August 16, 2021

2021.08.16
But as I read more about the physics of chips, I started to have a kind of acceptance of assembly language. I stopped seeing it as an annoying, unfinished abstraction--a bad programming language--and started seeing it for what it is: an interface to the physical world.
I am very bad at it now but I'm glad I dug into a little assembly language to make my Atari 2600 game JoustPong - and what I've learned about how damn physical and timer-based EVERYTHING is on that thing.

I remember having just a dash of assembly (of the Sparc or Solaris or whatever variety) in a computer languages class in college. It felt a bit dishonest, to be frank - like to run assembly that was talking about low level stuff like registers and what not, but then knowing it was on a system that was a bit virtualized, how it might be paged out by the OS at any time.
Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose. And whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations--as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness--nature pops up with her inescapable demands.


This is the black-metal nature of task management: Every single time you write down a task for yourself, you are deciding how to spend a few crucial moments of the most nonrenewable resource you possess: your life. Every to-do list, is, ultimately, about death.

We like lists because we don't want to die.