#introductions

pho4cexa

Hi, I’m pho4cexa. I know it’s a strange pseudonym.

I love the craft of software; I loathe the software industry.

omni/bi married leftist atheist parent.
I use xe/xem/xyr pronouns.Here’s how you might use xe/xem pronouns in a sentence: “Xe is actually fine with standard ‘he’-style pronouns, but declared xyr preference for this neopronoun in solidarity. But mostly because it sounds cool and scifi to xem.”

Present location: Southern California, USA.

Occupation

I spend most of my time making software. It’s my career, and my hobby.

I’ve also taught myself some electronics, mostly in the service of creating an interesting computer keyboard. Here’s some electronics things I did:

Study

I like mathematics and I regret not studying more of it in university. I was in Math Club and one year managed to place #10 in a statewide mathematics contest. :not_bad:

I wish employment forced me to improve my mathematics skills. Happily, my most recent employer made more use of them than any other has previously. Which is a bit ironic because all the other employers were tech sector, and that employer was not.

Politics

I’m some flavor of leftist but I don’t know precisely which.Maybe I’m progressive left or outsider left? I don’t know so I’ll just enumerate and let you decide what to call me.

 I believe in:

On the other hand, I have little confidence in our ability to fix the voting mechanism that entrenches a same-y flip-flopping two-party political system, in my lifetime. Maybe progress is too slow and drastic change is the only option?

 Many people say capitalism should end, and, while I don’t disagree, I think strong regulation, welfare systems, universal healthcare, and universal basic income could arrest a lot of the suffering that capitalism inflicts while being more stepwise-achievable here in the USA.

Religion

I’m an atheist; I strongly believe that no gods exist. Rationale:

  1. No evidence has convinced me that anything supernatural exists (which would make me technically agnostic), but moreover,

  2. I find those gods described by dominant religions to be highly unethical, so I wouldn’t revere them even if I somehow became convinced of their existence.

I think most of our religions are unhealthy, as is most belief in the supernatural.

I tend not to wear atheism on my sleeve because:

  1. the community and 2010s “movement” that I was into for fifteen minutes turned super toxic and embarrassing: The train wreck that was the New Atheism.

  2. I don’t think it’s productive to harangue people about their religious beliefs, as long as they’re not using them as a cudgel.

  3. Having an internet fight with someone about religion or politics is an inefficient use of your time unless you strongly care about that person, or you have a big audience who might benefit from the exchange.

  4. Since things seemed to be steadily improving for a while I was feeling less urgency to be vocal about it. However, I am sad to learn that the rate of improvement has leveled off since 2010.

    Ha, there’s so many terrible problems here in the 2020s though. Even though most of them are intertwined with and bolstered by religiosity in some way, they’d remain even if it dwindled away.

Reading

I like speculative fiction and fantasy with transhumanist themes by feminist authors.

I like stories with generous queer and transgender representation. A better way to phrase this might be: stories without generous queer and transgender representation betray their author’s prejudices and/or inexperience, which makes for a shit story that dispels my suspension of disbelief, and gets chucked into the bin.

A decade ago I began to feel really uncomfortable that, for some reason, the science fiction I read was written almost exclusively by straight, white, cis, men. To address that, I declared a moratorium on fiction by straight white cis men. Instead, I actively sought out fiction by more diverse authors to frontload my to-read pile.

That turned out to be a fantastic decision with even better outcomes than I had hoped for.

I’ve encountered the best fiction of my life.

There were few disappointments, but those that occurred were mild instead of enraging.

These days, the moratorium has been relaxed to a simple policy: straight white cis men go to the bottom of the to-read stack. I’m sorry Scalzi and Stross, your stuff is enjoyable and I’ll get around to it, eventually. Maybe.

Some say one shouldn’t consider the politics of creators of art or fiction when considering their work; I strongly disagree. Especially in works of fiction, narratives are vastly improved when an author’s constructed universe takes for granted ideas like: women are people, queer people are people, and trans people are people.

Food

I think veganism is indisputably the healthiest and most ethical diet for almost all humans, for the reduction of global warming, and for the reduction of suffering of animal life.

I don’t think it’s useful to be purist about it, or to make it an identity instead of a diet.There’s some interesting parallels between veganism, free software, and feminism: I think all three movements are hindered by their tendency to become an identity that one must strictly adhere to or else be called hypocritical.

