[bigiain]

It's worth reading right through. I particularly liked this bit:

"Up until recently (say, Google exists but you don't yet need to be transgender to work there), computers ran what were known as programs. These so-called programs were made of machine code, consisting of microscopic numbers that tell your CPU how to arrange particles of electricity into pornography. Ask your parents. The last program ever written was the V8 engine in 2008, after which programming was over and we all set about writing Javascript engines in Javascript for the next Javascript years.

Machine code was outlawed: in order to display pop-up advertisements, everyone agreed that it was best if we blindly ran whatever code was sent to us by strangers on the internet. We all got hacked for a while, but as a result, we now have a long list of extremely specific things that code from strangers shouldn't be allowed to do. We've only had to amend the list a few thousand times in the past; and—thanks to our collective willful ignorance of statistics, history, computer science, economics, crime, psychology, and of how lists even work—we're pretty sure that the list is complete this time."

[avgcorrection]

Reads like a “The Birth & Death of JavaScript” ripoff with a random transgender jab thrown in for some kind of measure.