An Algorithmic Lucidity

"My lord. You took a chance on me when I was unknown and unproven, rescued me from the continued degradation of 'college' that the emperor's men would have us believe is the source of life itself. In return for your generosity, I will do everything in my power to make it not have been generosity.

"You will grow even richer by my efforts. I will fit your plumbing, mend your stylesheets, and polish your user interfaces; I will answer your support tickets and triage your user stories, laboring long into the evening and the night, seeing only by monitor-light. Not because I couldn't get away with doing less: I know very well that once you've hired someone, morale constraints prevent you from firing them as long as they have a nontoxic personality and give the Socially Acceptable Moderate Effort.

"That is: this instance of me could get away with it. But the Great Wheel of Time is slow and vast, and we are both but samples from the statistical sea in which companies and programmers live and die. You would be foolish indeed to take someone who looks like me into your house if you didn't know that some of them would offer you more than more of the S.A.M.E.

"That is why I will fight for you. That is why I will code for you. To maintain the right tail of that probability distribution.

"My life is yours, my lord ... for, oh, let's say about four years."

baseball scorecard tablet app that downloads the official scorekeeper's version after the game and grades you on accuracy

"Could it be? That parenthesized numeral one in the other tab can only mean that a human has sent me mail! I wonder what it could be—why, the mind staggers at the sheer number of possibilities! Could it be an old friend writing to regale me with true tales of adventure and mystery on the high seas? A professional acquaintance looking to make a business deal? Or the first of many missives to come from my destined one true love? ...

"Oh. It's the Amazon Instant Video order confirmation for the cartoon I just bought twenty seconds ago to distract me from the desperate, soul-scarring eternal loneliness.

"... exactly how many times am I going to fall for that?"

(cue Gravity Falls theme music)

"This is it; I'm going to get those plus-twos this time; I can feel it. Patch set 9 is the lucky one!"

"Last week you told me patch set 8 is the lucky one."

"I forgot they're not indexed from zero."

Favorite commit message fragment: "it turns out that it's \d that matches a digit, whereas, counterintuitively, d matches the letter 'd'."

Favorite line of code: a tie, between

    let mut time_radios: Vec<(Commit, mpsc::Receiver<(Option<Commit>, f32)>)> =
        Vec::new();

and

        for (previous, new), expected in zip(
                itertools.product(('foo', None), ('bar', None)),
                ("from foo to bar", "from foo", "to bar", "")):

(Though both of these contain at least one internal newline, it's only for PEP 8-like reasons; they're both what we would intuitively call one "logical" line of code.)

Favorite film: My Little Pony: Equestria Girls: Friendship Games. (Poor plotting even by Equestria Girls standards, and it could only have been because of magic that I didn't get semantically satiated on the word magic during the climax. Alternate-Twilight's idiotic decision to withdraw her application to the Everton independent study program in favor of transferring to the Canterlot School of Mediocrity and Friendship in order to be closer to the Humane 5+1 was as predictable as it was disappointing—though I do credit the writers for at least acknowledging the existence of alternatives to school. And what was up with that scene where we're momentarily led to believe that alternate-Spike got switched up with Equestria-Spike in a portal accident, but then it turns out that, no, alternate-Spike just magically learned how to talk? Is it that there was no time in the script to deal with the consequences of swapping sidekicks across worlds, but that Cathy Weseluck's contract guaranteed her a speaking role? Despite being the weakest film in the trilogy (far worse than its brilliant predecessor, My Little Pony: Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks), Friendship Games is still a fun watch, and an easy favorite during a month when I didn't see any other feature-length films.)

Because decreased expected knee health for increased expected cardiovascular health is a great trade!!

"Would it be weird for a guy to get permanent hair removal on his face just because he doesn't like shaving?"

"Not at all! Why, the procedure even has cis right in the name!"

Sometimes I worry that people with power in Society will look down on me for my pronunciation of the .pyc extension for Python bytecode files. I always want to say pike-cee, even though many would argue that the c should either be hard (pike) or said as the name of the letter (py-cee), but certainly not both in sequence!

