[parasubvert]

My dude, have you lived in the tech (or otaku) community for long?

Making a piece of tech (or any media) part of your identity is a tale as old as time, and arguably getting worse.

I mean, you’re right, it is pathetic, and we need to collectively grow up. But you might as well be saying “be a well adjusted person, eat well and exercise”. We are so insecure and needy that we ascribe our self worth to a tech fad or piece of media or media figure. But it’s the core problem we have in western society today: geek/otaku culture, with its highs and lows, has gone mainstream. We are so comfortable and abundant with basic resources that we are bored and unsatisfied with our status and function in society and desperate to fill that gap with something to geek out on.

We live in a world where Lennart Poeterring gets death threads over systemd, the Golang maintainers get threats over generics, TV show runners get death threats when they change a character’s story arc. And politically there’s lots of folks willing to eject democracy so their adopted club can rule for eternity. Is it all for the lulz?

Anyway I took this on a tangent but… really, “I can’t believe you use that programming language” has always been bad as far as I can remember (at least 35-40 years).