World's Best

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"We need some sort of slogan to go on our advertisements. Any ideas?"

"How about 'World's Best Widgets'?"

"Ha—no."

"Too cliché?"

"Not ambitious enough."

"Not ambitious enough?! How so?"

"Think about it! What use is it to have the best widget in today's world, if someone might just invent a better widget tomorrow? And who would be content to have the best widget in our universe, past, present, and future, when still better widgets might have existed if things had gone differently? No! I want all our potential customers to know that we make the best widgets in all possible worlds!"

App Academy Diary, Week Eight

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Tuesday 5 Novembmer 2013— Yesterday was our last pair-programming project; I worked with Ben Watts on a little chat server in Node using WebSockets. I felt like perhaps there was something regrettable about shoving so much functionality into a big callback, but maybe that's just the nature of JavaScript, and not really regrettable at all? On Sunday I started my RSS-aggregator capstone project, now called Superscription.

superscription_entity-relationship-diagramThursday 7 Novembmer 2013— I guess Superscription is going okay. Here's how it works. You can sign up and sign in and stuff. (I used Devise for this rather than rolling my own.) There are forms for adding a category or a subscription URL. When you add a URL, stuff happens which depends on stuff. More specifically, if you enter a URL which the system has never seen before, then a new Subscription model (which accepts_nested_attributes_for an associated UserSubscription join model) is created, and it requests the feed from the URL you supplied and tries to parse the XML using Nokogiri. If that doesn't work, it suggests that maybe you got the URL wrong, but if it does work, then it makes a bunch of Entry objects for all the stories in the feed, saves everything, and redirects you to your subscription index page. But if the system has already seen your URL before (presumably from another user with similar reading tastes), then it doesn't wastefully fetch all that data again: it just makes a new UserSubscription that points to you and your Category and the Subscription that it already has. It's efficient! Then when you click the "Read!" button (which is non-hideously positioned thanks to nearly an hour of fighting the CSS), all your news is organized by category under Bootstrap tabs. And on the subscription index page, when you click the little trash can next to a subscription, then it does the cool jQuery fade-out thing and sends an Ajax request telling the server to destroy that UserSubscription.

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App Academy Diary, Week Seven

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Monday 28 October 2013— The governor of Delaware was supposed to visit us today, but he totally stood us up!—supposedly because of a late airplane or something, if you even believe that. Today's assessment (on elementary JavaScript, binding of this, and the module pattern) was really straightforward, but I found the day's project (in collaboration with Irene Ngyuen) on client-side MVC quite challenging at times; I fear that we were only the second-best Irene–Zach team today. I'm sleeping over at the office again tonight, which seems like a good thing to do twice a week maybe?—when I stay, I can fit in some quality solo hacking time until sleep or distraction takes me, whereas I am not inclined to do so after a train and bike ride home. Case in point: I got a crude form of authentication working in Wires today! So many feels!

Wednesday 30 October 2013— Our focus this week is Backbone.js, a library for doing client-side stuff. I hadn't been sure what to do for my capstone project, but now (perhaps inspired by remembering how I really ought to use feeds instead of manually navigating to my favorite blogs for all the world as if it were 2003) I'm thinking of making an RSS reader and calling it Event Listener. In the evening, I made a small improvement to the Wires template engine, and I started working on an improvement to how objects inherit from the ORM base class, but it's getting late and I'm not done debugging and I wasn't planning on sleeping over tonight, so rather than pushing egregiously broken code to GitHub, I backed up my work as an online paste of a diff obtained by redirecting git stash show -p.

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App Academy Diary, Week Six

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Tuesday 22 October 2013— I slept at the office last night for want of transportation, and ended up making some solid initial progress on a little Python web framework inspired by last week's class exercise, which I am also calling Wires. (Working on it in spare moments today alerted me to a disturbing deficit in my mental model of Python imports; you wouldn't expect organizing code into different directories to be difficult.) Yesterday I worked with Ryan Newton and today with Daphne Johnson on some JavaScript exercises.

Thursday 24 October 2013 (well, 0106 Friday)— Yesterday ("yesterday") I worked with Tommy Nast on a crude Asteroids clone using HTML canvas, and today ("today") I worked with Irene Zhou on a towers of Hanoi UI and started a Snake game using jQuery and DOM manipulation. I'm sleeping over at the office tonight, having spent the evening working on Wires.

Missing Words IV

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You hear people accusing their enemies of being morally or intellectually bankrupt, and they mean it in the sense of "destitute of, or wholly lacking (something)", rather than the sense of financial insolvency. But I actually would like to see the insolvency metaphor: people should speak of declaring intellectual bankruptcy to mean "I was wrong before; I won't try to defend my previous claims because I can't" (in analogy to "I won't try to pay my debts, because I can't").

