#terry-pratchett
Moist missed the rest of the sentence. Innocent words swirled in it like debris caught in a flood, occasionally bobbing to the surface and waving desperately before being pulled under again. He caught ‘the’ several times before it drowned, and even ‘disconnect’ and ‘gear chain’, but the roaring, technical polysyllables rose and engulfed them all.
“- and that takes at least half a day,” Sane Alex finished.
Moist looked helplessly at the other two. “And that means what, exactly?” he said.
“If you send the right kind of message you can bust the machinery,” said Mad Al.
“The whole Trunk?”
“In theory,” said Mad Al, “because an execute and terminate code -”
Moist relaxed as the tide came back in. He wasn’t interested in machinery; he thought of a spanner as something which had a person holding it. It was best just to smile and wait. That was the thing about artificers: they loved explaining. You just had to wait until they reached your level of understanding, even if it meant that they had to lie down.
#complexity #linguistics #language #meaningfulness #documentation #perception
Vetinari: The freedom to succeed goes hand in hand with the freedom to fail. #freedom #failure
Vetinari: in my experience, the best way to get something done is to give it to someone who is busy. #productivity