Erik McClure

Decades ago, something absolutely unheard of happened - a nerd became the richest person on the planet. This, of course, was merely a consequence of Software Eating The World, a fact we are all now painfully aware of. Programming, once delegated to glasses-wearing nerds banging away on strange boxey devices that could add numbers, has been transformed into something that many people are interested in (mostly because it makes tons of money). Nowadays, as software permeates almost every aspect of modern life, programming is “cool”, firmly entrenched alongside doctors and lawyers as a respected, high income career path, so long as you get hired at a large company.

If you think about it, this represents a radical societal restructuring. All these nerds being put in charge of things tend to be more progressive and willing to support social movements. Combined with the fact that the best programmers can come from anywhere, including diverse and underserved backgrounds, this has forced software companies to cater specifically to minorities, accelerating existing societal shifts simply because they want to attract good programmers. Adding benefits specifically designed for trans people is a common example, but the shift to remote work is another.

As our world changes, the kinds of people we need to support our society changes with it. I don’t think people appreciate just how much the world has diverged from the neurotypical-cisgendered-heterosexual norms that were so entrenched just a hundred years ago. The United States only enshrined woman’s suffrage with the 19th amendment in 1920, just after World War I. It’s not just that the social fabric of society has changed, the world has changed. The global reality we live in has changed. Climate Change is now an existential threat that is beginning to have visible effects. Software and the digital world have not simply merged with reality, the internet now dominates it. 6 of the 10 largest companies by market cap are software or computer hardware companies. The exceptions are Johnson & Johnson, Berkshire Hathaway, United Health, and Exxon Mobil. The world’s largest oil company is #9 on that list. This is a titanic shift in economic power that’s happened only in the past few decades.

This is not unique to modern history. Each major technological or geopolitical shift in human history changes the balance of power. World War II’s Rosie The Riveter is the most recent example of a sudden geopolitical change (a global Total War necessitating a drastic social shift), when women were encouraged to take manufacturing jobs previously reserved for men. This was extremely unusual at the time, and after the war ended, the government abruptly started pressuring women to “return to normalcy”. Sound familiar? While most women reluctantly returned to more traditional jobs, many historians consider it the impetus for The Quiet Revolution, which eventually resulted in women permanently entering the workforce. The First and Second Industrial Revolution notably involved a steep decline in infant mortality, but not child mortality, as the baby boom resulted in a massive increase in child labor that was much more deadly than the farm work they were doing before. This eventually resulted in much stricter child labor laws in the UK and United States, eliminating children from the pool of available physical labor.

Going back farther, ancient history is full of tribes and civilizations that displayed a huge amount of variation depending on their particular geographic and technological pressures, including concepts of alternative genders or even different ways of expressing time. A society is a particular subset of all possible personalities that are able to self-organize and maintain order. In any society, what exactly a “reasonable person” is and what constitutes a crime may vary significantly. Factions within a society grow or shrink depending on economic and environmental influences, which can change the favored social fabric. This evolution of the social fabric is happening right now as technological advances allow entire forgotten sects of humanity to express their true potential in ways never before possible.

VR is still in an early adopter phase and its real impact has yet to be appreciated. We have only a scant few video games that can take meaningful advantage of it, a few poor attempts at metaverses, and hardly any useful productivity apps. We are teetering on the edge of another technological reorganization of society, where the entire world gets eaten by VR and AR in ways that people have difficulty appreciating right now because the hardware isn’t there yet. Once we solve the last few critical problems - like comfortable reading without headaches and less bulky headsets - then everything will change, very suddenly.

Over half my friends have ADHD, and when hyperfocused are capable of things few neurotypical people could ever do. Many of them are autistic, able to think in ways that most neurotypicals can only replicate with a lot of drugs. They don’t just think outside the box, they think outside of boxes people aren’t aware of. Some hyperfocused ADHD people can take advantage of the entire interactive volume around them in VR space, allowing them to open 5 different reference manuals while working on a project, or cross-reference a dozen sources in realtime, or set up a massive set of realtime data visualizations while monitoring a system. A persistent, freely navigable workspace inside VR (that could also be non-euclidean) makes it easier to return to tasks later without having to reconstruct an entire mental state. However, the ability to do many things at once sometimes translates into a need to do many things at once, and the ability to focus for long periods of time on one task can translate into an inability to do anything else, like getting food or remembering to mail an important tax form.