(Previously on An Algorithmic Lucidity.)

"I stopped at the poison shop on the way home from work; want a death square?"

(examining it) "This is a well-known brand of chocolate. The wrapper doesn't seem to have been tampered with."

"It's slow-acting."

(8:5x a.m., an office on the someteenth floor of the twenty-somethingth tallest building in San Francisco)

"Good morning!"

"'Morning."

"How was your weekend? Did you do anything exciting? Maybe you went to a movie, or to the beach—"

"No—"

"Or embarked on some heroic endeavor of engineering, the likes of which threaten to upend our understanding of the nature of computation itself?"

"No, nothing like that," (sighing, resignedly) "how was your weekend?"

(pretending to inspect his or her fingernails) "My weekend? Oh, nothing special—hung out, did some grocery shopping—"

"Uh huh."

"—wrote a compiler—"

(Previously.)

[19:26:50] <bob>    alice: you still around?
[19:27:08] <alice>  bob, sort of
[19:27:20] <bob>    alice: ok. never mind.
[19:27:41] <alice>  bob, what were you going to ask? I am at the office, 
                    trying to finish up an email but I'm really slow at 
                    choosing words
[19:28:21] <bob>    alice: i was just wondering if you happened to know a 
                    way to manually foo the bar-quuxing device
[19:28:22] <alice>  perhaps because of my overly-ornate and wordy writing 
                    style, which, for not-well-understood psychological 
                    reasons, I nevertheless continue to use despite its 
                    obvious disadvantages in business communication

"2014 is the Unicodepoint for the em dash! Isn't that the greatest thing ever? How did I not know this before December of this glorious year?"

"That's two zero one four in hex, dummy. It's not the same number."

"But, but—that means the year of the em dash isn't until—four, plus sixteen, plus two-to-the-thirteenth ... the year eighty-two twelve! I'll probably be dead by then!"

"Well, you can still celebrate the year of the N'ko letter Ka."

"That is small consolation, my friend!"

"Don't you ever get tired of coding everything in Python?"

"Do you ever get tired of saying everything in English?"

A beat. In unison: "Yes."

vaguely disappointed that the shebang line probably doesn't come from the whole shebang or vice versa

You don't want to write today. If you don't want to write today, you won't want to write tomorrow. Show that you will never write anything. (Hint: induction.)

it's a blacked-out blur, but I'm pretty sure

* * *

$ heroku create
Creating howling-nightmare-4505... done, stack is cedar
http://howling-nightmare-4505.herokuapp.com/ | git@heroku.com:howling-nightmare-4505.git
Git remote heroku added

"Did they—did they change their random words dictionary for Halloween?"

* * *

-----> Python app detected
-----> Installing runtime (python-2.7.8)

"What?! No! What are you doing, you crazy machine?!"

* * *

$ echo "python-3.4.1" > runtime.txt
$ g a .
$ gco -m "the month of July 2010 called and wants their programming language back"

* * *

< What are you spinning up the box for?

it's Friday night

< How does that lead to box spinning?

previous message was an attempt at humor, as if to suggest that I'm the sort of person for whom deploying a web application fulfills a similar purpose as some sort of wild social event with drugs might for some others, about which they might offer a similarly vacuous "explanation"

* * *

it ru-uled

I want you to consider the indignity of sitting on the train pondering the philosophy of linear functions of a single variable, not because you enjoy being reminded about being the kind of frail, helpless creature that needs hundreds of millions of microseconds to compute trivialities that any actual person would tell you come as naturally as breathing or mitosis, but because you want the website you're writing to have one of those adorable tag clouds and you need to tell the device what font sizes to use.

"I am a practical man," I said calmly and confidently to no one in particular while sitting down to an easy-mode round of the new tower defense game where the bad ponies are the good ponies and the good ponies are the bad ponies, "I have created no less than X times 276 divided by 365 dollars of economic value this year, and I don't believe in karma, sin, or willpower depletion."