It’s counterproductive to criticize vegetarians, pescafarians, etc., for not being ethical enough. The closer to a vegan diet the better, but it would be better still to get many people to eat less meat than to get fewer to go strict-vegan.

I really loathe vocal anti-vegans though. I’ve literally never met the stereotypical “pushy vegan” but I’ve heard the jokes about them too many times. In my country, meat culture is tied into toxic masculinity as well.

Having said all these things: I’m not vegan, or even vegetarian.This cognitive dissonance—consciously behaving in a way that I fully understand to be less ethical—might mean I’m a bad person…

 I’d be healthier if I were. I try not to eat too much meat, I try to choose the vegan or vegetarian option when it’s easily available, that’s about the extent of my willpower on the subject.

Environment

I’ve lived in Atlanta before and Southern California now, but I complain about it a lot. I spent my formative years between the Adirondacks and the Catskills and dearly miss green forested hills on every horizon, colorful autumns, rain, rivers and lakes, and snowy winters. I hope I’m lucky enough to live among trees and snow again someday.

Pains

I struggle badly with time management. It never feels like I have enough time to do anything I want to. Estimating how long it will take to build a piece of software is supposed to be a core skill for us programmers, something you figure out by the time you graduate from junior to associate. But I’ve been at this decades and it’s still the most anxiety-inducing part of the job for me.

Computer-toucher opinions

Languages

I’m most experienced with Python but my latest employment has thrown me into Elixir and ClojureScript and enjoyed all three.

I’ve dabbled with Chicken Scheme, Rust, Haskell, Guile Scheme, Forth, and uxntal but I’d like to learn them better.

I’m excited by efforts to replace the corporate-centric world-wide-web with light, indie, distributed, peer-to-peer, technology.

Operating System

I use Linux everywhere. Work, play, desktop, laptop, router, containers, cloud computers. I don’t like it, but I like it more than anything else I’ve tried.

I hate Microsoft Windows, I hate macOS, and I avoid situations that would have me endure using them. I used to brag about the positive experiences I often had using Linux that would be unavailable under Windows or MacOS. But I don’t harangue people who use those other systems.

Post-AI update: …but now that Linux welcomes stolen code laundered through a language model and injected into the kernel without human comprehension, I’m trying to convert. Again. Late in life.

Windows and Mac remain non-starters, of course. NetBSD, Redox, 9Front, Haiku, and Illumos are, at the time of writing, the most interesting-looking paths to try.

Linux Distribution

Debian is was the Linux distribution that I preferred for more than a decade for work and play. Then they took a vote which resulted in “no opinion” on the question of banning the use of generative ai. I’m done with it.

I have been very interested in Guix for a long time, which has user-installable packages, declarative reproducable systems and builds, implemented in a powerful expressive lisp. But it remains a Linux distribution, using the slop-laced Linux kernel. Now I must reconsider: would studying Guix be a waste of time? I feel like learning the system’s design would be somewhat beneficial, but I’m still going to invest more effort into abandoning Linux systems entirely.

Editor

I used Vim for two decades, but I envied Emacs users for their lispy extension language, their built-in shell, and org-mode. So a few years ago I switched to Emacs by way of Spacemacs, and more recently I switched to Doom Emacs. How lucky I was to have moved early, before Vim embraced slop.

I still envy people who a Good At Emacs or especially Good At Org-Mode, and I often miss things I could do better with vim: large files, editing diffs, 3-way diffs, quick startup, per-project configuration and extension.

I think some other editor projects like the Xi Editor or guile-emacs are neat, too.

Nerd politics

I used to be a rabid fan of Copyleft: an agreement based in Copyright law stating that if I grant rights to you for a piece of software (or literature or art) then you must grant those same rights back to others.

Toward that end I was also a big fan of the AGPLv3 license, the Free Software Foundation that promoted it, and the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Proprietary software is my enemy. But I also disliked permissively-licensed software, since it ends up mostly providing free labor to already-powerful corporations.

And then:

Today, it feels like Copyleft has become meaningless within a legal system that allows copyright to be ignored. Today, it feels like all the institutions erected to protect an ethical stance have betrayed us.

I don’t have a clear position or strategy now; only seething rage in opposition to the people that did this.