Unfortunately, in our modern society, houses have little to no interior noise insulation and almost every single electronic device makes a constant high-frequency drone. Neurotypicals either do not hear these sounds, or tune them out after a few minutes (and then claim the sound doesn’t exist, having immediately forgotten it). These houses are then built right next to roads with noisy cars, often without sidewalks, and sometimes with ubiquitous traffic noises when buried deep inside the city. How distracting these noises are depends on the person, the noise, whether it is speech, music, a kind of music you don’t like, or a ticking clock. Many places make these sounds inescapable, like restaurants with loud music and conversations, or offices with ticking clocks in every single room.

In contrast, in VR you can wear noise-cancelling headphones and put on music no one else can hear that is automatically attenuated if someone is talking to you. VR lets you tightly control your auditory environment - you can selectively isolate sound sources to only hear the conversation around you instead of having to tune out the dozens of other conversations. Nameplates on avatars can help faceblind people and avatars themselves can be more visually distinct than human faces. Being able to share a funny image with someone without having to show them your phone and hoping you don’t get an embarrassing notification at that exact moment would be useful for many people. Making things more accessible helps everyone.

A lot of what makes these problems so damaging for neurodivergents is the refusal of accommodation from neurotypicals. Often, this is simply authority figures forcing neurodivergent people to remain in environments causing them physical pain. Sadly, humans have a tendency to reject any culture other than their own as invalid or barbaric, possibly due to tribalism. Those of us living in a western country point to history as justification, while conveniently ignoring the fact that history is written by the victors. Countries like America are often willfully ignorant of the natives they subjugated now living in a post-apocalyptic world. While many executives acknowledge the rise of LGBTQIA+ individuals, or at least pay lip-service to them, it is painfully obvious that most do not understand the true cultural upheaval that is upon us. For example, Meta is inherently doomed for a very simple reason: It’s not furry enough.

Despite the prevalence of how Furries Run The Internet, an amazing number of tech workers still do not understand the significance of furries. Just two years ago, a coworker of mine came out as both trans and a furry, in the same e-mail. I never saw the need to “come out” as a furry (which should be obvious, given my avatar) but the reality is that furries are now a significant social force, which is largely going ignored. The one significant competitor to VRchat is NeosVR, developed by… furries. A starbucks union organizer wears his fursuit to rallies. The furry revolution is already here and nobody is paying attention to the fact that furries will not only dominate VR tech, they will determine the fate of any VR “metaverse”, because furries are the ultimate VR power user.

This cultural blindspot is just one example of how humans are often laughably bad at predicting the future precisely because we are blind to social changes caused by technological advancements. This is why we laugh at visions of the future from 100 years ago, because they could only envision technological advances within the confines of their own culture. I still see people today predicting that VR will revolutionize painfully obvious things, like medical analysis, or 3D modeling, or architecture. No one talks about how it will provide a way for autistic people to be more confident about social gatherings when they control their sensory input sphere or allow plural people to switch between avatars depending on who is fronting. When people talk about “the dangers of VR”, it’s always the same stupid reading argument, instead of predicting the inevitable moral panic over weird VR sex. It reminds me of the old adage about science fiction:

“It would take an inventor to predict the automobile, and it would take a real visionary to predict highways and gas stations. But it would take a science fiction writer to predict the traffic jam.” - Ed Bryant

Death: No. Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
Susan: With tooth fairies? Hogfathers?
Death: Yes. As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
Susan: So we can believe the big ones?
Death: Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.

I want to start this by saying that I am in favor of a wealth tax. We should be increasing taxes on the wealthy and raising minimum wage, because we know that steadily increasing the relative buying power of the poor is the best way to improve an economy. However, none of this happens in a vacuum. When we talk about income equality, I have become distressed at the amount of ignorance on display about the economy, systemic societal problems, and even what money actually is.

