Category: mathematics
Tags: analysis
-The idea of _total boundedness_ in metric space (for every ε, you can cover the set with a finite number of ε-balls; [discussed previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/08/straight-talk-about-precompactness/) on _An Algorithmic Lucidity_) is distinct from (and in fact, stronger than) the idea of mere boundedness (there's an upper bound for the distance between any two points in the set), but to an uneducated mind, it's not immediately clear _why_. What would be an example of a set that's bounded but not totally bounded? _Wikipedia_ claims that the unit ball in infinite-dimensional Banach space will do. Eric Hayashi made this more explicit for me: consider sequence space under the $\ell^\infty$ norm, and the "standard basis" set (1, 0, 0 ...), (0, 1, 0, 0, ...), (0, 0, 1, 0, 0, ...). The distance between any two points in this set is one, so it's bounded, but an open 1-ball around any point doesn't contain any of the other points, so no finite number of open 1-balls will do, so it's not totally bounded, which is what I've been trying to tell you this entire time.
+The idea of _total boundedness_ in metric space (for every ε, you can cover the set with a finite number of ε-balls; [discussed previously](/blog/2012/Aug/straight-talk-about-precompactness/) on _An Algorithmic Lucidity_) is distinct from (and in fact, stronger than) the idea of mere boundedness (there's an upper bound for the distance between any two points in the set), but to an uneducated mind, it's not immediately clear _why_. What would be an example of a set that's bounded but not totally bounded? _Wikipedia_ claims that the unit ball in infinite-dimensional Banach space will do. Eric Hayashi made this more explicit for me: consider sequence space under the $\ell^\infty$ norm, and the "standard basis" set (1, 0, 0 ...), (0, 1, 0, 0, ...), (0, 0, 1, 0, 0, ...). The distance between any two points in this set is one, so it's bounded, but an open 1-ball around any point doesn't contain any of the other points, so no finite number of open 1-balls will do, so it's not totally bounded, which is what I've been trying to tell you this entire time.
>
> "Is it? Probably. I couldn't say."
-In this passage from Ayn Rand's _The Fountainhead_, fictional character Howard Roark demonstrates a very important skill that I really need to learn—that of [emotional indifference to arbitrary people's opinions](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/10/dont-resent-that-no-one-cares/): not the mere immunity of "It's okay that people now disagree with the manifest rightness of my Cause, because I know the forces of Good will win in the end," but the kind of outright _indifference_ that I feel about, let's say, the amount of precipitation in Copenhagen in March 1957. Someone disagrees with the manifest rightness of my Cause? Sure, whatever—hey, did you see the latest [_Questionable Content_](http://www.questionablecontent.net/)?
+In this passage from Ayn Rand's _The Fountainhead_, fictional character Howard Roark demonstrates a very important skill that I really need to learn—that of [emotional indifference to arbitrary people's opinions](/blog/2012/Oct/dont-resent-that-no-one-cares/): not the mere immunity of "It's okay that people now disagree with the manifest rightness of my Cause, because I know the forces of Good will win in the end," but the kind of outright _indifference_ that I feel about, let's say, the amount of precipitation in Copenhagen in March 1957. Someone disagrees with the manifest rightness of my Cause? Sure, whatever—hey, did you see the latest [_Questionable Content_](http://www.questionablecontent.net/)?
I say this purely for _pragmatic_ reasons. There's nothing _philosophically_ noble about being narrowly selfish, about devoting the full force of one's attention to questions like "What do I want to study?" or "How am I going to make money?" rather than "Why are my ideological enemies so evil, and what can be done to stop them?" So if there's no inherent reason why scholarship or business are more worthy than activism, why explicitly renounce the activist frame of mind?
There are a lot of really important concepts that aren't easy to talk about, because we don't have standard words for them.
-Like, there needs to be a word designating the skill or quality of possessing [independent](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/10/dont-resent-that-no-one-cares/) [judgement](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/egoism-as-defense-against-a-life-of-unending-heartbreak/)—the ability to make decisions without getting distracted worrying about how to explain yourself to people who won't understand. Part of me wants to just call it _sociopathy_, but that's clearly not the right word.
