Building programs that are useful, easy to install, easy to run, easy to modify, easy to share.
"After the obscenities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries on Old Earth, when military leaders had committed their nations to strategies wherein entire civilian populations were legitimate targets while their uniformed executioners sat safe in self-contained bunkers fifty meters under the earth, the repugnance of the surviving civilians was so great that for more than a century the word ‘military’ was an invitation to a lynching."
-- Hyperion (1989)
"Listen, I’m an ardent believer in restorative justice. I believe we have moral obligation to treat incarceration as the last, most reluctantly-taken resort of a just society. But the people who make zip files that barf their contents into same directory they’re in should be thrown in nerd jail forever, and should the day dawn that we come to our collective senses, realize that we can outgrow the worst habits of our past together and throw open those barred doors to put the cruelties of the carceral state behind us forever, we should let those people out last." -- https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2026/04/29/meshtaculous
We are all geopolitical actors now
Every action you make is a negotiation, and one iteration of an eternal negotiation.
If the whole world were to agree, "we will use tool X," tool X now has power over us all. At least, for God's sake, do your best not to let tool X cotton on. Keep some cards close to your chest.
"X is good" is not enough reason to use X. And it's definitely not enough reason to use _only_ X. Resilience matters.
I have this vivid memory of a month spent learning BASIC in 6th grade, and the instructor would repeatedly say "the syntax of ... is ..." And I had no idea what this word "syntax" was. I never got it, until when I went back to programming 7 years later.
With my kids I'm trying to use the word "skeleton" instead of syntax. Though calling the blanks "bones" seems like a wrong turn with hindsight.
