I caught myself doing that thing again.
Laptop open. Ten tabs. Something half-broken in the terminal. I already had the next command in my head before the last one finished.
Didn’t look at the screen like it was a screen. Just used it.
That’s usually fine. You can’t sit there stunned every time Chrome loads. You’d never get anything done.
But later I was waiting for a build and I actually looked at the fan spinning up and thought: this box is doing math so fast it has to push heat out of a metal hole so it doesn’t die.
That’s a weird sentence to just accept.
I don’t romanticize the old days. I wasn’t there for punch cards. I don’t want to write assembly for fun. I like that I can be sloppy and the machine still tries.
I just hate how quickly it becomes furniture.
Last week I wrote a script that renamed a folder of files. Took maybe twenty minutes, most of that me misspelling a flag. When it ran, the names just changed. No sound. No moment. Folder looked different and I closed the laptop.
Sat there for a second after and it hit me that I had just told a piece of metal to rewrite reality in a directory and it did it without arguing.
It’s a `for` loop. I know that. Still sat there anyway.
I use `mv` like it’s a door handle.
Same with sending a message. You type. You hit send. Someone in another city has it. We talk about latency like it’s a bug in an app. Somewhere, a radio talks to a tower, cables cross an ocean, boxes pass the message around, and eventually a rectangle in someone’s hand lights up.
I say that out loud and I sound like a guy who just discovered the internet. I already discovered the internet. I just stopped looking at it.
The part that still gets me isn’t the big stuff. Face ID, maps, models that write functions. That stuff is designed to feel like a product. Products are supposed to disappear.
What gets me is the dumb local shit.
A pixel I put there on purpose.
A log line I printed so I could see if a thing happened.
A file that exists now and didn’t exist at dinner.
You don’t need a good project for that. You need something that wasn’t there, and then it is.
I keep thinking I’ll get used to it for good.
Most days I do. Then something small happens. A script works on the first try. Or a page renders wrong in a way I can actually see. And my brain does this tiny double take like wait, we made a rock do that.
Anyway.
I’m not trying to make this a whole philosophy. I still have to answer Slack. The build still has to pass. The machine is still a tool.
I just don’t want the only time I notice it to be when it breaks.
Sometimes look at the thing. The actual thing. The hot metal. The file that appeared. The fact that “run” means anything at all.
It’s still fucking magic. Most days I treat it like a microwave.