5 ms·
I no longer need the Internet. My hamster chewed through a CAT cable last week; it took me three days to notice, so complete was my Zen immersion in creating
by samizdatum 13y ago
I no longer need the Internet.
My hamster chewed through a CAT cable last week; it took me three days to notice, so complete was my Zen immersion in creating a period-accurate replica of the first Galilean telescope, using only Haskell lenses.
When it finally dawned on me I had attained a sophistication that transcended the internet, I felt the inessentials fall away from my craft in an instant, and I was left in an affectless state of pure, actualized creation.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the Internet isn't a great tool- I remember when I, too, used the Internet on a regular basis, daily even, and perhaps even relied on it. If you have no idea about anything whatsoever, it can be a fantastic resource. But when I want to know something, I don't look up the documentation, or download the source code. I am the source code, the documentation, the alpha build, the omega build. The Seraphic gatekeeper of the NANDs. The bit stops here.
So I ask you- are you ready to unplug? Because I already did.
- nunodonato 13y agohow did you post?
- lclarkmichalek 13y agoButterflies, I imagine
- mvikramaditya 13y agoI presume you mean this? http://xkcd.com/378/ http://xkcd.com/378/
- unfamiliar 13y agoDo we really need every reference spelled out explicitly?
- wfunction 13y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
- kiallmacinnes 13y agodoesn't that still count as internet access? ;) granted, it certainty doesn't qualify as broadband.. birdband maybe?
- enscr 13y agoWith the submit button ofcourse
- TeMPOraL 13y agoHe wrote it on paper and asked a friend to post. Though that would still count as an access to Internet of some kind, with human transport layer separating his message from the nearest Ethernet port.
- decentrality 13y agoSneakernet
- anonymfus 13y agoHis nickname is a reference to Самиздат: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Самиздат http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Самиздат
- _nedR 13y agoHe is The One.
- habitue 13y agoSee, this is why I come to HN. In a reddit circle jerk comment, there'd be all kinds of references to being "enlightened by my own intelligence". Hacker News circle jerk comments are just so much more original
- michaelwww 13y agoWise hamster practices detachment from the internet.
- wdr1 13y agoHonestly, I don't get this. I remember working in a computer lab in the 90s and talking to one of the graduate students I really respected. She had interrupted a discussion some of us were having about compiler errors & warnings, specifically the various flags to pass to enable them. She was opposed to them -- strongly. I don't remember everything, but I remember he discussing how the days of punch card were ideal. The compile/execution phase was so divorced from act of writing your program, that you had to be really sure about what you were going. You would go over it several times before you find out if it ever compiled. For a long time, I took her words to heart. I still enabled the warnings & errors, but that was because I didn't trust myself. My goal was to get to the point were I wouldn't need to. After several years, I realized something: She was wrong. I would waste a lot of time identifying things like silly typos, etc. Things the compiler would have caught in an instance. I switched my habit to compiling frequently, just to make sure I hadn't missed anything. I didn't expect the compiler to be magical, but I also stopped under-utilizing my tools too. And that's the same way I view Stack Overflow. I learned to program in a small town, when most computers didn't even have a modem. If I had a problem & got stuck, that was it. I would either figure it or have to give up. Sure, sometimes I would figure things out on my own. But that would take days. And, I hate to say it, but in a lot of cases, I just gave up. On the other hand, I picked up Objective C a few years. The difference was night & day. If I couldn't figure things out after an hour (my general bar), I'd resort to Googling & asking on Stack Overflow. I have no doubt that I learned more and learned faster with the second system. The goal shouldn't be to reduce your toolset. It should be to learn to use them effectively.