I worked with a guy named Danny many years ago. He was one of the smartest programmers I'd ever met. Not only did he write great code, but he also always maintained an excellent connection to the his customers who would use the programs he wrote. This was in a hospital.

Personally, he was kind, generous, excellent family man. He never really talked too much about politics, didn't care too much for it. He also helped me order the parts for and showed me how to assemble my first intel based desktop computer, an amazing 486-DX2-66!

It's been years but I recently communicated with him, and we had a great e-mail exchange, caught up. He was surprised and pleased that since I left I'd not only gotten married but now have an adult son. Surprised because back >25 years ago when we hung out I was very much not a "family man" kind of person.

I asked him in passing how he'd been holding up with the pandemic, and suddenly, there it was.

Covid19 was a hoax perpetrated by China to help Joe Biden get elected.

It broke my heart. A smart, good, kind man that I knew had been brain damaged. Like some kind of fucking psychological cancer.

As the old saying goes, There but for the grace of God, go I.

You and I can't imagine falling prey to such a thing, but I can assure you that my old friend Danny had and has the same mental facilities as you and I.

He caught this particular cancer, and you and I didn't.

What's worse? He doesn't even know he has and is subject to this psychological malignancy.

I wonder if there are any psychological cancers you and I are subject to, right now, that we don't even know about or suspect?

Occasionally my wife likes to hear me explain my work, beyond just the outcome that I'm trying to accomplish. Whenever this has involved web UI work, the conversation has broken down into her lecturing me not to be so negative. This is not because I'm feeling any negative emotion at the time, but because virtually nothing in the modern web stack can be described in terms of a positive intention coming to fruition. Every time she asks "why?" the reason is some historical mistake, some failure that can never be undone. Even when it's an aspect of web technology I personally enjoy and admire, I can't explain why it exists without telling a horror story. I manage to frame other areas of computing, when I want to, as a story of progress, a heroic sequence of invention and improvement (with some mistakes and backtracking) leading to a better and better future. Web programming always comes off as a descent into hell. And it's a malevolent God's hell, where every mistake anyone has ever ever made, every injury anyone has ever done to another person, is revisited on you and everyone else every day for eternity.

I forget this, because I take all the history for granted and am excited and grateful that I can use create-react-app to summon a vast technological apparatus to mostly paper over the damage for a putatively-full-stack-but-really-back-end weeny like me. But when I have to explain it to somebody, yeesh. It's like explaining the Vietnam War (or, at this point, the war in Afghanistan) to a younger relative. You forget how awful it was until you have to put it into words, and then you feel depressed the rest of the day thinking about it and realizing that everything we could learn from it to prevent it happening again is something we already knew before we did it.