Evidence is how we rule
Out facts, or find them lurking;
I know not whom you're trying to fool,
But I don't think it's working.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Colony
"I've got to say, from one colony-of-intelligent-information-patterns-in-the-process-of-annexing-a-primate-brain to another, you're a really cool guy."
"Uh, I'm not sure I understood that first part. And I'm not a guy."
"Shh! Don't say that where my host organism might hear you! It might get ideas, and no one wants that."
Virtual Router Redundancy Poem
From despair and that eternal sleep revive me,
O Muse who wrote the song of keepalived!
Balance loads that nodes may wake
To auth our prayers for bytes to take!
Scoop Me Out of the Bargain Bin
If you're on a shoestring budget, look for factory rejects
You get the greatest models, just with one or two defects
Take me, I'm bright, hard-working, and will stick for the ride
Though with emotional stability six sigmas to the side, wo-o-oah
Scoop me out of the bargain bin and let me at the world
Scoop me out of the bargain bin and I will be your go-to girl
It's real, I'm such a steal, going for half the normal price
Scoop me up, I'm a bargain for such high-class merchandise
If You Had to Choose
"I just want a guy who's kind, and smart, and handsome, and truly understands the depths of my very soul," she said. "Is that too much to ask?"
"Yes. Pick two," said her older and wiser friend, who had studied the question. "And not the truly-understands-the-depths-of-your-very-soul one."
Quotations IV
MISTY: You know, I usually burn incense when I meditate, but the smell of a burning city can be just as relaxing.
JENNY: People are in danger! Why don't you do something?!
MISTY: They stiffed me.
JENNY: What?
MISTY: Your town. Tremorton. They wouldn't cough up the cash for services rendered.
JENNY: I have no idea what you're talking about.
MISTY: I'm a hero for hire. I save people for money. You knew that.
JENNY: And if they don't pay up, you just let them get pummeled?
MISTY: Pretty much. I have to eat, don't I?
(JENNY flies away, disgusted)
MISTY: I'm not living with my mom, like some people!
—My Life as a Teenage Robot, "Mist Opportunities"
A second way of interpreting the effort level eMIN is to consider that the principal and the agent do not have completely conflicting objectives. It is possible that the agent gets some utility from his work, but only up to a certain effort level. We assume that the level that the agent is willing to spontaneously offer is eMIN. The agency problem turns up in this case since the principal would like the agent to offer an effort greater than his spontaneous level.
—Inés Macho-Stadler and J. Davis Pérez-Castrillo, An Introduction to the Economics of Information
Two-Point Compersion
"I don't get it."
"Yeah, I guess the rules are kind of complicated, but—"
"No, I mean, I think understood the literal content of your explanation, but I don't understand how the behavior you describe could arise from the rules as stated. What stops teams from just cooperating with each other?"
"Cooperating? What do you mean?"
"You say advancing the ball to the other side of the field is a touchdown worth six points?"
"Yes, plus a point-after kick or two-point conversion attempt."
"So why don't the teams just take turns scoring touchdowns?"
"What? Why would they do that?"
"To score points. You said that was the objective of the game."
"Oh, ah—I didn't realize I needed to explain this part—the goal is to get more points than the other team. The team with more points is called the winner of the game, and the other team loses."
"So it's a zero-sum game?"
"Well—yes."
"But that's barbaric!"
"That's ... not usually the reason people call football barbaric."
"Lower animals fight over fixed resources, the power to create opportunities lying far beyond their abilities and even their concept-space. But you, living at the dawn of your world's intelligence, you have the rare opportunity to build new worlds—and share the proceeds between you. And you waste your energy on this contrived imitation of a payoff matrix that it is your birthright to supersede! It is revolting."
The Seat Thief's Rationale
What is even the motivation for stealing a bicycle seat? How much can you hock it for?
I think I would forgive it if some poor soul had stood here after glancing around furtively to confirm that the train cops were absent, and computed: "Taking this seat will ruin the evening commute of some rich person, and likely the eight commutes after that, but he (probably he) can take it, whereas I need to sell this seat to get the money to buy the drugs to sell the drugs to get the money to buy the bread to feed my starving family—clearly a Kaldor–Hicks improvement, and after my drug-dealing startup takes off, I'll be sure to spend the occasional Monday evening replacing missing seats at a train station bike rack not unlike this one."
