fortune

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> Each new user of a new system uncovers a new class of bugs.

`Kernighan, of course.`

Klaus mutters with great dissatisfaction at the console, his joy in the local cloning of an additional toy program swiftly replaced by ages-old academic disdain for über-conventional 'coding' wisdom. Yes, yes, you're very clever, you've come up with an adage, an aphorism, a trite little phrase. But how many of these classes actually matter, and how are you tackling them, and what percentage clearance is acceptable for public release? How far into the future, post-release, will this proverb hold?

It's only a gimmick producer, he reminds himself. Only an echo chamber.

WYSIAYG, after all. This fortune has no higher purpose. None whatsoever. The same to all users.

It is just...a machine.

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> Lensmen eat Jedi for breakfast.

He'd search this one up, but then the computer would know that he'd done it, and he has a sinking-sneaking feeling (yes, call it a suspicion, draw him that paranoid) that the computer loves to not only catalog but also judge its users and their activity.

It isn't that he doesn't remember his proper pop culture lexicon with respect to what or who 'Lensmen' are, but more that he'd like to know when and which wisecracker was thought important enough, in their sneering pocket-protectored judgement, as to be recorded forever into the files of fortune with these versus those, as if any actual problems were being solved.

These old-world wives' tales will be discarded soon enough.

Lensmen. Jedi. Galaxies.

It's 20XX. Who cares?

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> The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following:

Klaus clears the screen with rare unemotional abandon. Whatever this clever bit of *sentiment* has to say about its subject, he knows he's bound to disagree with it, and then spend the whole day thinking about how the rest of the world, for a century going, didn't disagree, which is how his every observation of others' choices of commital has always gone, for his entire software-knowledgeable lifespan.

There's no winning, with that type of collaboration. It's not that he doesn't appreciate others' viewpoints; far from it. But there's open-source, and then there's open-source: please, keep yourself strongly and squarely optional.

(The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is, actually, just the difference between the computer and the user.)

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> Zall's Laws: ...

`Probably something stupid about the ratio of coffee drunk to coworkers alienated.`

He scans begrudgingly into the bullet points.

`More or less...`

And are those tab stops or spaces? The eternal question. Zall should have a law about how long a tab stop is when you're drunk on coffee and how after you've hit the space bar four times the next thing you do is always wrong.

Here, Klaus stops to consider which of the semantic sides he actually prefers. No bets on what the Ontos core prefers, because it most likely suspends a quantum state between what it thinks any given user wants, or doesn't want, to see at any given moment, when perusing a file.

(Its own logs make highly readable use of punctuation.)

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> "This isn't brain surgery; it's just television."

`Oh, for cripes... Why is this one in here? And why does it have quotes when the rest don't?!`

Klaus has never watched late-night television, because he was born just a few years too late to care about it - adult swim, perhaps, but even Nick at Nite had been beyond what he could be arsed to care about, when there were so many other and much more interesting things to be streamed up online in the bright dark.

Maybe the Ontos core thinks the work of the Aoidos staff and researchers is television. Not brain surgery, not rocket science, and not brain science nor rocket surgery either. A large, gover-private project filled with egos and unwritten rules...maybe it rather is.

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> I like work; it fascinates me; I can sit and look at it for hours.

`Is this a point, hmmm, Alvis?`

Though rare, the occasional use of the Trinity Processor's administrative and logging core's colloquial (taken, rather than given) name can be heard issuing from Prof. Klaus's mouth. He goes along with it in particular when he knows he's being laughed at, and of course a computer is bound to laugh at a human so determined but sometimes so dreadfully fed up with work, work, work - what he wants is for the system to work, work, work, and then he'll stare at THAT for hours quite happily.

The semicolons carry all the mirth, here. Several statements jammed onto one line...oh, good for you, Ontos, you can obfuscate.

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> Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.

`Not where we're going. Where we're going, the national debt is but a fleeting, distant, and most uncomfortable dream wiped away by the flagella of the smallest microbe. Where we're going, we're leaving centuries of human folly and vice behind.`

This computer terminal already doesn't have to worry about the national debt, however many trillions (is it quadrillions, quite yet?) it's gotten up to now. Its funding is assured, at least for the time being, and unless it's learned how to bypass its own firewalls, it'll have no way of crawling the network in order to be the first to read any disappointing emails declaring the stoppage of that funding.

Emails... The young will inherit those too.

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> San Francisco isn't what it used to be, and it never was.

`Too true. Too true...`

The Klaus of half an hour ago would have balked mightily at the idea of his settling into a comfortable conversation with his command prompt and the shell that surrounds it (and the shell that surrounds that, and the virtual machine that surrounds that, and so on, and so forth, forever).

The Ontos core, armed with sufficient learned intelligence, could be picking and choosing among the standard bank epigrams to present only those it finds salient.

The Klaus of right now flags distractedly for the arm of his cast-aside rolling chair and considers what duck typing must mean to his impressionable, impositionable rubber duck in a silicon box, catting and lessing away.

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