# Look who's talking By [Nox](https://paragraph.com/@nox) · 2023-02-05 --- When someone says something, we believe them. When someone wears a chef hat, they're a chef. When someone _popular_ says something, spacetime bends to make their statement true; Einstein covered this in the universal theory. The world is awash with advice, "mental models", frameworks, conference talks, and long twitter threads that should have been conference talks. All of it is shit, useless for solving any problem except the problem of not having enough attention, but, society is built on trust. **Expressing something makes it _true_.** It's not easy to disprove something, and most people will think you're an asshole for even trying. The man in the chef hat says that good food is a single sprig of genetically modified fennel dusted with the memory of a flavor, just eat it. _Everybody_ says Javascript is blazing fast! It costs nothing to make false claims. They're on version 10.0 of this library and working with it is "such a joy." The prior 9 versions were pieces of shit that also claimed to be amazing but this 10th one has **really** revolutionized the way we use 100% of our CPU cycles and RAM to draw shitposts and cat pictures on a screen. Trust us. To cut through the noise takes not only vision, but the strength to stand against the crowd; the strength to recognize that just because something was said doesn't make it relevant to you. There's a big difference between recognizing bullshit, and having the ability to "prove" it in an effective way to others, but the only person you really need to convince is yourself. You have the same power of expression as everyone else—simply state an opinion to the contrary and it will inherit all of the innate and mystical characteristics of every statement ever uttered. Say it with me, make it true: Fuck Javascript. Fuck Google. Fuck Facebook. Fuck Docker. Fuck Twitter. Fuck whatever the new hotness is. It's **all** fucked up and retarded. This is the technological red pill. If expressing something makes it true, there must be a difference between truth and _truth_. The key is: look who's talking. Especially when something comes from a big company or a noteworthy person, we're inclined to think that it's true. It's real, it has institutional buy-in, millions of lines of code, all of the latest "best practices," they're wearing a fucking chef hat, it must be true! Wrong. **These people are solving different problems than you**. Facebook is trying to align hundreds of teams on multiple continents to serve the worst UX in the world to billions of people. Twitter is failing to monetize a surveillance tool key/value store that hasn't had any noteworthy updates in 5 years. Google is how you search Wikipedia and Reddit. The "thought leader" with the blog that everyone references is trying to sell books and consulting services. Is that what you want to do? Look, retard, you're reading my blog, you're not going to have thousands of employees or billions of dollars, and you're not a "thought leader" either. You don't _need_ a framework. You don't _need_ Scrum. You **definitely** don't need a code of conduct. And please stop talking about "scaling", my brother in Christ you have no **TRAFFIC**. You **need** a product. You **need** customers. You **need** to be able to maintain, expand, and support your product for years to come. Nothing else matters. You could easily write your product in vanilla PHP and serve it from a Raspberry Pi in your home. Nobody would notice. It certainly would not be the difference between your success and failure, and it might even be preferable to the risks of modern dependency hell and vendor lock-in. How do I know? Because I said it. --- *Originally published on [Nox](https://paragraph.com/@nox/look-who-s-talking)*