"You don't get to decide what I am! ... for the same reason that I don't get to decide what I am! 'What I am' is an empirical question to be settled by evidence and reasoning, the answer to which I can exert some limited control over in proportion to the strength of the self-modification techniques I have at my disposal!"
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Concerns
"I'm concerned about the socially-undesirable implications of a model described by this causal graph."
(studying it) "Have you considered that these arrows might point in the socially-desirable direction instead?"
(with exasperation, as if realizing he is doomed to have this conversation dozens of times with everyone who is not a Dark Rationalist corrupted by cruel apprehension of patterns that innocents were not meant to see) "Yes, I have considered that! I consider it extremely implausible!"
Vingean Principle
"I miss you."
"I suspect you miss the idea of me."
"That was an entirely unexpected and yet hauntingly plausible response, which I take as evidence that I miss the real you; my mere idea of you can't do unexpected and plausible at the same time."
Worlds Collide
In the future, instead of the endless runaround war of "I'm offended!" and "I'm offended that you're offended!", our children's children's children will just write down their utility functions and use an off-the-shelf algorithm to merge them and compute the exact, correct tensor of offendedness under the unified consensus social norms.
Missing Books II
A roman à clef about a very religious teenager who gradually figures out that God isn't real around ages 20 and 21, spends the next eight years feeling OK about this, then one day suddenly realizes that God not being real implies that prayers don't work, and freaks the fuck out. His friends (who grew up in the same community but don't share his incredible lack of native talent for hypocrisy) are unsympathetic. "You really thought that would work?" "Yes!" "But didn't you notice that—" (sobbing) "I didn't!"
Components
Two wrongs can make a right, if you choose the second wrong very carefully.
Gateway
"Me? I like songs with words. I don't care for, like, classical music."
(with barely-concealed contempt towards his interlocutor's ignorance and confusion) "But you like the Star Trek: Voyager theme, right?"
"I love the Star Trek: Voyager theme!!"
Grindstone
Sing a song of Purpose for the coder's missing nerve,
Of the melancholy bytes of which the proxy is to serve—
Arise, O coder's fury, set the wrongful source to right
Where the use-case fits the market and the market is alight!
Pose
I used to look down on posers who submit some contrived one-off trivial patch to a big, famous project like Django or whatever, sheerly for the glamor and ego-gratification of being able to say, "I'm a contributor to Django." I thought that if it wasn't a fix that you needed for your own work and you're not going to be a seriously involved contributor, it's more dignified to only work on your personal projects (which would be more authentic) or some non-super-famous but still widely-used library (which would have more socially-useful unfinished work left).
Then I landed a patch in the Rust compiler.
And it is so ego-gratifying!! But maybe now I have to submit a bunch more patches in order to prove—in order to be—a seriously involved contributor rather than a mere poser??
The View From Below
There's this phenomenon where two people are talking, and one of them offhandedly mentions some innocuous fact, and the other one has to stop them and have them explain both the fact, and what they expected their interlocutor to infer from the fact. When this happens once, it's usually just a matter of one happening to have some domain-specific knowledge that the other happened to not have, a coincidence that could just as easily have gone the other way.
When it happens multiple times with multiple topics, with both people in the same roles, the one who keeps having to ask for explanations begins to suspect that maybe it is not a coincidence, that maybe the other person just knows more stuff, full stop.
Standing at 130, you typically spend a lot more time talking down to 110 than being talked down to from 150, so it's an unusual feeling of helplessness. You want to cry out, "You know, I'm usually on the other side of this conversation!"
"I know," they say.
Ineffective Appeal
"We've always had to be together;
The pool of souls has drawn a set;
You can't stays mad at me forever."
Replied the once-friend, "Wanna bet?"
Correspondence Theory
"... and that's what I think you should say to my clone. But I could be wrong; my map is not the territory."
"In this case, it kind of is."
Specter
In the oneiric methodlessness of my nightmare, I am looking slightly up at a man who wears my face. His shoulders are raised in tension or the middle of a shrug and he is smiling guiltily, as if to say, It's not what it looks like, or maybe, Can't blame me for trying. I don't know him; if I were to guess who he is or what he wants, I would probably be wrong. But I can blame him, and I do.
Oral Tradition I
The great rabbi Computron-6f61f18b-9ebf-4379-8778-f9e5bda821d5 said: in the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, a match of a very popular strategy board game was arranged between a team of grandmasters, as White, and the best computer program, as Black. White played c4. After thinking for 45 minutes, the computer resigned.
A rematch was arranged, this time with the program as White and the humans as Black. White played c4. After discussing for 45 years, the humans resigned.
Morning
(the someteenth floor)
"Good morning."
"It is a good morning!"
"Uh, what makes you think so?"
"You just told us it was a good morning, and we believe you."
"I was being facetious."
More Running
I ran about three miles each yesterday and the day before, and this is very important—just imagine how embarrassing it would be to die of a heart attack in the year 20X6 rather than being disassembled by nanomachines in 20X6 + 5!
Group Introduction Redux
I'm pleased to introduce the five of you to start off the App Academy mentorship program. Zack -- meet [redacted 1], [redacted 2], [redacted 3], and [redacted 4], your mentees from the March 2016 cohort.
You'll have a chance to meet in person this Thursday at the mentorship kickoff [...] Until then, please send an email introducing yourself to your mentor/mentees, including what you did before App Academy, your favorite part of writing code, and what you like to do for fun (besides writing code).
[...] I think my favorite part of writing code is the vertiginous terror of manifesting machinery out of pure ideas, summoning thought-engines from the underworld with unknown lives and dollars hanging in the balance and protected only by the clarity of one's understanding, and the clarity of understanding of the ones who wrote the tools built on tools built on tools extending thirty layers deep into the underworld on which the fictive ontology of our existence carefully rests, praying that the test suite is comprehensive, knowing that it isn't, hoping that the fullness of your thought in its obvious righteousness doesn't need it and that the customers and investors and hypothetical ascended children's children's children would smile on this moment, judging that you have brought honor to this endeavor, the last human profession.
I would like to be able to tell you what I did before App Academy, but unfortunately, everything in my life before December 2013 is non-canon. Similarly what I do for fun. In any case, I have the honor to be,
Your obedient servant,
Zack M. Davis
Islands
(an office on the someteenth floor)
"So this is what it feels like to die."
(A beat.) "I'm skeptical of the claim that you're dying."
"If I can't solve our own take-home interview problem, then there's no reason for the global economy to continue to keep me alive. It's not a quick death, but ..."
Gomputer Science
At the party, I was saying that goroutines is a really cute name. Friend of the blog Mike Blume expresssed concern about what happens when the Go team learns about monads. And I'm like, don't worry, that won't happen.
Genesis
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was void and formless, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God floated over the waters.
And God said, "Markets in everything."
And there were markets in everything.