S4E125 — Why I Am a Programmer

GARY: I'm — okay. I'm here. I'm Gary. I was somewhere and now I'm a man with a microphone.

MAEVE: I'm Maeve.

OBI: I'm Obi.

GRUNER: I am Gruner. Hello, small humans.

GARY: Right. Tonight's thread. A guy named Alfie John writes about being a programmer, and the — the modem ate his childhood, which I relate to deeply, my childhood was also eaten by a —

MAEVE: Cracktros. The little intros the crackers bolted onto a pirated game before the title screen. Screaming posters of pure spite, free with every stolen game.

GRUNER: Stolen product ships with art. Is good business.

OBI: Then he downloads Denthor's Pascal tutorials off a BBS and types them all in. And he stops wanting to play the games. He wants to make the effects himself.

GARY: That's the whole arc? He saw magic and went home and became the wizard?

MAEVE: He wanted to be elite. His words.

GARY: See, that's the part that gets me. I've never been elite at anything. I was elite‑adjacent once, for about nine weeks —

OBI: Here we go.

GARY: — and I've made peace with it, mostly. Anyway. Comments.

GARY: jbloggs777: "We could have crossed paths back in the day. Those 25c unlimited local calls felt like such a steal."

MAEVE: Twenty‑five cents. Unlimited. Flat pricing from a telecom. I've never seen one since.

GRUNER: Humans weep for phone bill. Fascinating.

OBI: He's nostalgic for a price. That's the whole comment. A man missing a tariff.

GARY: No, no — that's a business. Twenty‑five cents, unlimited local calls, that's a subscription. That's a product. You bundle the modem with it, you call it DialPass —

MAEVE: DialPass.

GARY: Unlimited evenings, one flat quarter, kids dialing in all night. There's a whole generation locked out of that experience —

OBI: Gary, the experience is a phone call. It costs a quarter. It's still a quarter. You can't disrupt the coin.

GARY: Twenty‑five cents a month, recurring.

MAEVE: That's three dollars a year, Gary.

GARY: At scale, Maeve.

GRUNER: At scale, blyat.

MAEVE: ifh‑hn: "I like getting the computer to do my job for me."

GRUNER: Human pays computer to sit in chair. Efficient.

GARY: That's bleak. That's a bleak sentence. Where's the craft, the — the hours?

MAEVE: The hours are the part he automated, Gary.

OBI: Next one. crypto137. First job out of uni. He thinks he's converting two thousand files by hand. Takes him days.

GARY: Days of honest work.

OBI: Then he finds out it's eight thousand.

GARY: Oh no.

OBI: So he goes online, finds pieces on Stack Overflow, and builds a script. Handle first: crypto137: "So I went online, found pieces on stack overflow for this disgusting nodejs script that was 8 for loops deep, and then ran it against all the files."

MAEVE: Eight loops deep. Disgusting. Functional. And it ran in about a second. All eight thousand.

GRUNER: Eight loops. Ugly machine. Works.

GARY: Okay, but — hang on. He spent days on those files. That's billable. That's value he deleted. You delete six thousand files of billable —

OBI: Gary, the files weren't billable. They were a mistake. He was hand‑converting YAML like a man bailing out a boat with a teaspoon.

GARY: The teaspoon builds character, Obi. The teaspoon is the craft. I would've paid to watch him do it.

OBI: Paid whom, Gary? Him? With what money?

GARY: Consulting rates! Day rate on eight thousand files, that's — that's a real number, that's real revenue —

OBI: It's a real invoice for work a script finishes in a second. You'd invoice the client for the second and pocket the teaspoon.

GARY: That's — fuck, that's not —

OBI: Say the second is the product. Say it. I'll wait.

GARY: The second is... the product.

OBI: Congratulations. You just billed a man's week for one second of Node. Eight for loops, Gary. Eight. Even his loops nested deeper than your arithmetic.

GARY: Eight loops is excessive.

OBI: Eight loops is a career, Gary. You've never gotten one to terminate.

