Alejandro AR

Web Dev. Color writer. Fire Starter. Rational Pessimist. I'm crazy slap-happy and I'm scrappy when I'm nappy. Poeta tramposo.

Bluesky @kinduff.com

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

@ClamTheOwO @CDisillusion where did you see this tweet?

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

There’s a famous Usenet story about a programmer (Mel) who refused higher level abstractions.

It was the late 1950s, and even in that era, Mel was…well today we’d call him a boomer.

Mel only wrote in raw hexadecimal. He didn’t approve of compilers, and refused to use optimizing assemblers.

"You never know where it's going to put things”, he said.

Everyone else in the company was moving on to FORTRAN, and they didn’t understand why Mel was so stubborn about using new tools. He *loved* self-modifying code.

“If a program can’t rewrite its own code”, he asked, “what good is it?”

Mel eventually left the company, and other engineers were tasked with understanding what was left.

Mel’s hand-optimized routines always beat the assemblers; but some of it looked absolutely bizarre.

One engineer took ~2 weeks to understand why there were loops with no exit condition…yet the program worked fine.

I won’t spoil all the details, you should really read it, it’s short. But it’s a fantastic piece on “what defines a real programmer?”…which is becoming increasingly relevant in this vibe-coded era.

I strive to understand computers as deeply as Mel! If we aren’t careful, we’re going to lose the “Mels” of this world to time.

That’s part of why I go so deep in my youtube videos. I hope that younger viewers are genuinely fascinated by the inner workings of our machines, instead of handing everything off to higher abstractions.

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

claude said i should engage more

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

Everyone just lost access to AI. You're the only one with a self-hosted model at home. What's the first thing you do?

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

@JeffBezos you should add some fans so the rocket can see through the smoke

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

@codewithpri skill issue

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

@github its okay to say that the X-Github-Encoded-Secret was vibe coded, we won't be mad

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

🔗 toptal/chewy https://t.co/qtQpDJNr6N

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

🔗 thoughtbot/top_secret https://t.co/JoBPCdGqj9

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

🔗 kinduff/gvf https://t.co/acq7nW1YQE

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

"Don't judge me" he said, while adding `--dangerously-skip-permissions` to the `claude` command.

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

🔗 MichaelMure/git-ownership https://t.co/XZguwTB3Po

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

I just released https://t.co/a7YlSfxXdu an RSS feed generator for your Ruby gem dependencies. Hope you all like it!

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

🔗 Brooks law https://t.co/uAXdiREtY8

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

I am here

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

if the beginning of my 2026 had an intro

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

Its literally going like this song

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

"Let's see Paul Allen's logo count"

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

@SecurityTrybe Yes, got CDs with Ubuntu 5.10 in the mail when I was kid

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

thanks

[Alejandro AR @kinduff]

🔗 x86 CPU made in CSS https://t.co/i1nFUcXq7e