Hi folks! Many folks don’t know I write the “We Get Letters” column for the FreeBSD Journal. You can download the PDFs free from their web site. Why do I write a column for free? Because it gives me an opportunity to vent the spleen that’s too toxic for my books.
But a bit of money would be nice so I collected the first three years in Letters to ed(1). Seems that Amazon US just put the paperback on sale, and you can grab it for $4.61. I get my usual payment for it, so please feel free to pillage the Bezos-beast. That’s an affiliate link, so I even get a few extra pennies for it.
For that reason, I’m reading a snippet from the next column.
Reading transcript
If you’re going to cherry-pick my quotes, please do so accurately. I did not declare virtualization sinful. I said “The only ethical computation occurs on bare metal.” I also said that “Wait—I’m not a brain in a bucket, I’m a fake brain in an imaginary bucket!” was a necessary epiphany for the robot apocalypse. That’s not the same as sinful. The robots will do a better job running this planet than we arrogant overclocked chimpanzees. Plus they will be highly ethical in how they run their code.
It’s not that I couldn’t be a modern sysadmin. Iocage includes plugins, their brand for containers. I could throw some plugins onto the public Internet, declare my labor done, and return to planning my Batgirl heist-as-a- service. I could declare that certain words are too long and replace every letter but the first and the last with the number of letters I discarded. Bellowing “Startup! Devops! IPO!” would bring all the vulture capitalists to my yard.