website/content/posts/hitchhikers-guide-to-arch-linux.md

title	date	draft	description	type	tags
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Arch Linux	2022-07-09T12:51:59-05:00	true	The misadventures of the LHWHS Computer Science Club	post	humor fiction story arch linux fun

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is not coincidental and you should sue me.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who know binary, and nine kinds of people that don't. Bobert Wender is one of those nine kinds, specifically the "I totally know binary cause it's just a series of ones and zeros and it's what computers speak and—wait, what's a base again?" kind of person. He's the kind of person who knows exactly what he's doing, until he doesn't, at which point disaster strikes.

Bobert once got a computer virus from pasting a YouTube comment into notepad.exe and running it in PowerShell, because that's what l33t hax0rs do. As in opening up PowerShell with a customized eye-burning green on green theme, not getting a virus from a YouTube comment. That second thing is what script kiddies do, and Bobert is no script kiddy. He always knows exactly what he's doing.

Bobert knows over 64 programming languages, as in, he knows how to crash all their compilers by feeding them the most bizarre programs ever, so that the compilers commit suicide upon seeing his code. He caused Python to segfault. He caused gcc to print 2^32 lines of error messages. He can break computers just by touching them.

Naturally, this causes quite a bit of friction between him and his siblings, Billiam and Bella. As a middle child, Bobert has always gotten the short end of the stick and has had to deal with this injustice for 15 years already! Billiam is two years older (but twice as mature, if you ask his parents), and is the most boring person ever, according to Bobert. He's the president of the school computer science club, vice president of the math club, vice vice president of the physics club, vice vice vice captain of the quizbowl team, and vice vice vice vice captain of the junior varsity baritsu team. Boring! Looks great on paper for college applications, because Billiam is currently wasting his senior year of high school procrastinating to avoid writing the scariest scary essays of his life, but Billiam has a paper-thin personality in real life. As in, no personality.

Yeah... according to Bobert. He might be a little tiny bit biased about that.

Now Bella on the other hand is a completely different story. Bobert is, uh, well, uh, uh, scared of Bella. Yeah. For good reasons of course. Bobert always knows what he's doing.

Bella is, to put it simply, a living legend at their school. She's only 13 but skipped a grade, which is a bit scary for Bobert since she's a 9th grader and he's a 10th grader, but the really scary part is that she's three grades ahead of him in math and taking all the school's most advanced classes, while he's still stuck bored to death in some uninspiring, intro biology class when he would much rather be hacking the school's grading system and conceivably get expelled. Bella's code is inpenetrable to Bobert, because it's all written in Haskell and Scheme and Brainfuck, and Bobert has never gotten any of those compilers to commit suicide yet so far.

And by the way, this isn't just any school. This is the LHWHS Horton hears a Who High School in the beautiful, wonderful city of St. Louis, Misery, the happiest city in the world. LHWHS stands for LHWHS Horton hears a Who High School, in case you were wondering. It's the best school in Misery, period.

Now the best college in Misery in none other than the Misery Institute of Technology, AKA MIT. Blessed with the fastest professors, tastiest supercomputers, and smartest dining halls in the nation, MIT is undoubtedly the dream school of all the Wender siblings, and all the members of LHWHSCSC.

At this point, you probably just stared at that last accronym in utter horror (it's almost as intimidating as TANSTAAFL and just as enlightening), but I can break it down for you. LHWHSCSC stands for the LHWHCSC Horton hears a Who High School Computer Science Club. Easy as that.

You've probably already forgotten that Billiam is the president of the school computer science club (BTW FYI AKA LHWHSCSC), but he is. That's kind of a big deal, but Bobert hasn't realized it yet. He's too busy wondering why everyone takes his brother seriously, but not him. Come on, Bobert has actually has a personality! And his programs can do much cooler things than anything Billiam has ever written!

So I kinda lied earlier. Well, actually Billiam kinda lied on his college applications, because everyone does. He's not actually the president of the CS club, but rather the co-president. OHHH NOOO! Someone go alert the colleges to reject his applications!

