I belong to that weird group between Millenials and GenZ. I remember having one desktop computer that the entire family shared. Folks had admin access, the kids had normal users. Glued together Flash games. Back before it was cool to be a weeb, countless hours spent reading wikis and comments on the manga I was reading.

Ironically my father’s name sits on patents in the domain of silicon photonics, yet to this day they have kneecapped broadband in their home. Pro tip, read up on why we paid for nation-wide fiber and why we still don’t have it.

Home internet can reach gigabit speeds, 1000x the old dialup noises. We have access to more computing power than we have ever had in human history. Yet basic webpages take more than 3 seconds to load. Why is my client device assembling an entire webpage with JS. Send me the fucking document over the wire.

I remember when the teachers took us into the new library that the Middle School had constructed. The librarians pointing out the rows of encyclopedias. And then told how all of them are getting digitized. By the time we’re adults, we would have massive portions of human knowledge digitized and searchable. Instead we have clankers that can produce volumes of disinformation rivaling the flood Matsya Avatāra guided the boat through. Unfortunately like Manu, Kalki isn’t fixing this mess.

I remember when social media didn’t suck. If my writing hasn’t made it clear. It has taken my entire teenage and adult life to practice how to be “proper” in social situations. Still something I’m far from perfect at. But the early social media let me smooth over that. I got to be cringe. Express myself as my opinions and thoughts were forming. Connect and keep up with scattered relatives. Instead my timeline is a feed full of strangers talking over one another in “arguments” and slop.

Back when group chats weren’t the modern version of chain forwarding.

Back before video streaming was littered with low quality ads.

Back when adult content and gambling came from sketchy online websites. Instead major tech companies get paid to serve them in Ads. Some of us remember the old numbered rule whose tags got scraped by LLM researchers.

And on that topic, back when Advertisements would actually tell you what the product did instead of sell you a vibe.

Now I have white hairs slowly invading my luscious locks; I’m tired and grumpy.

Here’s what generated the banner image. Extended my script from last time to produce more fractals.

cargo run --manifest-path scripts/fractal/Cargo.toml -- \
  --fractal burning_ship \
  --colorX "#00BFFF" \
  --colorY "#00FF99" \
  --colorZ "#8A2BE2" \
  --noise 0.7 \
  --gamma 3 \
  --seed 7 \
  --out public/images/blog/blog-post-46.ppm