Last week I wrote a blog post, help wanted. I had a lot of fun writing it. I shared it with some friends who also found it funny, and after tweaking some parts, I was like “yeah, let’s do this” and posted it on Lobsters.
It got a lot more popular than I expected! Seeing people respond to it was very validating. I also got quite a few funny and kind emails from strangers, which was cool. The most fun part of writing it was that I got to talk about computer things but also to express the weird and, er, spicy parts of me. I liked that I could openly unmask in that way; I don’t often feel I get to in technical communities.
Something I did not see many pick up on is that while the fictitious version of me from that post holds some real truths, they are a terrible person (which doesn’t mean you’re terrible if you liked them; the point was to be terrible in an entertaining way). They are salty and bitter, and while dishing out some legit zingers at entitled attitudes about licenses, LLM coding tools, funding politics, and the state of open source as a whole, that me thinks extremely highly of themselves but ignores legit criticisms of their project, is ready to throw fellow (seemingly decent) open source developers under the bus, neglects to realise that a strange contributor is malicious even after it should be obvious, and is generally elitist and unhinged in hating on everyone who does things differently from them.
Someone emailed me to say that my post was shared on Lemmy (whoever did that, that was cool of you!), and I think this comment gets close:
After reading the whole blog post, I gotta be honest: The highlights are only funny out of context.
The undercurrent of depression and anger at the state of things that burns throughout the entirety of the blog post leave an altogether different aftertaste, humorous breakpoints or not.
That’s not a wrong reaction (though ouchie!). The Lake from that post is angry and depressed, and needs shrooms, or therapy, or to maybe spend a year in the mountains without internet. I would hate to interact with them on any project they maintained, or probably in general. Kyla is a fabulous friend for being there for them; I think I would have run away if they weren’t also inside me.
They’ll probably be back.
thanks to everyone who said hi! and please support your favourite open source projects so their maintainers don’t get as burned out as fake Lake.
here are some I love:
~ lake