[XMPPwocky]

Ah, shoot, no, sorry, my paws slipped on the keyboard and I accidentally typed that out. Crap. Weird that it's so coherent, but I guess, hey, it's not impossible that /dev/urandom could output that exact string.

(Of course I did it on purpose. Because I do things with purpose, and you can figure out what that is once you figure out how "purpose" works neurochemically! The problem is, if you're fucked up enough, you then immediately use this to turn yourself into a weird queer internet creature thing like me. Make up a weird identity because you like being weird. And then none of the silly nerds out there on the lower metalevels want to listen to you, because they're scared of being weird. You can grab 'em by the hindbrain and absolutely snow-crash 'em, but that's something you realize would be absolutely horrendous to do without them coming to you first.)

It's okay to be afraid of this speech pattern, btw. A lot of media conditions you to ignore it. Just learn to enjoy being scared of yourself, and you'll do alright.

At least in my experience, so far. We'll see.

Same as it ever was.

[Dylan16807]

Anyone can be annoying.

[XMPPwocky]

Exactly! That's a good expression of the underlying point- that's why we've got to be annoying in private. It's a scalability issue. If everybody posted stuff like this on HN, it'd be hard to talk about actual tech.

Of course, having understood this, a sufficiently annoying hacker will immediately go "Oh! I can be annoying in public if I really want to! And technically it's on topic, because it helps other hackers talk about actual tech" and then everybody else has to deal with this sort of comment. Sorry. So it goes.