On the Costs of Imperfection

When the machine I'm using freezes, I usually leave it to do something else, such as read a book.  I
feel horror when I imagine my very body behaving so unreliably, when reading no longer be an option.

I've one machine which has faithfully played music to me without skipping, a dedicated music player;
even then, it has issues with processing commands occasionally, but this is certainly less critical.

Only a machine as a real-time system could possibly replace reality with even decent results; it's a
prerequisite.  Until this problem were solved, at the very least, there will always be advantages to
not using the machines where avoidable, and this isn't even the most damning flaw of these machines.

At times, when my machine drops events I've given to it, and it's usually the disgusting WWW browser
called Firefox which does this, I'm forced to wonder whether I actually gave to it the event or not.
Only GNU Emacs tells me what events have been given to it, and only it helps in this respect.  Other
software asks me to spend my finite life repeating myself and leaves me wanting to similarly shorten
the finite life of its authors.  I wonder how many human lifespans have been squandered so by fools.

The primary advantage of books in the modern age isn't needing no electricity, lasting in situations
too harsh for other media, and certainly not any indices in the back; the primary advantage of books
is immutability, something few media can match, and those media still require untrustworthy machines
to read them.  I truly believe this quality in particular will probably never be bested by machines.

I've been concerned about my vision just a tad lately, and I've long noticed my vision outside to be
better.  Lately, I've noticed that sometimes when I see something not there on the screen, I in fact
see something there on the screen, as an error; I've a mental model of how the system works which it
regularly violates, previously causing me to doubt myself.  Combined with event dropping, this feels
like gaslighting from a damned machine, making me hate it far more than I thought myself to hate it.

It's a fool who is made aware of these problems and then claims them to be immutable and acceptable.
.