One Pixel Wealth is a webpage from 2021 that helps visualize how truly insane the amount of wealth that the richest people have actually is. While the visualization is great at putting in perspective just how much Jeff Bezos’ wealth is on paper, it links to a refutation of the Paper Billionaire Argument to dispute the idea that Jeff Bezos doesn’t really have that much money in liquid assets. The paper billionaire argument is that, because most wealth is in stocks or bonds, selling it all at once would flood the market and crater the total value of those assets.

The proposed counter-argument is incredibly bad. It demonstrates a total lack of understanding about macro-economic forces. Ironically, this is because it cannot appreciate the scale of its own arguments, the exact issue that One Pixel Wealth is trying to address. Let me paraphrase the key points in this counter-argument:

1. The Paper Billionaire argument doesn’t work, because you can liquidate the wealth over time in a controlled sell-off, which executives do regularly.
2. Given that $122 trillion worth of stock changes hands in the US every year, you could liquidate a trillion dollars over five years and only constitute 0.16% of all the trading.
3. Because 50% of all US households own stock, you will always be able find people to buy the stock the billionaires are selling, it’s not just other billionaires that will buy it.
4. Even if the paper bilionaire argument was true, if selling all the stock would lose 80% of it’s value, that would leave behind $700 billion.

To start, #1 and #2 don’t work for a very simple reason: A stock’s value represents the market’s confidence in the stock producing future value. Owning stock, in some circumstances, is interpreted as having confidence in that future value. If the market loses confidence in your company, it doesn’t matter what assets you have, your stock price will crater if the market thinks you’ll start losing money. If the CEO starts liquidating their position (which they must state their intention to sell stock ahead of time, years before it completes), the market will panic and the stock price will implode at the mere announcement of the liquidation, let alone actually selling any stock. Elon Musk right now should make it painfully obvious that he was only ever the richest man in the world on paper, because he just lost $107 billion dollars this year! He only bought Twitter for $44 billion! You simply cannot make the combined GDPs of Bulgaria, Croatia, Iceland and Uruguay evaporate if that money was actually real in any sense.

Money does not represent physical assets. Money is supposed to represent human labor, and there is a fixed amount of human labor available on the planet. When someone dies or is incapacitated, it goes down. When someone graduates into the labor force, or becomes more skilled, it goes up. In ancient times, “human labor” was heavily correlated to how much physical activity someone could do, like lifting things or harvesting food. However, our modern economy is dominated by specialist jobs done by highly skilled laborers. So for the sake of analysis, we can say that the GDP of the entire planet should ideally represent the maximum amount of labor the entire human race could do, if we assigned everyone to the job they are most qualified for. We could then increase the total amount of labor we can do by either building machines or improving our skills.

This leads into why point #3 is complete nonsense. It reminds me of when Ben Shapiro, when talking about climate change, asked “you think that people aren’t going to just sell their homes and move?”

The entire point of wealth inequality is that the top 1% holds more money than the entire middle-class. That’s literally the problem! How can everyone else possibly buy all the stock the billionaires are selling if it would require all of their savings? Who are you selling the stocks to?! This isn’t how money works! One Pixel Wealth even tries to claim that if we just gave all the poor people in america a bunch of money it would fix poverty, while linking to a study that only applies to local economies. The world’s largest economy is NOT a local economy! These measures only work when the global economy can absorb the difference, which means making changes gradually or in small, localized areas.

