Complete navigation logs from the Ruby nebula—all coding adventures, cosmic experiments, and debugging missions.
How the observability industry's vendor lock-in tactics led to building Lapsoss and the Liberation Stack - community-owned tools that put developers back in control
After fifteen deaths from AI comfort layers and countless near-disasters from over-engineering, the Mars colony codifies its hard-won wisdom. These principles are carved in metal, written in loss, and maintained in defiance of every trend that promises to make programming 'easier.' Because Mars doesn't want easy. Mars wants correct.
In the rec room's harsh light, survivors gather for a memorial. Nina from Hydroponics meets MadBomber from Emergency Command. Two generations of engineers—one who just learned AI can kill, one who spent 50 years forgetting it could. Together they draft the first law of Mars Engineering: Reality doesn't negotiate.
When a meteorite threatens to vaporize half the colony, the emergency warning passes through seven AI assistants. Each one makes it 'better'—more polite, more contextual, less alarming. By the time it reaches MadBomber through his philosophy-translation AI, imminent death has become a suggestion for mindful reflection. Captain Seuros discovers why comfort layers kill.
Captain Seuros has been growing food on Mars for two years with basic sensors and shell scripts. When a fresh colonist arrives with a 'revolutionary' AI farming system, they learn why Mars punishes complexity worship—and why the tomatoes don't care about your neural network architecture.
Senior Engineer Chen tries to fix a failing oxygen recycler, but the documentation has been corrupted by years of 'improvements.' The manual now contains a Gaza/Israel edit war, romantic Martian fan fiction, radiation procedures written as haikus, and three dead MegaUpload links. Meanwhile, the actual paper manuals sit untouched on a shelf marked 'Legacy Knowledge.'
Priya discovers that adding React-mermaid to the food distributor won't make bland rations taste better. But without resetting her AI session, she's now architected a distributed microservice mesh to regulate thermostat temperature, EVA suit comfort, and lighting flicker. Captain Seuros watches in horror as 200 messages of context pollution create the most expensive salt discovery system in the solar system.
Three weeks after Kay's brutal awakening in the Maintenance Bay, Captain Seuros intercepts Earth transmissions. The same grifters who sold Minecraft templates as AI expertise are now pushing 'Agentic AI Workflows' and 'Cursor-Powered Development Agencies.' The hustle never stops, even when the audience moves to Mars.
Captain Seuros has been on Mars for two years. When a fresh colonist finds old tech in a drawer, it sparks a conversation about the difference between owning your hardware and being owned by it. Sometimes the best gear isn't the premium brand.
In the flickering glow of Mars's communications hub, Maya Delgado receives another LinkedIn message promising '$50K workflows' and 'digital transformation roadmaps.' Captain Seuros watches her delete them and delivers a brutal truth about dead-world thinking and the grifters still transmitting from a planet that no longer exists.
The AI router goes offline for maintenance, and Kay—self-proclaimed 'prompt engineer' with 59,000 templates—discovers he can't execute basic bash commands. Captain Seuros watches him type 'Go to my private documents' and get 'go: unknown command' in return. The brutal lesson about exoskeleton dependency begins.
In the deafening hum of Habitat 7's life support systems, Lev Ad Astra asks Captain Seuros the wrong questions. What's the best framework? What pays the most? What will unlock his creativity? Mars doesn't care about optimization without purpose—it only cares if you can keep 200 people breathing.