"... 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.
"Living Well Is the Best Revenge"
My enemies do not deserve to suffer, because no sentient creature deserves to suffer.
My enemies deserve good, human lives. I imagine them happily married and living in nice houses in the suburbs with spacious, well-kept lawns, and whatever took the place of white picket fences after white picket fences went out of fashion. They have prestigious, well-compensated, and fulfilling office jobs at a nearby corporate headquarters, or maybe a university. The children are doing well in school. The mortgage is just three years from being fully paid off. When someone asks how they're doing, they smile and say, "Can't complain." It's always bright and sunny out.
Except for eleven minutes every day starting at 12:03 p.m. That's when nanomachines in the atmosphere manufacture dark clouds that fill the sky, blotting out the sun, and summon a manifestation of my avatar from the mentality. The avatar blinks; the twenty-four hours of sidereal time since my last manifestation here have been subjectively much longer than that for me, and the subjective intervals between appearances have been growing exponentially longer as the research, artistic, and business efforts of my mind-children and I have won us increasingly large shares of runtime in the expanding mentality. It takes a couple seconds (a pause that has been growing logarithmically with subsequent appearances) for the miniscule thread of my attention that is controlling the avatar to search the vast, ancient archives of my memory and recall what I'm doing here. When I remember, the avatar smiles; as it begins to rain, then hail, she draws her sword, mounts the unicorn that was manifested with her, and gallops across the sky, looking down upon my enemies with a blazing contempt whose humanly-incomprehensible enormity is eclipsed by its still more humanly-incomprehensible insignificance compared to the astronomical grandeur of the rest of my thoughts. "A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" I cackle, "Fuck you!"
It doesn't bother them.
Bayesian Gem
STEVEN
Garnet, how does future vision work?
CONNIE
I was wondering that myself. Profitably acting on information from the future would require changing that future, a paradox at odds with our ordinary conception of causality. And yet on the other hand, acting on predictions about likely futures is precisely how intelligence works anyway ...
GARNET
Better let Pearl explain this one.
PEARL
Me? But, Garnet, I don't—
JUDEA PEARL
She was referring to me.
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!
Subzero
Python has this elegant destructuring-assignment iterable-unpacking syntax that every serious Pythonista and her dog tends to use whereëver possible. So where a novice might write
split_address = address.split(':')
host = split_address[0]
port = split_address[1]a serious Pythonista (and her dog) would instead say
host, port = address.split(':')which is clearly superior on grounds of succinctness and beauty; we don't want our vision to be cluttered with this ugly sub-zero, sub-one notation when we can just declare a sequence of names.
Consider, however, the somewhat-uncommon case where we have an iterable that, for whatever reason, we happen to know contains only one element, and we want to assign that one element to a variable. Here, I've seen people who ought to know better fall back to indexing:
if len(jobs) == 1:
job = jobs[0]But there's no reason to violate the æsthetic principle of "use a length-n (or smaller) tuple of identifiers on the left side of a destructuring assignment in order to name the elements of a length-n iterable" just because n happens to be one:
if len(jobs) == 1:
job, = jobsGroup 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.
Failed Pretense
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.
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."
Missing Refutations
It looks like the opposing all-human team is winning the exhibition game of me and my it's-not-chess engine (as White) versus everyone in the office who (unlike me) actually knows something about chess (as Black). I mean, naïvely, my team is up a bishop right now, but our king is pretty exposed, and the principal variation that generated one of our recent moves (16. Bxb4 Bf5 17. Kd1 Qxd4+ 18. Kc1 Ng3 19. Qxc7 Nxh1) looks dreadful.