Of course, even if you somehow magically liquidated all your assets and acquired $700 billion dollars in real, liquid cash, it’s not actually $700 billion dollars. It’s like saying that there are gold asteroids worth $10000 quadrillion dollars - the value would plummet if you actually had that much gold. Since money represents human labor, which is a limited resource, simply having more money does not let you do more things. $700 billion dollars is enough to hire 12 billion people for 1 day working at minimum wage ($7.25), but you can’t actually do that, because there’s only 7.8 billion people in the entire world. Having $700 billion in liquid assets would decrease the value of money itself. That’s what inflation is. People claim that some billions of dollars will be enough to eradicate malaria or provide drinking water to everyone, but it’s never that simple because these are always geopolitical issues. Bill Gates has donated billions of dollars since 2005 towards fighting malaria and we only got a vaccine 16 years later. We’re surrounded by so many dumb problems we can solve with more money that we’ve forgetten that some problems are really, truly, fundamentally difficult problems that cannot be solved by throwing money at them. At some point there are just too many cooks in the kitchen.

Note that this labor distribution problem applies to liquid assets, which is one theory on why inflation had (until 2021), remained fairly low despite the amount of wealth increasing to ridiculous amounts. Wealthy people are acting as gigantic money sinks - by absorbing all of the “money”, the actual amount of real, liquid cash in the economy increased at a modest rate, so inflation remained stable. Now, inflation has started to skyrocket in 2022, and some people blame the stimulus payments, but the reality is that the low interest rates during the pandemic, combined with other complex macroeconomic forces, likely caused it, although nobody knows for sure. If wealthy people started actually spending all their money at once, as people seem to want them to do, the amount of liquid assets would skyrocket and so would inflation.

I keep saying that money is supposed to represent human labor, because it’s really an approximation. Someone can be more productive at one job than another, so the amount of human labor is not a knowable value in the first place. Instead, it helps to think of money as representing percieved power imbalance (conservatives often make the mistake of thinking it represents actual power imbalance, which it does not). This power imbalance can come from economic, diplomatic, or military factors. Basically, money is just the current state of global geopolitics. You cannot fight wealth inequality by just redistributing money. Simply taking money from rich people does not fix the systemic issues that created the power imbalance in the first place, because it’s not actually wealth inequality, it’s power inequality, and that is a political issue, not economic. Money is simply our way of quantifying that imbalance. The government’s unwillingness to tax rich people is because of the power imbalance, not the cause of it. If politicians are unwilling to go after rich people, it’s because those rich people hold an alarming amount of sway over politicians, which makes them keys to power.

It means that we have allowed power to accumulate in dangerously high concentrations, and we need to deal with this at a political level before we get an economic solution. We must elect leaders that help tackle power inequality (like break up huge corporations) before we can make progress on wealth inequality. Basically, go vote.

You can’t have a 4-slot GPU. You just can’t.

We have finally left sanity behind, with nvidia’s 4000 series cards yielding a “clown car” of absurd GPU designs, as GamersNexus put it. These cards are so huge they need “GPU Support Sticks”, which are an actual real thing now. The fact that we insist on relegating the GPU to interfacing with the system while hanging off of a single, increasingly absurd PCIe 6.0 x16 slot that can push 128 GBps is completely insane. There is no real ability to just pick the GPU you want and then pair it with a cooler that is actually attached to the motherboard. The entire cooling solution has to be in the card itself and we are fast reaching the practical limitations here due to gravity and the laws of physics. Top-heavy GPUs are now essentially giant levers pulling on the PCIe slot, with the only possible anchor point that is above the center of mass being the bracket on one side.

A 4090 series card will demand a whopping 450 W, which dwarfs the Ryzen 9 5900X peak power consumption of only 140 W. That’s over 3 times as much power! The graphics card is now drawing more power than the entire rest of the computer! We’ll have to wait for benchmarks to be sure, but the laws of thermodynamics suggest that the GPU will now also be producing more heat than every other component of the PC, combined. And this is the thing we have hanging off of a PCIe slot that doesn’t have any other way of mounting a cooling solution to the motherboard?!

What the FUCK are we doing?!

Look, I’m not a hardware guy. I just write all the shader code that makes GPUs cry. I don’t actually know how we should fix this problem, because I don’t know what designs are thermally efficient or not. I do know, however, that something has to change. Maybe we can make motherboards with a GPU slot next to the CPU slot and have a unified massive radiator sitting on top of them - or maybe it’s a better idea to put the two processor units on opposite ends of the board. I don’t know, just do something so I can use a cooling solution that is actually screwed into the fucking motherboard instead of requiring a “GPU Support Stick” so gravity doesn’t rip it out of the PCIe slot.

