Can of Infinite Worms

March 28, 2026 ·

Bugs have been on my mind lately. Not too long ago I posted about a bug while privatizing the GitHub repository for this website. I since learnt git is British slang for a stupid, annoying, unpleasant person; that Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel and distributed version control system Git, named it in self deprecating humor. What a legend. Git-style version control has far reaching value well past software, I think. While hearing people argue history for example, I often draw the conclusion that what's described in plain English as apples and oranges, is solvable via Git-style version control. I guess that's what epistemology is in a sense, and Git is simply computational epistemology. I'm a big fan.

A software phrase that's become commonplace in the last decade is whether something is a feature not bug, used when someone finds a perceived error which looked-at-another-way is beneficial. This feature-bug dichotomy sits on top of the idea that software shall forever remain incomplete. It is never done. It will always be open to both bugs and features upon further inspection. One could flex their philosophical underpinnings here and draw in the even-more-underlying free will or determinism debate, or an intermediate John von Neumann or neural net architecture discourse, among others, but the practical thing to be mindful of is incompleteness. And incompleteness is uncomfortable.

While making music or any sort of art, one also has to decide when a piece is done. This of course is another variant of the situation I describe above. Depending on who's looking at it, they could infinitely find more bugs or features to add or subtract in it. But the artist must taken upon themselves this burden and make that final call.

Yesterday I added the ability to ship physical products on this website. That was exciting. But there was an upward spiral of both bugs and features I spotted throughout the rest of the day. Shipping costs were not being charged for, wallets don't open the correct way in every browser, pictures could be better aligned. There were also obvious features to add. My main complaint with Stripe was their onboarding process which I found extremely annoying. Enter Square, which I gave a shot later yesterday. Onboarding was a true delight in comparison. Jack Dorsey knows ball, I can tell. Need to add credit cards back I thought.

This whole thing is a can of infinite worms. The more I peek into it, the more bugs and features I come up with. It's fun for me, though. Incompleteness is fun.

We're done when I say we're done.