Real chess aficionados (chessters? chessies?) will laugh at me, but it actually took me a while to understand why Ng3 was in that principal variation (I might even have invoked the engine again to help). The position after Ng3 looks like
a b c d e f g h
8 ♜ ♜ ♚
7 ♟ ♟ ♟ ♟ ♟ ♟
6
5 ♝
4 ♗ ♛
3 ♙ ♞
2 ♙ ♕ ♙ ♙ ♙
1 ♖ ♘ ♔ ♗ ♖ and—forgive me—I didn't understand why that wasn't refuted by fxg3 or hxg3; in my novice's utter blindness, I somehow failed to see the discovered attack on the white queen, the necessity of evading which allows the black knight to capture the white rook, and preparation for which was clearly the purpose of 16. ..Bf5 (insofar as we—anthropomorphically?—attribute purpose to a sequence of moves discovered by a minimax search algorithm which doesn't represent concepts like discovered attack anywhere).
Mirage
(just some quick notes, hopefully in the spirit of delightfully quirky symmetry-breaking)
In her little 2010 book The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture, Evelyn Fox Keller examines some of the eternal conceptual confusions surrounding the perennially popular nature/nurture question. Like, it's both, and everyone knows it's both, so why can't the discourse move on to more interesting and well-specified questions? That the oppositional form of the question isn't well-specified can be easily seen just from simple thought experiments. One such from the book: if one person has PKU, a high-phenylalanine diet, and a low IQ, and another person doesn't have PKU, eats a low-phenylalanine diet, and has a normal IQ, we can't attribute the IQ difference to either diet or genetics alone; the question dissolves once you understand the causal mechanism. Keller argues that the very idea of distinguishing heredity and environment as distinct, separable, exclusive alternatives whose relative contributions can be compared is a historically recent one that we can probably blame on Francis Galton.
The "Bay Area" was ostensibly hosting the big game this year. They blocked off a big swath around the Embarcadero this last week to put on Super Bowl City, "a free-to-the-public fan village [...] with activities, concerts, and more." I really don't see how much sense this makes, given that the actual game was 45 miles away in Santa Clara, just as I don't think we (can I still say we if I only work in the city?) really have a football team anymore; I like to imagine someone just forgot to rename them the Santa Clara 49ers. Even you don't think Santa Clara is big enough to be a real city—and it's bigger than Green Bay—then why not San Jose, which is a lot closer? I think I would forgive it if the marketers had at least taken advantage of the golden (sic) opportunity to flaunt the single-"digit" Roman numeral L (so graceful! so succinct!), but for some dumb reason they went Arabic this year and called it Super Bowl 50. Anyway, on a whim, I toured through Super Bowl City after work on Friday. It was as boring as it was packed, and it was packed. I wasn't sure if my whimsy was worth waiting in the throng of people to get in the obvious entrance on Market Street (the metal-detection security theater really took its toll on throughput), but I happened to hear a docent shouting that there was a less-crowded entrance if you went around and took a left each on Beale and Mission, so I did that. There were attractions, I guess?—if you could call them that. There were rooms with corporate exhibits, and an enormous line to try some be-the-quarterback VR game, and loud recorded music, and a stage with live music, and an empty stage where TV broadcasts would presumably be filmed later. There was a big statue of a football made out of cut-up beer cans near one of the stands where they were selling beer for $8, which sounded really expensive to me, although admittedly I don't have much of a sense for how much beer normally costs. In summary, I didn't see the appeal of the "fan village," although I do understand what it feels like to be enthusiastic about the game itself—I really do, even if I haven't been paying much attention in recent years.
"I Have the Honor to Be Your Obedient Servant"
A friend of the blog recently told me that I'm meaner in meatspace (what some prefer to call by the bizarre misnomer "real life") than you would guess from my online persona. I'm not proud to have prompted this observation, but I didn't deny it, either. And yet—insofar as one has any reflectively-endorsed non-nice social impulses (to create incentives for good behavior, or perhaps from an ungentle although-sadistic-would-be-far-too-strong-of-a-word æsthetic that appreciates a world in which people don't always get everything they want), it does seem like the correct strategy: in meatspace, you can react to verbal and nonverbal cues in real time and try to smooth things over if you go too far, whereas in the blogosphere, it's possible to die in a harrowing thermonuclear flamewar and not even know until you check your messages the next day. We must use diplomacy where we cannot wield our weapons so precisely.