As an example of alternative solutions, here is an MXM form-factor for laptops that allow them to provide custom cooling solutions appropriate for the laptop.

In fact, the PCIe spec itself actually contains a rear-bracket mount that, if anyone was paying attention, would help address this problem:

See that funky looking metal thing labeled “2” on the diagram? That sure looks like a good alternative to a “support stick” if anyone ever actually paid attention to the spec. Or maybe this second bracket doesn’t work very well and we need to rethink how motherboards work entirely. Should we have GPU VRAM slots alongside CPU RAM slots? Is that even possible? (Nope.) Or maybe we can come up with an alternative form factor for GPU cards that you can actually attach to the motherboard with screws?

I have no idea what is or isn’t practical, but please, just do something before the GPUs collapse under their own gravity and create strange new forms of matter inside my PC case.

21 years ago, I walked into my 5th grade teacher’s classroom and it was dead silent. The TV was on. Something was happening that I didn’t understand, but my instincts told me that This Was Very Wrong. That moment is carved into my memory not because of what actually happened on September 11^th, which I was too young to fully grasp, but because the way the adults were behaving signaled to my young mind that this was very important and I needed to remember it.

I have one other distinct memory from that time, which was either someone on the news or a teacher in a classroom explaining that “the goal of the terrorist attack is to make us scared. If we let fear rule us, the terrorists have won.”

I guess I should congratulate the terrorists for winning the war on terror.

The utter lack of rational behavior that followed was something that continued to bother me as I grew up and went to college. I could tell something was wrong, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was. As I realized college wasn’t going to teach me anything useful, I just started taking more and more difficult classes in an effort to glean math jargon I could Google instead. My faith in institutions was shaken, and continued to decline when I got a job and realized how much of the business world was complete bullshit. However, Obama was president during this time, and as a result I still had some faith that while we clearly had problems, these problems were surmountable. We even signed the Paris agreement in 2015, and I hoped we would finally do something about Climate Change.

Then we elected Trump.

I’m not going to rehash the Trump years, we all know it was a clown show. But somehow, I still believed that Trump had only been elected thanks to massive voter suppression efforts. Then Covid happened, and it taught me a very important lesson: People don’t give a shit. We managed to politicize one of the worst pandemics in modern history. We completely refused to obey even a partial lockdown, let alone a full lockdown, or even slow the spread with properly implemented contact tracing and testing, because this required people to act for the sake of their community, instead of themselves. At this point, America is completely incapable of collective action.

Every single year that September 11^th rolls around, people point out that 3000 people dying really isn’t that many when you compare it to, say, 1750 people dying from firearm homicides every month, which we continue to do nothing about, and every year people say this is in “bad taste” or is “disrespectful”. But now, idiots on social media are trying to say that this somehow isn’t the right time to point out that Covid-19 killed ONE MILLION PEOPLE in the United States alone, because we’re supposed to stop and remember the 3000 people who died because a terrorist from a group of rebels that we set up in the first place blew up a skyscraper?!

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

You want my respect? How about you explain to me why my friend’s boyfriend had to die from a preventable disease just because they lived in Venezuala and never had access to a vaccine that America was hoarding after scientists said this was a bad idea? He’s dead now. He’s just as dead as whoever was in the World Trade Center when it collapsed. Why are we honoring the people who died from being torn apart in an explosion and not the people who are being torn apart in slow motion by a trillion tiny viruses? Where are the Covid-19 memorials? Why does this country need something to fucking explode before we care about it?!

One of my friends is transgender. Their mom is, shall we say, not supportive, to say the least. Two years ago during the pandemic lockdown, her mom (who works as a nurse) showed up uninvited at her doorstep, without a mask, and essentially barged into her apartment. They messaged me for help, and I showed up to make sure her mom didn’t pull any stunts, because we already knew she was extremely manipulative. Meeting this slimy ghoul of a woman for the first time is something I will also never forget, because she made my skin crawl in a way that I can’t explain. It was like every word out of her mouth was dripping with deceit. Everything she said was an attempt to control the conversation or weaponize the situation against us. The entire time she misgendered and deadnamed her daughter while showing zero respect to anyone. All she did was act “polite” and then tried to pretend that saying please and thank you means being respectful. As the argument continued, she eventually said The Words.