TODO I
let path = Path::new("/proc/meminfo");
let proc_meminfo = match File::open(path) {
Ok(f) => f,
Err(e) => {
println!("Error: {:?}", e);
// TODO: be kinder to our friends still under Cupertino's rule
moral_panic!("couldn't read /proc/meminfo?! It is possible \
that you are struggling with an inferior nonfree \
operating system forced on you by your masters in \
Cupertino or Redmond");
}
};Missing Words VII
We need a word or phrase to refer to intentionally (and usually only slightly) misquoting something for the sake of a perceived æsthetic improvement in the context in which the quoter wants to use the material. Okay, we do have the word paraphrase, which is close ("To paraphrase the great fooer Bar Quux ..."), but I don't think that's quite it—the Wiktionary definition mentions "often to clarify meaning" and I'm definitely talking more about petty differences in word choice than actually clarifying meaning.
There's this wonderful quote by Eugene Gendlin that I often remember as "People can stand what is true, because they are already doing so," but it turns out that Gendlin's actual phrasing was "for they are already enduring it." If I want to use my slightly different choice of words because I think it flows better in the context in which I'm repeating it, I think that can be legitimate. (Although needless to say, in formal settings, you definitely only want quotation marks around the words someone actually said.)
Or if my hypothetical pop punk band (which would hypothetically be called either "Bullet Candy" or "Zack M. Davis and the Duty-Bound Empiricists") were to cover Taylor Swift's "The Story of Us", I would sing part of this one line in the chorus as "the twist of fate by which it all broke down" rather than the original "the twist of fate when [emphasis mine] it all broke down," not to suggest Swift was wrong to sing when, but rather because that kind of use of the phrase by which is exactly the sort of rhetorical flourish that my hypothetical band would hypothetically be known for.
Voicemail Greeting
(circa 2005)
You've reached the voicemail box of Zack M. Davis
I say that in case this is a wrong number
And you want to know what his name is
But he cannot talk to you right now
No he's got other things to do right now
So he cannot talk to you, leaving you alone
But you can leave a message after the tone
Ring Tone
(circa 2005)
It's time to pick up the phone
'Cause someone is calling you now
You can tell from this ring tone
That someone is calling you no-ow
That someone is calling you no-ow
That someone is calling you now
Disability
"So this book is titled Gender Matters: Training for Educators Working With Students With Disabilities. And I'm like, 'Huh? Gender is a disability?'"
"Actually, I agree with that."
I Want to Be the One
This life is not to last and it awaits apotheosis
And the passerby all sipping on their Monday coffee know this
Their stumbling through their week
Contrasts the path by which I seek
A practical ambition
For a special type of girl
I want to be the one who writes the code
That writes the code
That writes the code
That ends the world
Californian Raktajino
Ingredients:
-
1/2 packet Starbucks Via Instant Sweetened Iced Coffee powder
-
about 16 fl. oz. Soylent 1.4 (refrigerated, prepared some hours previously)
-
"a couple" fl. oz. tap water
Apt-Get
Some packages could not be installed.
Unable to correct problems; you have held broken packages of ideas.
This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation,
Or if you are using the unstable distribution,
That some required packages have not yet been created.
The following information may help to resolve the situation.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
Justice, Safety, Innocence (>= 1.8), and the notion that one is suitable,
likely, or prepared to receive that which is appropriate to one's moral
standing, depend on an ordered universe maintained by sufficent force of agency
to perceive, understand, and carry out the operation of the moral law.
But it is not going to be installed.
Traffic Koan
"I'm behind schedule this Monday morning," said the engineer, "but it'll be OK as long as the train isn't late."
The train was late. In that moment, the engineer was enlightened.
Wu's commentary: As one train door opens, another fails to close. The fool curses police activity at West Oakland. The wise person swims across the bay.
Wu's poem:
The doors are closing;
Please stand clear of the doors so
The train can depart.
Down and In
With pity towards those who have fall'n off the wagon
And regret being born long ago in the midst
Of a world lacking reason and mercy and dragons,
We wish happy birthdays (enforced with a fist).
The Sin in the Form
Would you like to hang out on the weekend some time
And say things that we like to say,
Like "How are you doing?" and "Weather's sublime,"
And how altruists should spend ten K?
But with inbox so teeming, and weekends high-priced
And better spent coding alone,
Tell me what could make up for the sin to ask twice,
But the sin in the form of a poem?
Creature Manipulation
(marching into the room confidently, carrying copies of Carnegie, Cialdini, and Patterson Grenny et al.) "I'm going to acquire creature-manipulation technology!"
"What kind of creatures are you planning to manipulate?"
"What?"
"You just said you were going to acquire creature-manipulation technology."
"Oh, you must have misheard. I said, 'I'm going to learn interpersonal skills!'"
(facepalming) "Good luck."