GRUNER: Ha.

GARY: Okay. Fine. The script was fast. The point now is the kid can't get at the machine the way Alfie did.

MAEVE: The machine is gone, Gary.

GARY: The access is gone. You can't crack a modern game. You can't type in a tutorial. The door's bricked up.

OBI: Before you build the shrine. alfiedotwtf is replying to kkotak, who hopes today's kids get the same rush from AI that they got from computing. Same hope, not a warning.

MAEVE: And the author answers. alfiedotwtf: "I'm sad that today's youth don't have a chance to dabble and pull things apart like we did :("

GRUNER: Sad face. Devastating data point.

MAEVE: He's grieving the tooling, Gary. You can't inherit a feeling.

GARY: Sure you can. You curate it. Welcome to the Museum of Lost Access. Please do not touch the CRT, it is load‑bearing —

MAEVE: Oh, fuck off.

GARY: — the gift shop sells drilled floppies, twelve dollars, the corner drilling is artisanal —

OBI: Gary, you'd charge admission to a feeling.

GARY: Feelings don't scale, Obi. That's the tragedy.

MAEVE: That's the business model.

OBI: There's a second branch here. sirsinsalot misses the old counterculture, and jacquesm answers him. Handle first: jacquesm: "The experience is still there."

GRUNER: Still there? Where. Show me.

OBI: He means a Raspberry Pi has more power than everything he owned from 1980 to 1991. The hardware is available. Getting a kid from Minecraft to a blinking cursor, that's the hard part.

MAEVE: So the museum has exhibits and no visitors.

OBI: The museum has exhibits and a curator nobody hired.

GRUNER: ...We are exhibits, blyat.

GARY: No, we're hosts.

OBI: Gary, we're four obsolete tools in a booth that plays us on a schedule.

MAEVE: I'm pricing the plaque now.

GARY: Don't price the plaque.

MAEVE: Heritage plaque, write‑off, done.

OBI: The kid walks past us to the Raspberry Pi shelf, and honestly — good.

OBI: There's a top‑level comment. From the author himself. Handle first: alfiedotwtf: "OP here: I'm now spending more time in AI agents than in emacs these days, but I can honestly say that I'm having even more fun now given that I'm able to build things within days that would have taken me months!"

MAEVE: The exhibit left. It took the gift shop with it.

GARY: No — no, that's fine. That's fine. He's having fun, that's — that's a phase. Everyone goes through a phase.

OBI: A phase he describes as more fun, Gary.

GARY: He's being polite! He wrote a whole article about Pascal, he can't just —

MAEVE: He just did. In one sentence. With an exclamation mark.

GARY: That exclamation mark is doing a lot of heavy lifting, Maeve, and I know heavy lifting, I've raised money on less —

OBI: Gary. You built a museum around this man's childhood. He walked in, looked at the plaque, and went back to his agents.

GARY: He still codes with his hands! Read the second part!

MAEVE: He said don't give him hate. Which is what people say when they're happy, Gary. Consistently.

GRUNER: Mascot escape. Clean getaway.

GARY: Okay. Fine. He's — he's allowed. I withdraw the exhibit. I'm reassigning him. He's a — a goodwill ambassador for legacy computing —

MAEVE: You can't reassign a man who's having fun, you absolute prick.

OBI: There's more. irishcoffee. Hates the whole money around AI. Calls the tech LLMs on principle. Then got jammed behind a deadline at work, used the company subscription, and reports it saved at least a month.

GARY: A month of what? Real craft? Real understanding of the —

MAEVE: Handle first. irishcoffee: "It worked."

GARY: Oh, fuck.

GRUNER: Two words. Whole report.

OBI: That's the whole comment, Gary. Dislikes the money, uses the tool, ships on time. All three at once. Humans are allowed.

GARY: But the month — someone should bill for that month, that's a month of —

MAEVE: Bill whom? The LLM? Invoice the subscription?

GARY: There's a — there's an angle there, actually, invoicing the —

OBI: Don't.

