A "1500 lines" of nihilistic code written by GOD

Tom Waits, an eminent musician/poet famously said, with a cigarette in his hand on a national television, “I would have a bottle in front of me rather than frontal lobotomy”.

And this line strikes to me, not with seductive optimism but with much more rational melancholy.

Hear me out listen (fuck your snack, keep it aside we need to talk), I have read some handful of books to ponder about it and come to a conclusion that Mark Manson described (Yes, I didn’t really ponder).

It is better to have a problem of passion than not having passion at all in the first place.

And yes nerd, if you are smart enough then you might have already guessed it.

“Programmers took it dead seriously.” You know ‘Problem Solvers’.

When I was in school, my English teacher used to emphasize a sentence a lot which is, “Writers make choices!”, which simply means that nothing is ever said or done in a void.

But guess what, I just did it, I wrote all of this in vain. It makes no sense to what I am going to write now, it might (even I ain’t sure). But uncertainty is important, void is important, useless reading is important and so is useless thinking. So, titan, we up?

Don’t you ever look up at the sky and say to a 90,000 people getting their pants wet at your voice watching you put out a speech and say, “Wembley, I am a thinker”.

If you haven’t done that yet, picture that in your head right now.

You are making Wembley think about it, let’s go.

Don’t you sometimes feel your life is a 1500 lines of machine code written by some mysterious guy living somewhere in the sky and just feel sad about it. That is a bit of an exaggeration but hey, who cares right. 90,000 people are waiting.

And the problem is the code can only be understood by him or maybe her.

But how have we been dealing with it?

We all program in C, Python, JavaScript but have we ever taken a pause to think, how on earth are mere lines of codes doing such magnificent stuff.

We do it hardly, because it’s too overwhelming to think and understand it. And it’s not quite important to understand that to do all the amazing stuffs we want to do.

When we do high level programming stuff we don’t really bother to ponder, we say, it’s working fine, why bother?

But when we get to the root level stuffs, OS, firmware and when interacting directly with hardware, we gotta have some understanding of how the stuff works because if we make an error there, there’s no way we will be able to do all the hot higher level stuff.

So, Wembley, life is just that. When we are chilling in our yachts or maybe we are just happy, we don’t really find it prominent to bother about what life is, what it consists of.

But when we are at the brink of despair, the only thing that bothers us is questions, questions of who wrote this whole drama, whole lines of code that we can’t really wrap our head around with little to no docs with no internet connection whatsoever. Enough to make us go crazy, right.

And we somehow get a problem solved, get a rush of elation and boom, another Hitler unfolds before our eyes, but this time to decrease our balls to one.

We build operating systems with a new god, nevertheless forgetting deep down all these systems work on the same 1500 lines of code. We feel this is the new freedom but we don’t really get out of it. With more and more operating systems, we create more ways to entangle ourselves in those 1500 lines of code again.

So, where the hell are we supposed to go Wembley (Never forget).

The only way is to rise above, go beyond this 1500 lines of code. Is AI the way? I don’t think so, it might be yet another fake god with fake promises.

Should we follow, Musk to the Mars or maybe Jesus to Jerusalem. But Jesus is supposedly hung on the wall and has become just another cool wallpaper of our computers and Musk is a manchild.

Are we stuck in this loop forever then or is there a way? Is there a base case to this recursion? Is turning inwards and rewriting code for yourself a better idea or just sailing the code already written, a better hand to hold onto?

You might be expecting answers Wembley, but guess what even I am uncertain about it.

But as I mentioned above in the article, uncertainty is important, void is important, useless reading is important and so is useless thinking, to create to make our own base cases and make this ridiculously infinite loop an walking work of art.

Only then we can chill in the terminal window with our own little friend, with no directories to move to and discuss why programmers are not racists.

Wembley, grateful for your time. Sabin Ranabhat, signing off.