The other co-president of the club is Lalani Li, who is a much more interesting person than Billiam, at least to Bobert. In fact, Bobert would probably be super obsessed with Lalani if he wasn't already super obsessed with anime girls. Wait, did I already mention that Bobert is hardcore hyper-weeb? He also brags to everyone about how he knows Japanese, except his entire knowledge of the language comes from watching dubbed anime so I'm not sure if should trust him too much about that.

The entire planet of Earth has a problem, which is that its computers enjoy malfunctioning and watching you cry. Many solutions have been suggested for this problem, but most of them involved creating more and more powerful and smart computers that only gain more and more satisfaction from watching you cry.

And so the problem remains, and people only cried more and more from their computers malfunctioning. Some people thought that the problem was the computers themselves, and that computers never should have been invented and we should just switch to using paper and pencil for surveillance capitalism, but they were quickly apprehended by the Facebook Bureau of Investigation and permabanned from the internet. Some were even permabanned from IRL.

And then, one Out of Touch Thursday evening, Lalani was coding at a small little café, since that's what cafés are meant for, and suddenly an arc lamp literally went off on in her head figuratively and she realized what was going wrong with the world all this time, and she finally knew how to make humans and computers actually get along together.

Sadly, before she her laptop could allocate enough RAM for her bloated Electron chat app so she could message LHWHSCSC about her idea, a terribly stupid catastrophe happened, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

But this story is about a book, specifically, a really crappy out-of-date waste-of-money book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Arch Linux. It's not worth your time to read it, so thankfully you aren't reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to Arch Linux right now. But Lalani has read it before, for the sole reason that it's the thickest book on the bookshelf in Mr. FFFFFF's classroom.

Mr. FFFFFF is the teacher of the Advanced Placement Java Language and Culture class at LHWHS and therefore, the sponsor of LHWHSCSC because no other teacher knows what binary is. (The math teachers are the "why use binary when we have ten fingers and clearly should use base 10" kind of person.) Club meetings take place weekly every Out of Touch Thursday in Mr. FFFFFF's room with high probability. Mr. FFFFFF's room is a perfect specular reflection of his personality, with posters of algorithms on the wall that you can use while cheating on his tests, desks arranged in the exact combination to cause the most congestion, using a layout he generated using a genetic algorithm, and a bookshelf with books about every programming language in existence, from the A programming language to Z. There's one book that stands out.

No, you're wrong.

It's not The Hitchhiker's Guide to Arch Linux, even though that book takes up half of a row from how thick it is.

I'm also wrong.

I kinda lied that this isn't Lalani's story, because it is a story about her, but just not that one. Billiam also put that lie on his college application, because a college application without a few lies is not a true college application.

Anyways, the book is called How to Hack and contains all the step you need to become a script kiddy. When Bobert discovered it in Mr. FFFFFF's room his first year of high school, he took it out on permanent loan and didn't return it until some other hardcore fan of the book at LHWHS commented on one of Bobert's hacking flex YouTube videos a Batch script that Bobert blindly pasted into notepad.exe and ran it in PowerShell. Bobert always knows exactly what he's doing.

Today is Out of Touch Thursday (if you computer's clock says otherwise, it's wrong and you should set it to Thursday), and that means a LHWHSCSC meeting!

At exactly 14:30 PM, the final school bell rings and all CS enthusiasts and wannabe l33t hax0rs in the building compute the shortest path to Mr. FFFFFF's room and make the perilous trek against a torrent of students stampeeding the other way that want to get out of school as quickly as possible. (It's miraculous no one has died yet getting trampled in the halls.)

The club members congregate inside Mr. FFFFFF's room and struggle to find seats amid the precisely designed congestion. The room fills with the noise of casual conversations about computing and really loud laptop fans. (Try compiling the Linux kernel on a laptop and see how loud your fans get. I bet if Linus Torvalds gave a talk where he compiled his egotistical kernel, the fans in the audience wouldn't be as loud as your laptop fans. Also, in case you were wondering, compiling a kernel is slow because gcc is so fast. Think about it and it'll make sense.)

Bobert weight-lifts his giant l33t hax0r gaming laptop out of his backpack, and his backpack breathes and audible sigh of relief as it no longer has to carry such an atrocious thing. Bobert presses the power button, and waits for Windows to boot up. In the meantime, Bobert's friend and partner-in-crime, Aydyn, stops by.

"Why haven't you switched to Linux yet?" asks Aydyn.

