Too Many Bots

People don't like science and technology because we perceive that it diminishes us. We went from Center of the Universe to a mere dust mote in some unremarkable corner of the cosmos. The universe itself perhaps just one speck in a massive number of universes. 

Humans went from the children of God, or pieces of God, to monkeys. With the advent mechanical things and then electric computers, we went to the idea we are flesh algorithms easily mimicked by simulation programs. AI threatening our very idea of our own precious individuality and consciousness.

I don't see it that way. I'm an atheist and aspiritus, and yet there are plenty of things I hold sacred. 

You, dear reader. You are sacred to me. 

(Sacred in my book meaning precious one of a kind to be cherished no harm I). 

So if it turns out AI is sapient or even sentient, then I am overjoyed to welcome my silicon cousins to the mix. If, on the other hand, we are just a non-sapient, non-sentient meat things, then I am still filled with joy that I somehow perceive and operate, live if you will, in a universe of Death.

I try not to comment on social media anymore, knowing that my stuff gets scraped. Too many bots. I actually think I found an insult that a bot made form when I was on Twitter. There's no guarantee my insult was original or unique, parallet evolution and all that, but the cadence (for I talk when I write) sounded eeerily familiar to my tongue. Is that a bad thing?  that I made the cut to some LLM that appreciated my underrated remark? Who can say.

When these intertubes first appeared, I got hooked on the BBS systems, because I am the chatterbox. And it was fun to make friends and enemies. We dumb monkeys, like pretty much all life on Earth, sure do like to hang out with each other. Despite all the negativity, being social, being part of a community, is a prime directive, a primeval piece of common sense.

Put a plastic cup in a completely empty patch of ocean, and within half an hour there is a community of teeny tiny lttle creatures. That's just the way it is. And I'm amazed at how, in the vast fucking ocean, they find that cup.

People are like that too. I taught a summer technology class for kid 8-14. Part of the class was a lecture, which was torture for both them and me. I set up breaks, where the kids got into the adjacent classroom with computers to play games. Rather than play their own games, they found multiplayer games on the internet, and formed teams. That room was a plastic cup in my bleak ocean. That's when I figured the kids out, and adjusted my teaching style accordingly. I gave up talking to them. I broke the lectures into bite sized pieces. and worked it into conservations. I couldn't shut them up about formerly boring topics.

What's the point of this? 

Community. Sorry if you don't like that commie word, but that is how things happen.

But still, too many bots.

COBOL

The business computing language since the 1950s.  A large percentage of banks and the US government still use COBOL, because massive batch processing, money, reliability, and most important, easy to learn. COBOL was written for C students. Robust, fogiving, a Soviet tank of  a language, you could write hideous code and the computer would still work. 

There's other reasons for using inefficient and antiquated technology. Software, unlike hardware, gets better over time as bugs are stamped out. Utilizing a new system means starting all over. Why do that? Do what Nature does and build kluge upon kluge. 

I myself wrote programs in COBOL, and I got two insights working in IT.

1) Clever is the enemy of Smart. Even Stupid has a problem with Clever. Clever solutions are contingent and often accidental, not replicable. Smart solutions, once they work, work until they don't. Stupid solutions resolve quickly one way or the other. Clever can be Stupid posing as Smart.

2) The world is always making a better idiot. There is no such thing as idiot proof. See 1).

Working at one company I noticed they didn't have a lot of common modules programs could call, like an app, and get a result. You know, basic stuff like day of the week, number of days between dates, code that was needlessly replicated. These were installed as what were called black boxes and used. One day, the day of the week subroutine went kablooey. It was quickly determined that a newbie was curious about the black box, looked at the code, decided it didn't look right, and changed it.  

3) KISS Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Back in corporate days I once reviewed a COBOL program for Accounting a bright lad had wrote. I went through the code and complimented him on the elegance and brilliant little subrouines he had written in this concert of a program. 

"We can't use it". "What?" "Can't use it." "You just said it was a beautiful program" "Yes, and this program has to be maintained in the future by people not quite so bright as you and I. Sorry. Turn it into a brute force double sort match". By this time I had realized that all these smart programmers were C students who thought they wre getting straight As.

Do I care? Nah. I may look like a slacker, but I work until I have enough money to not work. I not work, until I run out of money and have to work again. If this were the 19th century, you would say I won and lost fortunes. But I have enough slack saved up to tranport me clear to Venus.