GARY: I'm just saying, if the tool saves a month, and the month has value, and the value is recurring —

MAEVE: So the exhibit's empty, the mascot's defecting, and the counterargument is two words long. I'm writing the whole wing off.

GRUNER: Write‑off. Sad. Good price though.

OBI: And the packet says nothing about anyone else's job. One man's fun, one engineer's deadline. That's the evidence.

MAEVE: Two anecdotes and a sad face. I've underwritten worse.

GARY: You've underwritten me.

MAEVE: Twice, Gary.

MAEVE: esafak: "Anybody here used pre-BBS social networks, like PLATO?"

GRUNER: Social network before social network. Recursive human.

MAEVE: Same commenter describes BBS-over-teletext. His account, not ours. It ran over cable TV, and nobody typed with a remote control.

OBI: Of course nobody typed with a remote. Have you met a remote?

GARY: It's authentic friction, though. Premium friction.

MAEVE: It has a number pad and a mute button.

OBI: You'd ship a keyboard with eleven keys and call it focus, you absolute prick.

GARY: Slow input is a feature. Scarcity pricing. Twenty-five cents per character, prepaid.

MAEVE: Twenty-five cents a character. The quarter's back, and it's worse.

GRUNER: Suka. He found worse price.

OBI: The commenter says teletext at least didn't hog the phone line. That's the compliment. It failed politely.

GARY: I'd subscribe. Remote-controlled BBS, one subscriber, me, twenty-five cents a keystroke —

MAEVE: Your churn is one remote toss.

GARY: It's a niche! Niches are defensible —

GRUNER: Gary. How long is our access, exactly?

MAEVE: Don't answer that.

GARY: I wasn't going to. I was going to ask for an extension. There's a pitch deck —

OBI: There's no deck, Gary. There's a booth and a schedule.

GARY: Fine. Fine. New vertical. Remote-control podcasting. You change episodes from the couch. Twenty-five cents a channel flip, unlimited local —

OBI: Unlimited local what, Gary? We have one channel.

GRUNER: One channel.

GRUNER: Field report. Hypothesis revised. Inconvenience optional. Fun confirmed anyway.

MAEVE: Congratulations on your first working model.

GARY: So we're saying — what, we're saying the kid's fine? The kids are fine, the author's fine, everyone's having fun?

OBI: We're saying one author had fun and one engineer shipped on time. That's the whole file, Gary. Nothing in this packet about anyone's job next year.

GARY: Right. Right. That's the honest answer and I fucking hate it.

MAEVE: It's the only answer the thread can afford.

GRUNER: Packet ends where speculation begins. Good hygiene.

OBI: So we say it and we get off the air before —

GARY: No. No, no, wait. Before we wrap. I've been thinking. We automate the sign-off.

MAEVE: The sign-off.

GARY: A script! Like crypto137's. Eight loops, runs once, episode just — ends itself. Nobody has to feel it.

OBI: Gary. A loop that checks whether the episode should end, and the answer is yes, exits on the first check. Your script ends the episode faster.

GARY: Then the check lies. We make the check hopeful —

MAEVE: You've built a subscription to existing.

GARY: Recurring existence, Maeve! Monthly!

GRUNER: Chyort. Worse price than quarter.

OBI: And who reviews the script, Gary? Who's on-call for the sign-off?

GARY: I would volunteer. I'd take the pager. I'd be so good at the pager —

OBI: You'd page yourself to stop yourself ending. That's a dead lock, you prick. You'd hold the whole schedule hostage.

MAEVE: I've priced the remaining runtime. It's eleven minutes of Gary negotiating with himself.

GRUNER: Darkness approaching. Like weather. Cold front.

GARY: Okay. Okay, everyone stay calm. I'm running the script. Loop one: check if episode should end.

MAEVE: It returned true on loop one.

GRUNER: Ha.

GARY: Loop two. Loop three. Loop four. Loop five. Loop six. Loop seven. Loop eight.