“You should respect your elders.”

In that moment, it took every ounce of self-control I had to not tell this horrible woman that she had no right to tell me anything. Instead, I simply said “excuse me?”, because this was not my fight - I was there to support my friend’s decisions, not my own, and to ensure her mom actually listened to those decisions. We did eventually get her mom out of there, but the fact that someone actually said that has stuck with me, because it reeks of the bullshit I have been fed for the past decade from old people who demand respect yet have done nothing to earn it.

I want to make this absolutely crystal clear: I don’t respect any elders. They’re destroying the planet and they want me to respect them? Get out. I don’t think the older generations understand that you don’t ask for my respect, you earn it. One of the very few people from older generations that I do respect are my parents, because they never told me I should respect them. They didn’t tell me what to do. They simply tried to be good parents and respected me as a person by letting me make my own decisions, and as a result I deeply respect them, and they respect me, because respect is a two-way street.

The bullshit that conservatives say nowadays reminds me of my friend’s mom. It’s so patently disingenious, so obscenely manipulative, so obviously bad-faith that the only reason I take it seriously is because a real person said the same things to me in real life. I don’t think they respect anyone. I don’t think they care about anyone other than themselves. To conservatives, social behavior is just a game of pretend where everyone lies about everything all the time. It’s performance, where you say the words you’re supposed to say and do the things you’re supposed to do, and if you don’t you’re a Bad Person.

The worst part is that this bleeds into programming. When I was a senior at high school, I argued that garbage collected languages were too inefficient for core game systems because it would cause memory fragmentation. I was brushed off because people said that magic heap compaction from the garbage collector would take care of it. 15 years later, all mainstream game engines are still C++ and many have data-oriented architectures specifically designed to minimize memory fragmentation! Despite this, I still see people brushing off younger programmers pointing out that these same problems are precisely why Rust is necessary, but when I step in and make the exact same points, they listen to me, because I’m older and have a job at some game company they’ve heard of. This means people are not actually listening to the technical substance of an argument, but judging it by the credentials of the author. JeanHeyd Meneide mentions this exact phenomenon in a 2020 talk about problematic behavior in the C++ standards committee, a committee is supposedly purely about technical merit that is nonetheless plagued by intense hypocrisey.

Long ago, we had a hole in the Ozone layer caused by CFCs. World governments got together and banned it right before I was born, and now the ozone has partially recovered. Today, we can’t even hit the Paris Agreement goals, we’re dismantling nuclear power and replacing it with coal, we continue building car dependent infrastructure while refusing to maintain any of it. We are the architects of our own demise, except I didn’t vote for any of this garbage, and other millenials didn’t, either. The boomers won’t give us health care, they tell us to go to college but won’t pay for it, they buy up all the houses, and for good measure they almost took down the entire financial system.

These people want my respect?

Performative social behaviors are not respect, and you are not entitled to my respect, or anyone else’s. If you want respect, you can earn it, by respecting the agency of the other person, by actually listening to what they’re saying, and by having an honest dialogue instead of arguing over semantics. Maybe if boomers actually cared about other people, they’d get some respect.

This blog was started on LiveJournal shortly after I graduated high school in 2009. It has survived this long because I was very persistent about porting all my posts to Blogger, and then to my own static website. Of course, I have limits. Most of my terrible old posts were removed long ago, because they were so bad they didn’t contribute anything. One post was a rant about my high school internship at Microsoft. I took it down because it was bad, but more importantly I took it down because I wrote it before graduating college, while I was still completely delusional.

Let me explain.

