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")

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!"

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

My Genotype
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.

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.

My 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.