2025-08-09
today, I am writing to you from within the deepest reaches of the facility where I do my time. one of the first things I learned when I was old enough to understand computers was SSH. a friend, mona, let me remote in to her computer and read her code, and in doing so she also taught me how to move with bash. it's a daily monotony for developers, but for a layperson it was incredible to be able to log in to any computer from any other, anywhere! to interface with my machines at home is to send a piece of me back there, even from burial beneath countless tons of steel and machinery, and to bring a piece of home back here to me. it's not dismal work by any means. the days are long and heavy, but the company affords us luxuries aplenty to compensate, chief among those anonymity. I don't know the people I work with, they don't know me. I don't even know who my boss is on account of we have no reason to speak: every moving piece of beaurocracy is just as automated as the machinery on the product line, just as finely tuned and just as modern. the parts they haven't got to yet are sure to be automated by next year. shouldn't that scare me, or us, or you? to be so quickly replaced, and so easily replaceable? in fact, it's no different anywhere else. I appreciate the honesty here.