Sitting on the green couch, eating cheese ravioli and sipping an allegedly peach-tea-flavored energy drink, admiring my brand-new wireless router and fresh installation of Xubuntu 14.04, I make a deliberate decision to drop to my knees in a song of praise which says, "God bless America!"—and if some not-yet-forgotten ghost or subroutine of intellectual integrity has me quickly disclaim that God is but a metaphor and America a metonym for concepts much less familar and perhaps slightly sinister, I don't think it makes the prayer any less heartfelt.
Author Archives: Zack M. Davis
Where I Stand
(firmly on one side of the fine and yet distinctly perceptible line between "I've got mine; fuck you" and "I've got mine, and I hope that you get yours, but I'm far too ignorant of the relevant sciences to say which interventions would make this more or less likely")
Lexicographic
"Here's a draft of the new sign-up form."
"... I like it. Only one question: I'm just curious, but why did you put the Female radio button first?"
"Alphabetical order."
Standard Advice
"So? What do you think I should do?"
"Hm. I think you should start with all computable universes weighted by simplicity, disregard the ones inconsistent with your experiences, and maximize expected utility over the rest."
"That's your answer to everything!"
The Emissary Who Will Bring Disunity
It's like everyone thinks they belong
Like everyone thinks they agree
Like everyone thinks they can strike up a cause
With one half of humanity
But I think I can show that they're wrong
Their consensuses all disagree
I'm as spry as can be
I'm the emissary
Who will bring disunity
I will bring disunity
Lower Decks
Another way you can tell that you're the worst person at your job is when you play the "If This Were a Starfleet Operation, What Rank and Division Would Everyone Have?" game and you're not tempted to make anyone else an ensign.
Behind Schedule
gotta wr8
gotta wr9
it feels like you should be able to spell write with a numeral
but I guess
you can't
A Short Story
"Seriously, what kind of asshole writes the phrase conditional on the hypothesis that when the word if would do?"
"Well ..." I said.
Speculative Etymology III
kind of disappointed that 401(k) comes from the relevant section of the tax code instead of being short for "$401,000 of free money"
Sub Specie Aeternitatis
Contrary to popular belief, it is not the case that all's well that ends well. But it will seem like it, at the end.
Clarity of Intent
<bob> and here on line 79--- <bob> else: <bob> return None <bob> you don't need the else <bob> Python functions will implicitly return None <alice> $ python -c "import this" | sed -n 4p
Reasons for Seasons
I don't particularly care for Christianity, but my heart went out to the designer of the greeting card with a chocolate cross attached that was on sale at the corner drugstore. May His Light Shine Upon You, it said on the front, and Happy Easter inside, as if some foresight-burdened defender of the faith had reasoned, "We know we're powerless to stop the secular commercialization of our holy day, but maybe we can slow it down, just a bit."
A sentiment to remember for the day when your favorite ideology ends up on the wrong side of history.
Ode to Swift
Our users have a need although
Our budget's rather ...
Thrifty—
Not just, "I want my data," but
"I want my data
Swiftly."
But should their need our budget meet
I'd think it not an oddity,
In an age of open source in which
The hardware's a commodity.
The right solution's quick to get,
No need to hunt or forage;
We'll see our users' needs are met
With open object storage.
Defect
I—I'm afraid that examination of my 23andMe raw data has revealed a horrible truth about myself. I mean, I had always suspected, but now there's no room for doubt, no hope for denial. The terrible fact is that—
I am not a geneticist.
Missing Words V
The other week I was reading a book that used the word multimegaline—from multi- and mega- and line, referring to software projects composed of many millions of lines of source code. But I prefer to believe that the last syllable rhymes with keen and that the word is good for anything really big.
Lethal --force
Dear reader, if you're like me—and if you're not, why are you reading this stupid blog about random shit that no one who's anyone could possibly care about?—close the tab and go do something worthwhile instead. No, I mean it. I'll wait ...
Proper Outlook
Contempt for the past is a healthier emotion than fear for the future.
Twilight Sparkle Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen
I swear to Celestia, one of these days that mare is going to get somepony killed or worse. I almost suspect it's already happened and Hasbro is just sitting on the footage.
Seriously. Levitation or teleporting is fine, but you do not buck around with mind control or transformation spells unless you are absolutely sure that nothing will go wrong and that you can fix it when it does anyway. You'd think she'd learn after, I don't know, accidentally brainwashing pests into destroying the town, or unleashing a transmissible-by-sight plague of madness that wasn't stopped until Princess Celestia herself intervened, or accidentally swapping parts of her friends' souls, or accidentally transforming her friend into a horrible bat-pony abomination, or transforming herself and her friends into tiny vaguely-insectoid creatures and venturing through a closing portal to another world and only barely making it back in time.
Even plot armor isn't infinitely thick. Someday it's going to break, and I don't want to be watching when it happens.
Motivation
The blog has been silent for two weeks plus and, dear reader—that is, if there are any of you still remaining—dear reader, the thought occurs to me that maybe I should keep my drafts in a Git repository with a remote on GitHub, not because I need the full power of version control (I do not), but because then I would be rewarded for writing with those contemptible green contribution squares.
It's an anthropomorphism to think that humans have goals, that we do things because we've computed that they'll increase expected beauty or rightness in the world. We do things for the immediate reinforcement. You eat the candy because it tastes good and you show up to work on time because if you didn't, then your colleagues would notice. Serious long-term risks of diabetes or unemployment are too distant and too abstract to enter in the equation; far more effective is something immediately noticeable, even something as trivial as an integer being incremented or a square turning a darker shade of green. I tell myself that I code because it's fun and useful and lucrative (though I'm never explicit about whether that's descending or ascending order of importance), but would I be quite so diligent without the implicit gamification of my virtue? Would it be enough to have done good work, without wasting a few minutes here and there to gaze admiringly at commit diffs and contribution squares which manifest my moral worth in red and green and green?
Dear reader, I want you to picture yourself reclining at the end of a long day near the end of long career filled with great or terrible deeds. A young minion at the start of their own career will look at you and ask in awe, "O Master, what motivated you, all that time? What drove you on in your hour of deepest exhaustion? Was the it money, the fame, the men or women? Was it your ideological fervor or spirit of generosity?"
"No," you'll reply. "I did it for the green squares. And given the same circumstanstances ... I'd do it all again."
"You mean, you made the right choices? You have no regrets?"
"No, you fool!" you'll shout. "Don't you understand? I said, I'd do it again."
An Education News Bulletin
Apparently a gang of extortionists calling themselves the "California state Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education" are threatening to shut down a number of organizations that provide assistance in learning to program, including App Academy, which I recently benefitted from attending. I could explain why the behavior of the BPPE is an outrage that must be opposed by anyone with a scrap of decency in their heart, but I'm too busy coding and counting my money.