2026-09-24 La Roue - Devine Lu Linvega's Diurnal
Hi R,
Before I could make up my own mind about it, I accidentally spoiled it for myself by reading the comments, there were some very good replies. Obviously, a lot of the answers to What is still exciting in tech? align with that which also interests me, seeing folks fight for their right to repair, open hardware, sabotage of AI infrastructure, personal computing explorations, permacomputing, etc. you know the ones.
But there is something I'd like to add, first, I am very oddly positioned to answer this. I only hear as little about tech as I'm willing to look for. It's not forced onto me through a day job, and nobody close to me is even interested in the topic, so it rarely comes up in conversation; if I'm not actively searching for tech news on my own, I'll miss out entire boom and bust cycles of new operating systems, frameworks, apple conferences, languages and all that.
From where I'm standing, it feels like tech moves at a glacial pace, and once in a while, it even feels like it goes backward a bit. How many months went by been between the volume control program being deprecated and fixed in Manjaro? Months. So the question, hasn't even occurred to me, since everything is still to be done, everything is still broken and everyone is distracted with other things. There is a LOT that excites me in tech, but it's nothing that I can wait for, because nobody would or even could do them for me.
Someone could make me a new mail client to fix the broken one I use, but it wouldn't help. My appreciation of technologies often relies on my understanding them from a foundational level. So, there's no cheating myself from that understanding by downloading an app, or changing OS. My technological journey is like a fitness journey, sending a machine to workout in my stead defies the whole point, downloading a new version of a program? delays the inevitable and I'll have to try to understand it for myself at some point anyways. I can only really appreciate something by understanding how it works.
This is half a curse, and half a blessing. Sure, I'm cursed to reinvent wheel after wheel, but it shields me, at least in part, from the cynicism that'll look at tech and think it utterly fucked. I understand why someone would think that, but I can't say that I do, because I'm constantly excited about what's ahead!
I'm excited to know that I might be on the cusp of understanding something critical to multisets, I'm excited to think that in a few days I might have a better understanding of how to encode numbers in SICs, I'm excited to imagine how that email client I build will work. Each time, someone tries to sell me onto some new gizmo, you know what I do? I secretly implement it in my own little crappy language, see what it's worth, and often enough, it's a genius idea! And knowing that these come regularly is exciting me most of all. So, I'm hyped, because I feel like my work hasn't even begun.
- Released a new version of Donsol.
- Writing a presentation on Fractran & Rejoice.
- Added I/O capabilities to Tote.
- Enjoying Alcest's Les Chants de l'Aurore.