I grew up 20 minutes from Microsoft. I had absolutely no idea what an absurdly warped childhood I had until I graduated college and met people who hadn’t grown up in a tech bubble. I never questioned how my middle school always somehow had the latest copy of Windows and maintained six different computer labs (one in each classroom hub, plus the library, plus a dedicated lab). I didn’t realize how unusual it was for my high school to offer an “intro to game dev course” in 2008, or how ridiculous it was that my AP Computer Science professor had worked on the first version of DirectX at Microsoft. I never thought it was weird that we had Microsoft Connector buses driving around town, creating an entire secondary bus system for the sole purpose of moving around Microsoft employees.

I definitely did not realize how utterly insane it was that, in July 2006, students from my high school (and a few other high schools around the area) were invited to a week long event where we would get to experiment with and “bug test” a beta version of Windows Vista, a full six months before it was released. At 8:00AM every morning, our parents dropped us off at Microsoft Building 40, and we were led into a room filled with rows of desks with computers on them. There were maybe 50 of us, and we were given guest accounts and full internet access while Microsoft employees gave presentations about various new features they had introduced for Vista.

I still remember some of those presentations. One that really stuck with me at the time was Microsoft jumping on the “192kHz sampling rate support” bandwagon, which makes absolutely no sense outside of music production, and in retrospect just seems incredibly dumb. Another presentation had us build wifi mesh networks between the computers, which was touted as a way to share files and communicate with friends in places with little to no internet connectivity. I remember this one both because I thought it was very cool, and because someone managed to bluescreen Windows while attempting to set it up, so they actually had an SDE come in and take a look.

In their attempts to make this a “camp” experience, they gave us all a project on the final day: create our own presentation (using the new Microsoft™ Office™ PowerPoint™ 2007, of course), about some new feature we wanted on Windows or some improvement that wasn’t there yet. I don’t remember what our presentation was, but I do know we were all terrible. Afterwards we were all invited to the “Windows Vista Consumer Support Assisted Beta”, a predecessor to the Windows Insider program.

This “Camp Vista” thing was a strange, one-time event, but the Hunt The Wumpus competition is still going. If you’re lucky enough to be attending school in the Lake Washington School District, you can team up with several other students and get tutoring from a Microsoft employee over the course of several months while you build a very basic video game and compete for Microsoft sponsored prizes. I fondly remember our attempts at building a game using XNA back when it was brand new (it’s now dead), and making a bad Descent clone. We tried to use SVN, but weren’t allowed to install it on school computers, so we resorted to an FTP folder and e-mailing zip files.

Here we have the crux of the problem with my initial impressions of my high school internship - it’s not a normal thing! Students worldwide compete for a chance to get college internships at Microsoft, but the high school interns are just random CS students from the Lake Washington School District. When my team learned I knew quite a bit of programming already, they had to come up with something else for me to do because they had assumed I barely knew how to code. It was just another outreach program for nearby high schools, only available to 31000 kids on the entire planet.

So in the midst of me having an experience that almost no other high school student gets to have, I am complaining about things like “wow, we have too many meetings” and “wow, this software is bad”. Yes, we know Microsoft is a dysfunctional catastrophe, but focusing on issues that are omnipresent in large corporations only serves to detract from the actual crazy parts of the internship, like how the program we were working on, if compiled with no optimizations, took 20 minutes to start. Or the meeting where the entire team spent 15 in-person minutes sitting around an actual table deciding that one of our function names was too long and debated over what to rename it before deciding not to change it. Or that one time the department head (my boss’s boss’s boss) took me, an intern, to a meeting with his boss, who I think directly reported to a vice president. It got better, though, because one afternoon, there was a 3-hour period of time where my boss, his boss, and the department head were all gone, so I, a 19-year-old high school student, was technically supposed to take my questions about how to use C# PInvoke to the department head’s boss.

I was really careful not to break anything for 3 hours.

Looking back at my teenage years has made me realize how easy it is for people to simply miss how some aspect of their upbringing was deeply unusual. For some, it may be a silent hindrance, but for others, it might be a quiet boon, softly sending opportunities their way that almost no one else has access to. How many opportunities did I let slip by, unaware of how unique they were?