We can keep throwing counterexamples at each other forever. You can find an endless number of examples wherein the provenance of an activity or piece of work is important to the enjoyment of it, and I can find endless examples where the provenance is unnecessary. What will this prove?

I mean, I guess when I was really early in my career I'd get a kick out of writing a clever loop or whatever, and I drank deep from all the low level coding wisdom that was available, but the scope of what I care about these days has long since expanded outward.

As a software engineer, I need to solve business problems, and much of this requires code changes, testing, deployments, all that stuff we all know. Again, if a good AI could take on a lot of that work, maybe that means I don't have to sit there in dependency hell and fight arcane missing symbol errors for the rest of my fucking career.

That being said, here are some of the things I worry about:

- The internet is no longer a niche playground for nerds, and much of it has become a mainstream entertainment megahub, very highly cultivated for your bland engagement. When I was growing up, I had to constantly fiddle with and troubleshot several layers of software in order to explore, interact with friends online, and play games. It was almost like a barrier to entry. These days, I'm not entirely sure I would have fiddled with anything and might have just skipped to the gaming & media consumption part. After all, it just works now, and the media is more engaging than ever. There seem to be fewer incentives for learning and creativity.

- I'm more concerned about bad behavior modeling than I am about the moral panic nonsense. I want to make sure that whatever personalities my kids are having a social/parasocial relationship with aren't encouraging trollish and abusive behavior.

- I'm also concerned about misinformation. Most people generally are very bad at gauging the trustworthiness of information online. Ironically even the people who cry the most about how media distorts your worldview tend to have that exact problem. I want to teach my kids critical thinking and how to evaluate information based on several important criteria. This will have to be an involved process, and I want to be able to contextualize heavy sources of misinformation while they're being exposed to it.

None of these problems are well addressed with a luddite approach, but they do need careful attention.

I'm not convinced of the meme despite its cleverness or the many blog articles discussing it. I don't think it would get less politically intense if the stakes were raised.

This actually happened to me, and guess where all of the official police updates were posted.

The only time I use numbers to specifically target a location is when jumping to a line. I have relative line numbers turned on (line numbers are relative to the cursor) so I always know the exact number I need to type to move to the line I'm looking at.