When I SSH to a VPS I just spun up, there's no guarantee whatever godforsaken LTS version of Ubuntu it's running has Node.js or Ruby on it, let alone some fancy-schmancy version manager. Python? Don't make me laugh—nobody in the last 20 years has been able to successfully install Python. So I use the language that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time: awk, which is the standard general-purpose programming language.

Some of you may be skeptical. Some of you may be asking "what standard". I'll tell you what standard: the POSIX standard. Before Perl was a mere twinkle in anyone's eye, awk was here. You may say: "isn't awk an utility for extracting data from text files with tab-separated values." To which I say: 99% of programming is extracting data from files and putting it into other files in various ways. awk already knows that's what you want to do, so it skips all the bullshit like "opening a file" or "creating a stream" or, God forbid, "allocating memory".

Now you may say, "surely awk is inadequate for some types of programming. I mean, every number in awk is a float." To which I'll say: the same is true of JavaScript and this has not stopped anybody. I think at this juncture in the history of computing we should be ready to admit that integers are just a sort of safety blanket for programmers. If you never give a number a fractional component, floating-point math doesn't happen and all is right in the world. I think that's true. I don't really understand floating-point math at all.

Now you may say, "well, I mean, awk has no GUI toolkit." Wrong. awk has the exact same GUI toolkit you were going to use anyway.

# table.awk
# Consumes a text file and displays a GUI table of its contents.

BEGIN { print "<table>" }
{ printf "<tr><td>%s</td><td>%s</td><td>%s</td></tr>", $1, $2, $3 }
END { print "</table>" }

How do you use this GUI toolkit? It's simple: cat table.txt | awk table.awk | lynx (lynx is the standard web browser). "But what if I need interactivity," I hear you whine. Easily managed; awk is in fact a superset of Javascript.

END { print "<script>"
      print "(function(){"
      print "document.querySelector(\"#button\").addEventListener(\"click\","
      print "function(){ console.log(\"button clicked\") })"
      print "})()"
      print "</script>" }

Please understand. awk is the standard general-purpose programming language. The sooner you accept this fact the sooner we can move on.

Tech people (like Manton Reece, the creator of micro.blog), whose growing inability to think becomes more apparent day by day, have been praising a long-winded post from Alexandr Wang, Meta's "chief AI officer", about why he's "building"^[1] Muse, Meta's new product which is basically (and explicitly) openclaw for people who are too nontechnical to run openclaw.

Now imagine every person on earth with a second mind beyond their own. A general manager whose whole job is to find out what you want and make sure it happens. Someone that hears the half-sentence, “I feel like there’s something more I could be doing,” and helps fill in the blanks. This might not be a genie in a bottle, but it can be someone that says, “This is the thing you’ve been dreaming of your whole life. Let’s go get it. Here’s how.” And then builds a plan. Sends the email. Makes the phone call. Finds the funding. Keeps you on schedule. Clears the way and solves all the problems it can until the human part, the wanting and the dreaming, is all that’s left.

Like most writing that either comes straight from an LLM's asshole or was gargled by an LLM psychotic on the way to the internet, this is mawkish and longwinded, but here's the fundamental gist of it:

Clears the way and solves all the problems it can until the human part, the wanting and the dreaming, is all that’s left.

This is the pitch. You can let go of all those inconvenient verbs like do, make, learn, negotiate, fucking think. Instead you live an existence driven purely by your desires, delivered to you by Facebook—the largest advertising channel in history, which is to say the largest manufacture of desires ever created. I don't know how you can read this and not view it as unbelievably dystopian, an articulation of a consumer slop ideology where any actual engagement with the actual world is minimized in favor of letting a chatbot run by a corporation entirely take over your life.

The business model? According to Mark Zuckerberg, a man who is responsible for abetting at least one genocide and who absolutely should be fucking hanged, it is:

Muse also has a novel business model. We believe that Muse will make you money. And we are standing behind this by making Muse free for a huge number of tokens, with the expectation that over time we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions.

"A small fee from transactions". Zuckerberg envisions a world where all online shopping is both happening through Muse, and directed by Muse. A system designed to interpret your half-thought desires in the ways most convenient to Mark Zuckerberg personally, which presumably means—as at least one Muse reviewer found—telling you to self-actualize by buying shit you don't need off Facebook Marketplace, so Meta gets a cut both coming (when you buy on their platform) and going (when Muse makes the transaction on your behalf). This is not a "novel business model", this is affiliate marketing (except, of course, sellers have no choice whether to pay for the affiliate link).

Oh, and in the process he also gets all of the fucking data on every fucking thing you do.

You'd have to be a complete fucking idiot, just railroad-spike-through-the-forebrain mind-melted, to not notice that like literally every fucking other thing Meta does this is about mass surveillance and rent seeking. I can't tell if all of these people are slowly making themselves unbelievably stupid by inhaling chatbot fumes, or if proximity to silicon valley tech sphere radiation is microwaving their brains by itself.