But What Does The Power Button Do Then?

Behold, the revolutionary new device for developers who miss the command line days. It's not a laptop without a screen—it's a feature. Now you can code without the distraction of actually seeing what you're doing. Perfect for those who claim they can program blindfolded or have their terminal color scheme set to black text on black background. Bonus: battery life measured in weeks instead of hours.

Remember when "burning a CD" meant laser-etching data onto a shiny disc instead of committing arson? Nothing makes you feel like a digital fossil quite like explaining to Gen Z that we once had to wait 20 minutes to copy Linkin Park's "Hybrid Theory" onto a circular piece of plastic that would skip if you breathed on it wrong. And no, you couldn't just "AirDrop" it—you had to physically hand someone your mix like a technological caveman. Those were dark times... with progress bars.

The cobbler's children have no shoes, and the programmer's house has no smart tech—just a demonic printer that might need to be put down at any moment. Nothing captures the duality of tech life better than this. Non-tech people building smart homes with IoT everything, while actual developers know better than to invite that chaos into their lives. We're too busy fixing bugs at work to come home and debug why our refrigerator is suddenly speaking Portuguese and ordering 50 gallons of milk. And that printer? The universal enemy. The one piece of technology that has somehow escaped decades of innovation and remains stubbornly, maliciously stupid. It senses fear and feeds on desperation. It requires blood sacrifice to print a simple PDF.

Cloud-based relationships come with hidden costs. When your AI companion's neural networks are hosted on someone else's servers, you're essentially paying a subscription fee for affection. Self-hosted models might require more maintenance, but at least your sweet nothings aren't being analyzed by data scientists in a corporate basement somewhere. Remember kids: true love means running your own inference engine.

So you spent three weeks learning trigonometry, diving into DDA algorithms, and debugging why your walls look like a Salvador Dalí painting, only to realize John Carmack did this in 1992 on hardware that had less computing power than your smart toaster. And he did it while probably eating pizza and writing assembly like it was a casual Tuesday. The "box of triangles" bit hits different when you realize modern game engines abstract all this pain away with their fancy rendering pipelines, but back then? Carmack was literally casting rays and doing trigonometric calculations per pixel to fake 3D in Wolfenstein 3D. No GPU acceleration, no Unity, no "just import Three.js"—just raw math and the will to make demons shootable. Meanwhile, you're here in 2024 with Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, and 64GB of RAM, still struggling to get your raycaster to not crash when you look at a corner. Humbling stuff.

When you understand how technology actually works, you realize that "smart home" is just a fancy way of saying "200 attack vectors living rent-free in your house." Mechanical locks can't be phished, mechanical windows don't need security patches, and OpenWRT routers are basically the programmer's way of saying "I trust myself more than I trust Cisco." Meanwhile, tech enthusiasts are out here treating their homes like beta testing environments for every IoT device that promises convenience. Voice assistants? That's just always-on microphones with extra steps. Internet-connected thermostats? Because what could possibly go wrong with letting your HVAC join a botnet? The real power move is the 2004 printer with a loaded gun next to it. Because if two decades of dealing with printer drivers has taught us anything, it's that printers are inherently evil and must be dealt with using extreme prejudice. PC LOAD LETTER? More like PC LOAD LEAD.