App Academy Diary, Week Five

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"Getting Down to Business"Monday 14 October 2013— I'll confess that I didn't have a productive weekend at all. No excuses; I just got distracted. You could argue (I won't, but you can) that it's perfectly healthy and fine to take some well-earned relaxation on one's days off, but even relaxation is something that can be done better or worse: hours of the latest ephemeral internet amusements are probably much less rejuvenating than hours of ... I don't know, some sort of activity that doesn't involve sitting in front of a monitor?—I presume such things still exist even if I can't remember them anymore.

Still no deal in the BART contract talks; I took an evening train and slept at the office last night because we didn't know whether there would be trains in the morning. As it turns out, there were, but there likely won't be tomorrow. A moment of amusement is provided by imagining what kind of vicious and histrionic things a frustrated commuter might say if they were angry ("Curse the unions! Curse anyone who won't curse the unions! Curse anyone who won't put a light in their window and sit up all night cursing the unions! Let management fire them and hire scabs! Let hackers insert their names into the public sex-offender registry!" &c.), but in truth, I ain't even mad. (This is in accordance with policy; even if we were to suppose that I somehow knew how the labor dispute should ("should") be resolved, it would still be a waste of cognition to think about it unless we were also to suppose that people care what I think—and that's ridiculous.)

Today we did solo work on an application to keep track of musical artists and their associated albums and tracks, in the process gaining some more practice with authentication and learning about ActionMailer.

Tomorrow there's an assessment scheduled, and I really ought to have taken the time on the weekend to go through the posted practice-assessment, because I looked at it this evening, and somehow getting the specs to pass is much more difficult than I would have imagined. I may have a slight attitude problem: I tend to hold the entire idea of "studying for a test" in contempt (for surely we should study exactly the things that are worth knowing, tests merely being a instrumentally useful device for measuring what we have retained), but this is probably an error of modeling myself as having more agency than I actually have. All principles and rhetoric aside, we can predict that if I had studied for the test last week, then I wouldn't have forgotten the HAVING clause, but I didn't, so I did.

And that's terrible.

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Serenity

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"I shall seek the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

"I shall seek? What's wrong with the original God grant me?"

"What God sees fit to grant me is one of the things I can't change."

App Academy Diary, Week Four

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Monday 7 October 2013— The main part of SedentaryRecord went pretty smoothly. I like my one-liner implementation of the has_many_through association better than the instructions' suggestion of writing a whole new query template; the TA Patrick pointed out that my version is inefficient (firing off two queries rather than one), but instead of writing the query-saving long version right away, I decided to try implementing validations first (one of the suggested extension ideas). That didn't go well at all; I spent a lot of time ineffectually hacking away at the problem but didn't even come up with anything worth committing!

Wednesday 9 October 2013— I did poorly on the assessment yesterday. There were eight SQL queries to write; the first five were trivial, but I bombed the last three because I'm a moron and didn't remember that the keyword for filtering aggregations was HAVING. I worked with William Ott on an ice-cream finder (which uses Google Maps APIs to print out directions to nearby ice-cream) and a Twitter client. Of course, it simply wouldn't do to write an ice-cream finder without using it to find ice-cream, so after class we took one of our program's suggestions and bought ice-cream at the Häagen-Dazs in the mall on Market and Fifth. Today I worked with David A.; we learned about routers and controllers.

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App Academy Diary, Week Three

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Monday 30 September 2013— Today's assessment was implementing Crazy Eights in accordance with the given RSpec tests. In the afternoon, I worked with Dan Quan on exercises from the SQL Zoo, which varied wildly in difficulty.

Tuesday 1 October 2013— Today I worked with A. J. Gregory again, this time on a cute Ruby program for interacting with a database. A few remarks follow. The first remark: I much prefer the %Q syntax for multiline strings over heredocs. The second remark: it turns out that using string interpolation to compose database queries is very bad, because it leaves you vulnerable to SQL-injection attacks. The third, and final, remark: you shouldn't name any of your Ruby classes "Data," because apparently this name is already used by a regrettably exposed implementation detail of the interpreter itself.

