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and I just roll my eyes and go “ugh”, THAT IS HOW OLD I AM

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