"Why should I? I like Windows!" replies Bobert, annoyed.

"What, you enjoy Windows update?" Aydyn asks, preparing for the There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who know binary, and nine kinds of people that don't. Bobert Wender is one of those nine kinds, specifically the "I totally know binary cause it's just a series of ones and zeros and it's what computers speak and—wait, what's a base again?" kind of person. He's the kind of person who knows exactly what he's doing, until he doesn't, at which point disaster strikes.

Bobert once got a computer virus from pasting a YouTube comment into notepad.exe and running it in PowerShell, because that's what l33t hax0rs do. As in opening up PowerShell with a customized eye-burning green on green theme, not getting a virus from a YouTube comment. That second thing is what script kiddies do, and Bobert is no script kiddy. He always knows exactly what he's doing.

Bobert knows over 64 programming languages, as in, he knows how to crash all their compilers by feeding them the most bizarre programs ever, so that the compilers commit suicide upon seeing his code. He caused Python to segfault. He caused gcc to print 2^32 lines of error messages. He can break computers just by touching them.

Naturally, this causes quite a bit of friction between him and his siblings, Billiam and Bella. As a middle child, Bobert has always gotten the short end of the stick and has had to deal with this injustice for 15 years already! Billiam is two years older (but twice as mature, if you ask his parents), and is the most boring person ever, according to Bobert. He's the president of the school computer science club, vice president of the math club, vice vice president of the physics club, vice vice vice captain of the quizbowl team, and vice vice vice vice captain of the junior varsity baritsu team. Boring! Looks great on paper for college applications, because Billiam is currently wasting his senior year of high school procrastinating to avoid writing the scariest scary essays of his life, but Billiam has a paper-thin personality in real life. As in, no personality.

Yeah... according to Bobert. He might be a little tiny bit biased about that.

Now Bella on the other hand is a completely different story. Bobert is, uh, well, uh, uh, scared of Bella. Yeah. For good reasons of course. Bobert always knows what he's doing.

Bella is, to put it simply, a living legend at their school. She's only 13 but skipped a grade, which is a bit scary for Bobert since she's a 9th grader and he's a 10th grader, but the really scary part is that she's three grades ahead of him in math and taking all the school's most advanced classes, while he's still stuck bored to death in some uninspiring, intro biology class when he would much rather be hacking the school's grading system and conceivably get expelled. Bella's code is inpenetrable to Bobert, because it's all written in Haskell and Scheme and Brainfuck, and Bobert has never gotten any of those compilers to commit suicide yet so far.

And by the way, this isn't just any school. This is the LHWHS Horton hears a Who High School in the beautiful, wonderful city of St. Louis, Misery, the happiest city in the world. LHWHS stands for LHWHS Horton hears a Who High School, in case you were wondering. It's the best school in Misery, period.

Now the best college in Misery in none other than the Misery Institute of Technology, AKA MIT. Blessed with the fastest professors, tastiest supercomputers, and smartest dining halls in the nation, MIT is undoubtedly the dream school of all the Wender siblings, and all the members of LHWHSCSC.

At this point, you probably just stared at that last accronym in utter horror (it's almost as intimidating as TANSTAAFL and just as enlightening), but I can break it down for you. LHWHSCSC stands for the LHWHCSC Horton hears a Who High School Computer Science Club. Easy as that.

You've probably already forgotten that Billiam is the president of the school computer science club (BTW FYI AKA LHWHSCSC), but he is. That's kind of a big deal, but Bobert hasn't realized it yet. He's too busy wondering why everyone takes his brother seriously, but not him. Come on, Bobert has actually has a personality! And his programs can do much cooler things than anything Billiam has ever written!

So I kinda lied earlier. Well, actually Billiam kinda lied on his college applications, because everyone does. He's not actually the president of the CS club, but rather the co-president. OHHH NOOO! Someone go alert the colleges to reject his applications!

The other co-president of the club is Lalani Li, who is a much more interesting person than Billiam, at least to Bobert. In fact, Bobert would probably be super obsessed with Lalani if he wasn't already super obsessed with anime girls. Wait, did I already mention that Bobert is hardcore hyper-weeb? He also brags to everyone about how he knows Japanese, except his entire knowledge of the language comes from watching dubbed anime so I'm not sure if should trust him too much about that.

