ennemi

The 1842 retreat from Kabul was the retreat of the British and East India Company forces from Kabul during the First Anglo-Afghan War. An uprising in Kabul forced the then-commander, Major-General William Elphinstone, to fall back to the British garrison at Jalalabad. As the army and its numerous dependents and camp followers began their march, it came under attack from Afghan tribesmen. Many in the column died of exposure, frostbite or starvation, or were killed during the fighting.

In total the British army lost 4,500 troops, along with about 12,000 civilians: the latter comprising both the families of Indian and British soldiers, plus workmen, servants and other Indian camp followers.

Out of more than 16,000 people from the column commanded by Elphinstone, only one European (Assistant Surgeon William Brydon) and a few Indian sepoys reached Jalalabad. Over one hundred British prisoners and civilian hostages were later released.

Liberal ideology is the free square at the center of the bingo card. It's the world view almost all of us inherit from the various authority figures that we grow up around. Reflection, of any sort, can only take you away from it.

Starting from there, it takes years of difficult reflection before you can even contemplate the idea that universal housing, food security and education should be human rights, and that upsetting the status quo to achieve that is a worthwhile goal, and that subsequently using authority to defend those rights against fascists and bourgeois revanchists is morally justifiable.

I also understand that being ideologically liberal means living with extreme cognitive dissonance. They are raised to believe that racism is bad, and are given zero of the intellectual tools necessary to understand why majority-white-european states tend to be astronomically richer than the rest of the world, or why the situation is not improving, and therefore have nothing but racism and associated notions (corruption, evil china influence, etc) to explain it. Similarly they are raised to believe in merit, insisting that hard work and ingenuity are necessarily rewarded by capitalism, and yet have to live with endless examples of the exact contrary in every single sphere of life, up to and including a god damn cheeto beating the most credentialed game-player politician in history and becoming president of the United States of America. It goes on and on, and it cannot be good for the human brain.

When these people retreat into their mind palaces, plug their ears and yell CIA talking points at us, it's hard for me to get mad or think less of them. I just feel sad. I just wish we could trephinate Marxism into these people's head and skip past all of the hyper-conditioned defense mechanisms that USA regime propaganda has hammered into their heads.

That is all

Here's one example (and this is just one example). My workplace makes heavy use of linters and static analyzers. The CI is configured so that if the linter outputs any errors or warnings, the pipelines fail. Often that occurs because an empty code block or type definition contains a space, and the linter really wants to see '{}' instead of '{ }'. I simply cannot imagine the consequences to humanity at large if this excess whitespace ever made it to production. The kicker here is that the default VS Code autofmt wants that singular space to be there, and inserts them itself, and the default Angular linter thinks they really do not belong. I'm not sure which of these two organizations (Microsoft and Google) are right, as both normally emit good practice the way Moses emits commandments, and they are now in direct contradiction with one another.

I have approached colleagues about the idea of maybe turning off some or all of these rules, and was promptly told that I should have my editor configured to run the linter and apply its fixes whenever I save, and given instructions on how to do so. This is a Good Argument, in that it solves my problem effortlessly, but I just can't resign myself to do it, and still find myself embarrassingly pushing commits to apply linter recommendations after opening merge requests. To put it as simply as I can, I have identified The Problem. Please address it. I do not care if your solution is easy and low impact. It does not solve The Problem, it just sticks a layer of paint over it. It's also not just the failing builds that piss me off, it's also that the linter is garbage and overly opinionated and actively makes our code look worse by (for instance) removing line breaks in lengthy call chains or array literals making them longer than 100 characters. Motherfucker I broke that up for a reason.

As far as dysfunction and cargo cult nonsense goes, I have seen a hundred times worse in my time. This is a complete non-issue. But fuck me, I can't do it. I can't be slippery like that anymore. I just can't tolerate all this fucking process that never touches the fundamental problem of engineering nondiscipline. I can't jump on the latest fads that promise to solve every factoring problem and just make code bases wordier and ten times more opaque. I don't want copilot to be fucking turned on by default. It sucks and will always sucks no matter how many teraflops you throw at the LLM and how strongly you believe that AGI is among us. I just want to choke a bitch. I want to punch some poindexters in the face and break their +1.50 glasses.

Maybe I should quit software development? Should I flip burgers? Become an Agile coach? Go fight for the YPG?

Search engines are basically 90% blogspam promotion machines at this point, and the blogspam churning engine is going to become completely autonomous. The tools we're relied on for nearly three decades now are going to become a big virtual tug of war between machine-learning-guided SEO systems and machine-learning-guided ad revenue systems.

Every single anonymous interaction is going to be suspect. The next dogwhistling fucking cryptonazi groyper you run into is probably not even going to be a human being. Machine learning is probably going to elect the next US president. Eventually the medium will become so polluted that we will have to go back to doing everything in person.

Thank you for reading my doompost