namelessWrench

The Only Rotten Dollhart Webring

A hideous fruit, disgracing itself.

Allo-Aro



kyn
@kyn

once upon a time i was part of a program at google and we were given the opportunity to make a shirt for our group
i (because i was the one leading this effort) decided on "computers were a mistake" with google's logo
and was very promptly shut down by our manager

anyway computers were a mistake


lydia
@lydia

at my last job I was very well respected and had a habit of saying "computers were a mistake"

about two weeks in to moving to a new team my manager pulled me aside and was like "I need you to stop saying that around the junior engineers. it scares them."

no one in this industry wants you to acknowledge that we fuck up constantly and live on thrones of lies


ireneista
@ireneista

because we learned that it was resulting in young queer people who admire us choosing to not learn more about computers

we intend the saying in a spirit of self-criticism, more an acknowledgement of our own failings than a condemnation of the technology

there are a lot of problems with computers but that only gets better when counterculture people engage with the problems and MAKE it better

it sure is an emotionally satisfying thing to say though


mintexists
@mintexists

this is a good point. encouraging people to improve flawed systems rather than just ignoring/abandoning them is important!

computers are a mistake but we can fix it


micolithe
@micolithe

And they CAN be good! They WERE good! I genuinely think that the start of the Windows 7 era is the best computers ever were!!!!


micolithe
@micolithe

I had MSN Messenger and a Mumble server. People used Steam for messaging back then because it wasn't yet so overrun with phishing attempts that you COULD use it as a chat app. It was truly another world.


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

I have a webbing site and a forum and an irc server and a (hopefully open for public account creation soon) PDP-10 emulator running TOPS-20 all running on a baby-grade Linode instance. No it doesn't scale and I will maul anyone who suggests it should. Computers can still be good as long as we remove the limbs of people who try to make them bad


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in reply to @kyn's post:

in reply to @ireneista's post:

I have toned down my antimaths outwardness for similar reasons, and brought some of the enthusiasm for it back... but I can't fully shake the critiques, I just wish it was less black-or-white impressions. Maths: fun, and there's more to its context and how we think about it than on the surface.

in reply to @hellojed's post:

in reply to @micolithe's post:

Hell, discord didn't used to suck. When it first came out it was actually good, it was easier to use than mumble and it was a replacement for AIM as that went down.

But as it tried to become "social media" and focused not on things its users wanted but on things it could monetize to investors and income streams, it became shit over the decade it's been with us.