Small things

I’m a writer who comes from a long line of engineers. We’re born with too much memory space. We’re short people with big heads.

Prior generations put that brainpower to good use building rockets, planes, and factories, whereas I mill about with a liberal arts education. I have one redeemable hard skill, though. I tinker with computers.

I had a job fixing them in college, and to this day, you can find me whiling away the evenings by opening up motherboards and listening to servers chirp and buzz. It’s a goal of mine to be the most charming dweeb you know.

In the time of smartphones, working with computers has a quaintness to it like needlepoint or restoring classic cars. You schlepp a contraption onto a workbench, pop the top, and blow the dust out. Slowly, you give it life.

I like my grown-up Tamagotchis, though it’s only recently that I’ve begun to consider myself “technical.” I used to believe that word was the sole domain of savants like nuclear physicists and programmers.

Later, when I worked in tech, I was struck by how humble programmers tend to be. If you ask one to describe a system they built, they sometimes respond with astonishment. Many of them look at a codebase—of which they’ve contributed something of their own and a lot of something borrowed—and regard it with a sense of mystery and wonder that borders on spirituality.

Today, programmers are increasingly having chatbots code for them, so maybe it’s time I expanded my definition.

The other day, I was messing around with Claude, the bot du jour. I asked him (?) to compare Linux and OpenBSD for a side project I was looking to build.

Both are operating systems like Windows or macOS, and they’re for nerds, plain and simple. I won’t get into the weeds about them too much. Linux powers most servers on the planet, while OpenBSD has remained a niche player intended to be simple, stable, and secure.

Linux used to be a tinkerer’s dream. It was free and transparent. To get more adoption, however, most of the ecosystem adopted a sort of black box called “systemd” several years back that does many jobs.

This might have been a necessary concession, though it came with a caveat: many otherwise technical people can’t make heads or tails of it. That’s less fun for someone like me asking “What’s this knob do?”

OpenBSD has nothing of the sort. It’s technical like most things should be. It’s specific about what it is, and you can understand the system if you take time to learn it. A stance that has hindered its popularity, no doubt.

I was curious about the two, so I asked Claude to review and analyze them as a thought experiment. As usual, he (?) did so willingly and tirelessly and told me to “sit with” what he had to say. Then, he coughed up a comment about OpenBSD that struck a chord with me:

“The thing that stays small stays true.”

That little fortune cookie of a statement speaks to many experiences I’ve had in my life, personal and professional, and it fits with some of the existentialism I’ve grappled with lately, the tension to live according to principles and somehow survive.

I’d never heard that turn of phrase before so I looked it up, and I haven’t been able to pin down where it came from. I searched for that exact phrase on Google and got zero results. If it belonged to someone well known, I should be able to source it easily, especially when social media is full of slop now like “celebrity said WHAT?”

Whatever this sentence is, it seems like Claude just generated it. The tinkerer in me is amazed. The writer in me laughs nervously.

I’ve said next to nothing about AI since ChatGPT came onto the scene, partly because it’s all people talk about and also because the two opposing camps, Team Human and Team AI, are exhausting with their absolutes. To be honest, I don’t know where I fully land on the subject. I value free expression but language is tech.

I don’t use LLMs to write prose. I think it’s disrespectful to an audience to do so, and I choose each word carefully. It’s lame to outsource your God-given voice to a bot when you’ve spent decades honing your craft like I have. When you’re good, you don’t need floaties.

Yet, even on days when my ego is the size of the sun, I can’t say I’m above it all. LLMs are tremendously helpful for research. Perhaps, the most human thing I can say is it’s possible to find inspiration in a machine. Prompt the model and the model prompts you. It’s a sort of seance with the cosmos, one Socrates would enjoy.

As a creative, I’d love to tell you this stuff is hot garbage, but even a word-guessing algorithm is capable of divining the occasional nugget of wisdom, it seems. There are real use cases in tightly controlled environments. The question is whether we are capable of controlling an expanse like this, and more importantly, if there’s even the willpower to remember us little people.

Now is a bad time to take anything at face value. A lot of humanity does, and it’s not like the chatbots know any better. As I write this, the powers that be are building data centers to the sky to serve Claude and friends. Will he (?) stay true?

Ancient alien theorists say yes. The market would like to think so. As for me, I can only watch the machine spin. The truth is waiting, not for whoever gets there first but for whoever sits with it. I sit back in awe.

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