So Monday night my Twitter timeline turned into one long group chat trying to figure out how you're supposed to say "X Æ A-12." That's the name Grimes and Elon Musk gave their newborn, and by Tuesday morning half the internet had opinions about it and the other half was trying to type the Æ on a normal keyboard and giving up.
I'll admit it, I laughed. Not at the kid, obviously, a baby doesn't pick its own name. At the discourse. Grimes did this whole explainer thread breaking it down: X is "the unknown variable," Æ is her "elven spelling of Ai" (love, and/or artificial intelligence, take your pick), and A-12 is a nod to the Lockheed A-12, apparently the precursor to the SR-71 and, in her words, "no weapons, no defenses, just speed." Great plane. Weird thing to name a baby after. My spouse's reaction when I read that out loud was just a long silence and then "so it's a car with a person inside."
Here's the part that actually got me though, and probably only gets me because I write code for a living: X Æ A-12 is, structurally, a way better variable name than it is a name for an actual human being who will need to fill out a W-9 someday. It's got a placeholder (X), a unicode character that's going to break half the form validation on earth, and a hyphenated alphanumeric suffix that looks like a part number off a Boeing schematic. If a junior dev on my team pushed a commit with a variable called xAeA12 I'd flag it in review, not because it's illegal but because nobody two years from now is going to remember what it means. Which, I guess, is sort of the joke people were already making by Tuesday afternoon, except they were making it about California's Bureau of Vital Statistics instead of a pull request. Turns out state law doesn't allow numerals in first names, so whatever ends up on the actual birth certificate probably isn't going to be the same string that was in the tweet. Naming things is hard. Ask any programmer, ask any parent, I guess now you can ask both at once.
The other half of this story that I don't think got enough attention next to the baby name is that this is the same week Musk tweeted "Tesla stock price is too high imo," on a Friday afternoon no less, and the stock dropped something like ten percent basically immediately. A CEO tanking his own company's market cap with four words from his phone is, on any other week, the whole news cycle. It got buried under a baby name by Monday. I don't know what to do with that except find it very funny in a bleak sort of way. If I tweeted something that moved a stock ten percent I think I'd just turn my phone off for a month.
Anyway. I've been working from the same desk in the same room for going on eight weeks now, like most of you probably have, and my brain has apparently decided that "weird internet news about a billionaire's kid" is the closest thing to lighthearted content it's getting these days, so that's where the energy went instead of, I don't know, actual technical content this week. Sorry. Or you're welcome, depending on your taste.
One small complaint while I'm here: every single article covering the name spelled it a different way in the headline. Some went with "X Æ A-12," some did "X AE A-12" because their CMS choked on the ligature, and I saw at least one that just gave up and wrote "X AE A-Xii." If your content management system can't render a two-character Old English digraph in the year 2020 that's a problem with your content management system, not with the baby. Encoding issues aging like milk, as usual.
I don't have a tidy point to land on with this one. Some weeks are just about a weird name and a reckless tweet and eight straight weeks of the same desk. Back to actual posts soon, probably about something with fewer diacritics in it.