The entire planet of Earth has a problem, which is that its computers enjoy malfunctioning and watching you cry. Many solutions have been suggested for this problem, but most of them involved creating more and more powerful and smart computers that only gain more and more satisfaction from watching you cry.

And so the problem remains, and people only cried more and more from their computers malfunctioning. Some people thought that the problem was the computers themselves, and that computers never should have been invented and we should just switch to using paper and pencil for surveillance capitalism, but they were quickly apprehended by the Facebook Bureau of Investigation and permabanned from the internet. Some were even permabanned from IRL.

And then, one Out of Touch Thursday evening, Lalani was coding at a small little café, since that's what cafés are meant for, and suddenly an arc lamp literally went off on in her head figuratively and she realized what was going wrong with the world all this time, and she finally knew how to make humans and computers actually get along together.

Sadly, before she her laptop could allocate enough RAM for her bloated Electron chat app so she could message LHWHSCSC about her idea, a terribly stupid catastrophe happened, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

But this story is about a book, specifically, a really crappy out-of-date waste-of-money book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Arch Linux. It's not worth your time to read it, so thankfully you aren't reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to Arch Linux right now. But Lalani has read it before, for the sole reason that it's the thickest book on the bookshelf in Mr. FFFFFF's classroom.

Mr. FFFFFF is the teacher of the Advanced Placement Java Language and Culture class at LHWHS and therefore, the sponsor of LHWHSCSC because no other teacher knows what binary is. (The math teachers are the "why use binary when we have ten fingers and clearly should use base 10" kind of person.) Club meetings take place weekly every Out of Touch Thursday in Mr. FFFFFF's room with high probability. Mr. FFFFFF's room is a perfect specular reflection of his personality, with posters of algorithms on the wall that you can use while cheating on his tests, desks arranged in the exact combination to cause the most congestion, using a layout he generated using a genetic algorithm, and a bookshelf with books about every programming language in existence, from the A programming language to Z. There's one book that stands out.

No, you're wrong.

It's not The Hitchhiker's Guide to Arch Linux, even though that book takes up half of a row from how thick it is.

I'm also wrong.

I kinda lied that this isn't Lalani's story, because it is a story about her, but just not that one. Billiam also put that lie on his college application, because a college application without a few lies is not a true college application.

Anyways, the book is called How to Hack and contains all the step you need to become a script kiddy. When Bobert discovered it in Mr. FFFFFF's room his first year of high school, he took it out on permanent loan and didn't return it until some other hardcore fan of the book at LHWHS commented on one of Bobert's hacking flex YouTube videos a Batch script that Bobert blindly pasted into notepad.exe and ran it in PowerShell. Bobert always knows exactly what he's doing.

Today is Out of Touch Thursday (if you computer's clock says otherwise, it's wrong and you should set it to Thursday), and that means a LHWHSCSC meeting!

At exactly 14:30 PM, the final school bell rings and all CS enthusiasts and wannabe l33t hax0rs in the building compute the shortest path to Mr. FFFFFF's room and make the perilous trek against a torrent of students stampeeding the other way that want to get out of school as quickly as possible. (It's miraculous no one has died yet getting trampled in the halls.)

The club members congregate inside Mr. FFFFFF's room and struggle to find seats amid the precisely designed congestion. The room fills with the noise of casual conversations about computing and really loud laptop fans. (Try compiling the Linux kernel on a laptop and see how loud your fans get. I bet if Linus Torvalds gave a talk where he compiled his egotistical kernel, the fans in the audience wouldn't be as loud as your laptop fans. Also, in case you were wondering, compiling a kernel is slow because gcc is so fast. Think about it and it'll make sense.)

Bobert weight-lifts his giant l33t hax0r gaming laptop out of his backpack, and his backpack breathes and audible sigh of relief as it no longer has to carry such an atrocious thing. Bobert presses the power button, and waits for Windows to boot up. In the meantime, Bobert's friend and partner-in-crime, Aydyn, stops by.

"Why haven't you switched to Linux yet?" asks Aydyn.

"Why should I? I like Windows!" replies Bobert, annoyed.

"What, you enjoy Windows update?" Aydyn asks, preparing for the