Now that the Roman calendar has rolled on over to 2026, it can only mean one thing. Time to check in with the Quarto project to see if that glossary function is ready yet:
Awww man! Jack Squat has happened other than this famous encounter where I was banned and some valiant attempt by a scientist to make the code work utilizing what appears to be an LLM. So, let’s count the number of years it has been since the request. That would be 1…2…3…4 years of doing nothing toward making sure a glossary works for “academic writing software”. Of course, there is plenty of love for the “hard position” cscheid finds himself in of doing nothing to get this particular job done, but it is like, totally on the map! My former post though, well, we can’t have “code of conduct violating” posts up and about while we are doing nothing. Better to look like we at least are doing some moderating. That’s good for the community. They eat that stuff up! Kinda reminds me of Trump’s “do-nothing” Democrats, though to be sure, I’m positive working on a well-funded open source project must be VERY HARD AND TIRING—what with making it consistent with something textbooks could do 90 years ago. (I’m talking about having a glossary, of course)
However much fun it is to show this level of hypocrisy, it is not, contrary to what readers here might think, my main goal for this post. Instead, I’m going to talk about something else—radical abandonment. Do you want to know what that is? I’m glad you asked!
A lot of my life has involved moving about trying to “fix” one thing or another. However, I’ve learned something after all this time of trying to solve problems. People actually do not want the problems solved. They are not really too different from cscheid. They kick the problem down the road for a year, and before you know it, you look up, and four have gone by. A current example illustrates the point. People extend this “internet is broken” vibe out as though it also wants to be fixed. The internet was not broken but people got on there and have made it what it is now which people summarize as “broken”. It does not want to be fixed. Not really. Your best bet, instead, is to radically abandon it. What do I mean?
There are many layers to the web. There are other search engines out there that are not your “main” search engines. There is an entire Indy web movement too. If none of that tickles your fancy, there are also retro-webs and everything in between. The relevant point here is that the visible web is only one part of the web, and indeed, one can argue that it is a burning building. If you give that up, along with the idea of meaningful interaction happening there, then you become free. In other words, the glossary does not matter not because cschied is extra busy, but because cscheid should not be assumed to actually want to fix the problem. The entire interaction is a kind of humanity honey-trap since git has a place for opening tickets to deal with problems. The reality, though, is cscheid is more concerned with exercising his power over the narrative and other people than actually doing anything about the problem. Does that make him a bad person? Probably not. He’s likely very average—maybe above so since he tries to fake some kind of accountability in an ass-covering maneuver. Many people will simply ghost you instead. You don’t get to see a reassurance that establishes a false-hope with no accountability as clearly as you can in that thread. The problem is bigger, though, than silly Quarto and community-protecting cschied from the JB git-posting-menace. The issue is that the internet is not running under a paradigm of good faith.
It is like having a place, for instance, to whistle blow, but instead of assisting the whistle blower, you kill them instead. If you assume instead that the whistle blowing place is actually a honey-trap and nobody actually wants to fix the problem, then you become free of the entire discussion. You radically abandon the idea that anyone is actually listening or wants to understand a perspective other than the one they are all ready holding. The only ones who might care about the problem at all might just be you and God. Sometimes it might feel like God tech support isn’t listening, or is moving slowly, but what makes that support different is that it always fixes whatever the problem is. And really, that might be the broader problem. The internet is not always known for having God as a focus and instead has many individuals prancing about trying to play God for everybody else while most often telling people how such a thing as God is silly to believe in. The natural outcome of that would be a tremendous kind of honey-trap of bad faith since no promise, without a divine imbuement, is ever going to come to be from the standpoint of a moral good. Why? Because the definition of the good IS God. Without any understanding of what is good, you just get a bunch of people together acting on what they agree is good. Of course, people agreeing on what is good is prone to failure. Sometimes, people decide ethnic-cleansing is “good”. I’m not talking about the kind of “ethnic-cleansing” where someone wants to relocate a group somewhere else either. I’m talking about the kind that wants to murder a particular group of people because they don’t like ‘um. That sometimes includes relocation, and sometimes just involves killing them where they stand. This kind of hatred is another problem that does not REALLY want to be solved. It does, however, like to be noticed.
Poverty and homelessness is another problem that really does not want to be solved, since if you do not have poor people, you might, pretty soon, not have rich people either. People get their power, most often, from lording it over someone else. A king with no subjects is not much of a king. People want money and status more than they want to care about their fellow beings. The internet, as social media demonstrates, is a wider example of this process. We are more connected, sure, but we care even less than we did before we were.
Therefore, I say to you that I am radically abandoning the internet at large. We are breaking up. We have irreconcilable differences. Whatever problems it has are going to become someone else’s to fix—along with the people who claim they can fix them as well as the ones who want fixes. The play action or charade that takes place after this, well, it will not be a problem for ME to solve or to indicate anything about what needs solving. Go to cschied for that. In four years, you might get some interaction. Or, you might just get censored, shut down, and ignored while the problem remains. Either way, that’s the web everyone agrees on, and I surely wouldn’t want to go against the wishes of humanity—far be it from me to do such a thing. After all, we wouldn’t actually want to fix anything and move on, would we?
P.S. If you are wondering why this post is on the main internet, it actually is not there for that reason. Instead, its chief audience in the author’s mind are the netizens of the Indy web. If anyone else sees it on the normal web, well then, this piece really isn’t for you—or maybe it is in the sense that you are likely more of the problem and less of the solution.