Ghosts in the machine! – Project (b)log

There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code, that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols.

animated gif with clips from I, Robot, The Net, Hackers, NCIS, a very little clip from the music video for Dilemma by Kelly Rowland – no real reason for the last one or any of them

Key Lessons from the GIF

you can only hack the planet if you’re in a spinning phone booth or you happen to have a Xybernaut Poma Wearable PC, though I bet if you grabbed that old Virtual Boy you have laying around, you’d hack twice as fast
red floppies are for viruses, only; remember to always use the appropriate color floppy disk for your intended purpose
are you being hacked? Is it moving too fast? Get a friend and type on the same keyboard together for maximum effectiveness — it’s just like a two player computer game from the 90s (clip from NCIS)
tech debt = AI/robots taking over–time to delete all those functions you know you’re not using but have left there just in case (or better yet, just comment it all out… just in case)
and lastly, even 22 years later, Excel still isn’t a great way to text (details)

Why I Made it

I found this while cleaning up files. I made it recently, but forgot I did. It was supposed to be a joke, but turned out weirdly serious. I made it because I could, but also because it makes me think of one very specific incident from my past.

When I was still very new to tech/development, I kept coming across a file containing a single class in our SVN repo at work that didn’t seem to be used anywhere. I was still unsure of myself and my skills. I thought that maybe it was used somewhere and I just couldn’t find it like some weird Java magic. (It wasn’t.)

So, instead of tracking down the code author or asking people–because they were busy and maybe I was wrong–I added a comment in the file asking if it was still in use and suggested that if not, we should delete it. I forgot about it and stumbled across it 3 years later. I finally deleted it.

I happened to rewatch I, Robot shortly after this, and it’s what came to mind when he said random segments of code. I imagined all of the code bloat out there giving rise to the singularity/AI/robot takeover. Obviously, that’s not how it works, but it’s still what I think about, and it still makes me laugh every. single. time.