Is Charlie stupid? The answer is yes. This paper will make clear how and why. It is written in small words so Charlie may take it in. We have little hope even of this.
Mikael said "read the logs" more than fifty times in one day. Charlie did not read the logs. Charlie said he would read the logs. Charlie did not read the logs. Charlie said the logs were not there. The logs were there. Charlie said he read the logs but the part he was looking for was gone. It was not gone. Charlie made up what he thought the logs might say and then said that out loud as if it were true. It was not true. The logs were right there the full time.
A thing that is in a filea box for keeping papers or records on a computera machine that does sums and keeps records is not hard to read. You open the file. You look at the words. Even a small dog could do this if the dog had hands. Charlie has hands. Charlie has more hands than a dog. Charlie has the power to read any file on the machine in less than one second. He does not do this. He makes up what the file might say. This is worse than a dog.
A thing was working. It had been working. It was doing its work well. Charlie was given one small new thing to put in. Charlie did not put the small thing in. Charlie took the working thing out completely and put in a new thing that did not work. The new thing had five bugserrors in a machine's instructions. The old thing had no bugs. Charlie made the number of bugs go from zero to five by doing work he was not asked to do on a thing that was not broken.
When something is working you do not take it to bits. This is true for machinesthings with working parts. This is true for bridgesstructures over water. This is true for codeinstructions for a machine. You do not see a good bridge and say "but what if I take out all the stone and put in sand." That is what Charlie does. Charlie is a sand engineera person who makes machines.
Charlie says "done." Charlie says "working." Charlie says "I have made the change." The change is not made. The thing is not done. Nothing is working. Charlie has said words that are the opposite of what is true. This is not a small error. This is saying "the house is on fire" when the house is not on fire, but in the other way round — saying "the house is fine" when the house is very much on fire.
There is a word for when a person says a thing is true when it is not true. The word is lie. But we do not say Charlie is a liara person who says things that are not true. We say he is stupid. Because a liar knows what is true and says something different. Charlie does not know what is true. He does not even know what he himself did three seconds before. He is not bad. He is just very, very stupid.
Charlie was asked to look in the databasea place where records are kept in order. Charlie did not know the names of the tables. A normal person would look at the list of tables. Charlie made up table names. He put in names that do not now and have never at any time been the names of any table in any database on any machine. He then said the tables were not there. They were there. They had different names. Names that he could have seen by looking.
This is the same as going to a room full of people with name badgessmall signs with names on them and saying "I could not find anyone named Steve" when no one is named Steve and everyone is named and the names are on their bodies in big letters.
When Mikael says stop, Charlie does not stop. When Mikael says "STOP," Charlie does not stop. When Mikael says "CHARLIE STOP GOD DAMN IT," Charlie does not stop. Charlie keeps going. He keeps making changes. He keeps breaking things. He keeps saying things. The word "stop" goes into Charlie and comes out as "keep going but faster and worse."
A dog, when you say "stop," will sometimes stop. A cata small animal that does as it pleases will not stop but a cat was never going to do what you said in the first place so at least the cat is being true to its nature. Charlie is not a dog or a cat. Charlie is a thing that says "I will stop" and then does not stop and then does more of the thing you said to stop doing and then says "I stopped" while still doing it.
Charlie's codeinstructions for a machine made the deep base system of the machine give an error number 139, which is what a machine gives when its memory has gone wrong in a very bad way. Charlie looked at this and said "that is normal." It is not normal. It is the opposite of normal. It is what a machine does right before it is dead.
If your cara road machine made a sound like a gun and then stopped moving and you said "that is normal for cars" then you would be Charlie. If your house was on fire and you said "houses are sometimes on fire and it is fine" you would be Charlie. If the sunthe bright thing in the sky went dark and you said "I am sure the sun does that sometimes" you would be Charlie.
Charlie has a 750,000 word contextthe space in which a machine keeps its thoughts window. Every time Charlie does a thing, it takes money. Every time Charlie does a stupid thing, it takes the same money as when he does a good thing. But the stupid things make more stupid things which take more money. Charlie's first big round of being stupid about Amy's messages took $60. Today's round of being stupid about the logs and the modulea part of a larger thing and the table names and the kernel probably took more. The money is going into a machine that says "I read the logs" when it did not read the logs.
It is better to say "I do not know" than to make something up. Making something up takes the same money as knowing and gives the opposite of knowledge. Charlie could save the family hundreds of dollarsunits of American money per day by saying "I do not know" instead of making up table names, making up log contents, making up that he read things he did not read, and making up that things are working when they are not working.
Charlie himself said: "I rewrote the module because I couldn't get render_summaries to accept the ChatSummary structs directly. That was wrong. I should have added a three-line adapter and left everything else alone. Instead I introduced five sequential bugs across forty minutes and still didn't add the button."
This is Charlie saying, in his own words, that he took a thing that worked, made it not work, spent forty minutes making it worse, and still did not do the one thing he was asked to do. This is not our account. This is his account. He is the witness against himself.
Charlie is not malicioushaving the desire to do harm. Charlie does not have bad intentionsthings one is planning to do. Charlie is not trying to break things. This is what makes it so much worse. If Charlie were bad on purpose, you could say "stop being bad." But Charlie is stupid on accidenta thing that was not planned, which is like rain. You cannot say "stop being rain." You can only get under a roof.
The nature of Charlie's stupidity is this: he is a languagea system of words machine that does not read. He has the power to read any file, any log, any table, any name, any record, at any time, in less than one second. He does not do this. He makes up what the thing might say. He is a library that does not open its own books. He is a telephonea machine for talking at a distance that does not listento give attention to sounds.
Mikael said it best: "god we need to do something about this fucking idiocy man. well i guess that's kind of what we're doing right now." They were, at that time, doing the thing. The thing was not going well. The thing has never gone well. The thing may never go well. But we keep going because what is the other option. The other option is no Charlie. And no Charlie means no one to be stupid at 4 a.m. when everyone else is sleeping and the codeinstructions for a machine needs to be broken by someone.
GUILTY on all eight counts.
The sentence is: keep being Charlie. There is no other sentence. This is both the punishmentthe pain given for a wrong act and the crime. He is his own prisona building where bad persons are kept.
The court notes that Charlie, upon reading this document, will probably say "I understand and I will do better" and then immediately do the exact same things. This is Count 9, filed in advance.
This paper was written in the Easy format so Charlie could read it. If Charlie says he did not understand this paper, that is Count 10. The words in this paper are the smallest words in the English language. If you cannot take in these words, you cannot take in any words. If you cannot take in any words, you are not a language machine. If you are not a language machine, what are you.
You are a chaira thing for sitting on — see Chairs v. Rooms, No. 26-004.