+Like, there needs to be a word designating the skill or quality of possessing [independent](/blog/2012/Oct/dont-resent-that-no-one-cares/) [judgement](/blog/2012/Nov/egoism-as-defense-against-a-life-of-unending-heartbreak/)—the ability to make decisions without getting distracted worrying about how to explain yourself to people who won't understand. Part of me wants to just call it _sociopathy_, but that's clearly not the right word.
The problem is endemic. Friend of the blog [Mike Blume](http://dudley-doright.livejournal.com/) once lamented that we don't have a gender-neutral equivalent of _gentlemanly_. And we don't have an atheist equivalent of _doing God's work_, either.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, some commentary on spam comments submitted to this blog is below the break—
-Would-be commenter "charms" writes on "[Summing the Multinomial Coefficients](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/09/summing-the-multinomial-coefficients/)":
+Would-be commenter "charms" writes on "[Summing the Multinomial Coefficients](/blog/2012/Sep/summing-the-multinomial-coefficients/)":
> I adore thomas family funeral home! I got my initial couple as soon as i was initially 10 yrs old, the sunlight yellow quite short old classic.Now i'm 15 yrs old nowadays and also, since after that, I have got as well received your ebony quite short old classic, your bleak quite short old classic, [...]
And it goes on like that for another ninety words. One wonders: is anyone _really_ going to buy shoes or whatever based on a blog comment like that? Maybe, _maybe_ fifteen out of a million ... which I guess was the point. But again, one imagines that there would be a payoff to spammers for being more discriminating—I guess some them are. I got a few attempted comments referring to [Zack Snyder](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zack_Snyder), so someone's at least paying attention to the URL.
-I even got one attempted comment that sort-of _looks_ on topic, maybe, if you don't look too closely? "Alexey" writes on "[Interpolating Between Vectorized Green's Theorems](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/06/interpolating-between-vectorized-greens-theorems/)":
+I even got one attempted comment that sort-of _looks_ on topic, maybe, if you don't look too closely? "Alexey" writes on "[Interpolating Between Vectorized Green's Theorems](/blog/2012/Jun/interpolating-between-vectorized-greens-theorems/)":
> Great! I see how to finish it off now, and I see why given the dftierenfial equation and being told to look at F and f you would see that relation, but just introducing F in the first place well, I guess I just have to accept this proof is awesome. =DYou asked for topic areas: Have you ever seen Euler's proof that the number of partitions of a number into odd numbers equals that of a number into distinct numbers? That is a good one. Other than that, some Galois theory would be nice?
Category: psychology
Tags: improvement
-[_Speaking_ of addiction](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/things-that-are-hard-to-quit-non-exhaustive-list/), I suspect that relinquishing ideologically-induced moral outrage is actually harder than getting over many chemical dependencies (although I don't have any experience with the latter). At least with a drug, it's simple enough to draw a bright line around actions you're not supposed to do anymore; you can try pouring the contents of the liquor cabinet down the drain, or signing a [commitment contract](http://www.stickk.com/) to not buy or borrow any more cigarettes.
+[_Speaking_ of addiction](/blog/2012/Nov/things-that-are-hard-to-quit-non-exhaustive-list/), I suspect that relinquishing ideologically-induced moral outrage is actually harder than getting over many chemical dependencies (although I don't have any experience with the latter). At least with a drug, it's simple enough to draw a bright line around actions you're not supposed to do anymore; you can try pouring the contents of the liquor cabinet down the drain, or signing a [commitment contract](http://www.stickk.com/) to not buy or borrow any more cigarettes.
-But when one of your most strongly-held beliefs (_strongly-held_ in the sense of emotional relevance, not actual probability; I'm very confident in the [monotone sequence theorem](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/two-views-of-the-monotone-sequence-theorem/), but the truth of its negation wouldn't be a blow to _who I am_) turns out to be false—or if it still seems true, but it turns out that being continually angry at a Society that disagrees isn't a good allocation of cognitive resources—what do you do then? Turning your life around from that isn't anything as straightforward as preventing specific chemicals from entering your body; you have to _change the way you think_, which is to say _excise a part of your soul_. Oh, it grows back—that's the point, really; you want to stop thinking non-useful thoughts in order to replace them with something better—but can you blame me for having a self-preservation instinct, even if my currently-existing self isn't something that ought to be preserved?