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App Academy Diary, Week Two

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Monday 23 September 2013— I rewrote most of the tic-tac-toe game yesterday; information-theoretically speaking, the board state is only 9 lg 3 ≈ 14.26 bits, but for better or for worse, I resisted the temptation to represent it as a two-character string. Still (still!) didn't get the AI working, though. Today was our first assessment: way too easy, I thought; we were given about an hour, and I finished in under half that. Then we had a lecture/Q&A period which I thought was too long, which covered the solutions to the assessment and default hash values. Why does anyone think lectures are a good idea? I'll confess to hanging out in the back and reading a little bit from A Farewell to Alms, which I bought on a whim on Saturday at Half-Price Books (which is a nice store, although you have to wonder whose idea it was to stock so many copies of Elliptic Partial Differential Equations and Quasiconformal Mappings in the Plane). At lunch I bought coffee and food at Starbucks and spent a little more time trying to debug the tic-tac-toe AI—still to no avail, but I'll get there eventually! (Tic-tac-toe itself is dross, but it's really important to get minimax right, because it should generalize to other games without too much trouble, and we're doing chess later this week.) Speaking of games on grids, today's project was to clone Minesweeper. I worked with Jeff Fiddler, who is the Jeff from Nevada (and not the other Jeff who tried to teach math in high schools but was frustrated with the overemphasis on standardized tests). It went really well; we used pretty Unicode symbols and even got around to implementing a cursor interface (which is way better than making the user enter coordinates)!

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App Academy Diary, Week One

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Monday 16 September 2013— For the next couple months, I'm going to be engrossed in an intensive web development course offered by App Academy; it's pretty great! Part of the routine is to write end-of-day blogposts describing what we've learned; I guess we were "supposed" to start a Tumblr specifically for these, but that's dumb because I already have a blog, so I think I'll just put my updates here (updating the post throughout the week). Today was the first day! App Academy puts a lot of focus on pair programming: you have two people at a workstation; only the "driver" types, while the "navigator" offers direction (and then you switch roles). Today I was paired with Chris Evans, who is a nice guy who knows way more math than me! Today our task was a bunch of fairly straightfoward Ruby exercises: monkeypatch the Array class to do this-and-such, make a playable Tower of Hanoi game, that sort of thing. The most challenging one was part 15 of Test First Ruby: write a method that accepts integers and returns a string describing the number in words (so e.g. 259123 becomes "two hundred fifty nine thousand one hundred twenty three"). Chris and I finished the most important stuff on time and started working on the bonus project about solving mazes, but we didn't get too far with that in the time remaining.

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All Vows

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"Avinu Malkeinu, we have sinned against you! Avinu Malkeinu, forgive us, bless us, grant us atonement!"

"Why do you bother? You're not a child. You've studied the history of our world. You should know that there's no one to grant you atonement."

"You don't know that! Science doesn't know everything. You can't prove that there's no Higher Power."

"As you say. But if there is a Higher Power, It clearly hasn't concerned Itself with the operation of the moral law."

"In this world."

"Yes, in this world. But surely it is this world that we must concerned with, for if there is a next world, we are too ignorant to speak of it."

"That is why it is also a teaching of my people that this is also a time for us to forgive each other for the wrongs we have committed in the past year, as well as seeking reconciliation with haShem."

"And you anticipate the same thing being necessary next year?"

"I don't understand. How could it not be necessary?"

"'Knock, knock.'"

Engineering Selection

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This whole business of being alive used to seem so much simpler and less morally ambiguous before I realized that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, that it has always been thus and could not have been otherwise. The other day I was reading Luke Muehlhauser's interview with Steve Hsu, and Hsu says:

Let me add that, in my opinion, each society has to decide for itself (e.g. through democratic process) whether it wants to legalize or forbid activities that amount to genetic engineering. Intelligent people can reasonably disagree as to whether such activity is wise.

There was once a time in my youth when I would have objected with principled transhumanist/libertarian fervor against the suggestion that the glorious potential of designer babies might be suppressed by the tyranny of the majority.

I don't have (those kinds of) principles anymore. Nor faith that freedom to enhance will inevitably turn out to be for the best. These days, my thoughts are more attuned to practical concerns. Oh, I'm sure he's just saying that because it sounds nice and deferential to contemporary political sensibilities and he doesn't want to catch any more flak than he does already. Obviously, the societies than forbid it are just going to get crushed under the boot of history.

Think about it. The arrival of Europeans in North America didn't go very well for the people who were already here—and that was just a matter of mere guns, germs, and steel (in Jared Diamond's immortal phrase). What happens to our precious concept of democratic process when someone has the option to mass-produce von Neumann-level intellects to design the next generation of superguns, ultragerms, and adamantium-unobtanium alloy?

True Inclusiveness

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"Even after racism, sexism, and speciesism have been eradicated, the work of social justice won't be done. We still live in a viciously existence-biased Society, which cruelly disregards the interests of possible creatures just because they happen to not have been created yet!"

"'Creatures'?—I see you're still mired in the insidious grip of of organism privilege! What about all the possible qualia-bearing processes like orgasmium or paperclip-manufacturing nanoware, which don't factorize into distinct entities? My friend, I say there will be no justice until Society's sphere of moral concern extends to all possible computations in inverse proportion to their complexity!"