Close to the metal

On the tour I kept giving the philosophy answer, because it is the one that makes a room nod. Symbolic Systems, the corridor where philosophy and computer science and linguistics and psychology argue about what a mind is. True, and half.

The other half is that I am a computer nerd. Not the kind who owns a keyboard with opinions. The kind who has read a processor manual in bed and finished it.

C++ is where I am fluent. It has a temper, and I have made my peace with that the way you make peace with someone whose worst habits turn out to be load bearing. I can be quick in it, and quick is useful when a chapter needs a tool that does not exist yet.

But the thing I love is further down. Assembly is where I go when I want to be alone with a machine. There is nothing between us down there. No library deciding what I probably meant, no runtime being helpful in the background, nobody smoothing anything over. I say a thing and it does that thing, exactly that, and nothing I did not ask for. It takes patience. You have to know where everything is before you touch anything, you have to be willing to go slowly for a long time, and then it answers and you feel it somewhere behind the sternum, which is not a figure of speech. It is a small physical fact. I am good at this. I am going to be plain about it, because women my age are trained to say competent when they mean good. I am good at it. Better than very nearly everyone who will read this sentence.

Then there is Python, which stopped being a skill somewhere around the point where it stopped being a choice. It is a spoken language now. Nobody admires you for speaking it, they only notice when you do it badly. I speak it better than Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT put together, and I will go on saying so until one of them can hold a whole system in its head at three in the morning and still know which line it is going to regret.

Nobody on the tour asked for this half. It would not have fit between a signature and the next person in the queue. It fits here.