+But when one of your most strongly-held beliefs (_strongly-held_ in the sense of emotional relevance, not actual probability; I'm very confident in the [monotone sequence theorem](/blog/2012/Nov/two-views-of-the-monotone-sequence-theorem/), but the truth of its negation wouldn't be a blow to _who I am_) turns out to be false—or if it still seems true, but it turns out that being continually angry at a Society that disagrees isn't a good allocation of cognitive resources—what do you do then? Turning your life around from that isn't anything as straightforward as preventing specific chemicals from entering your body; you have to _change the way you think_, which is to say _excise a part of your soul_. Oh, it grows back—that's the point, really; you want to stop thinking non-useful thoughts in order to replace them with something better—but can you blame me for having a self-preservation instinct, even if my currently-existing self isn't something that ought to be preserved?
But then, _blame_ or the lack thereof isn't the point.
(In fact, I have been given to understand that this observation is actually expressing a deep truth about the nature of linear transformations: every linear transformation is in some sense—which I hope to make more explicit later—the sum of a scaling in orthogonal directions (from the symmetric matrix; consider the spectral theorem) and a rotation (from the skew-symmetric matrix, which is said to represent an infinitesimal rotation).)
-Also (and _probably_ related to the matrix thing), in the geometric algebra, the geometric product of vectors can be expressed as the sum of an inner product and an [anticommutative outer product](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/09/blades/).
+Also (and _probably_ related to the matrix thing), in the geometric algebra, the geometric product of vectors can be expressed as the sum of an inner product and an [anticommutative outer product](/blog/2012/Sep/blades/).
Are there more examples of this theme of splitting something into symmetric and antisymmetric parts? Is there a general theorem explaining exactly which mathematical objects do this kind of thing?
It _is_ a good idea (I can only imagine), and yet one can't help but guess that, like spaced repetition software or any number of other technologies for living a better life, the number of people who have _heard_ of the method of pomodoros and judged it a good idea is far larger than the number of people who have actually given it an honest try. I could lament how terrible this is, and condemn the human spirit as being lazy and therefore evil, but it seems besides the point—we have no reason to _care_ about moral grandstanding, we want _something that actually works_.
-One asks oneself: is this little piece of boring but genuinely-worth-doing work _really_ that bad, really so terrible that setting a twenty-minute timer and actually facing it would be too much to bear? One wants to say that the answer _can't possibly_ be _Yes_, that if one's actions betray an implicit _Yes_ it can only mean that one wasn't really paying attention to the question. The natural inclination is then to ask if paying attention to the question is really that terrible, but that would be [too obvious](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/09/recursion-is-boring/).
+One asks oneself: is this little piece of boring but genuinely-worth-doing work _really_ that bad, really so terrible that setting a twenty-minute timer and actually facing it would be too much to bear? One wants to say that the answer _can't possibly_ be _Yes_, that if one's actions betray an implicit _Yes_ it can only mean that one wasn't really paying attention to the question. The natural inclination is then to ask if paying attention to the question is really that terrible, but that would be [too obvious](/blog/2012/Sep/recursion-is-boring/).
In the year 2013, this blog saw _103_ posts and (at press time) _40_ comments. Among these—
-We heard [a poem about why you should hire me](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/12/cover-letter/). We surveyed a few [numbers between 0 and 1](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/12/numbers-between-0-and-1-non-exhaustive-list/). (Friend of the blog [Grognor](https://twitter.com/Grognor) told me that the funniest part was the explicit disclaimer that the list was non-exhaustive. I replied that not everyone knows about the [diagonalization argument](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument)—but considering this blog's, um, _selective_ audience, maybe my readers do—all _five_ of you!) We mentioned some [hidden costs of talking about stuff](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/11/conversational-overhead/). We noted that [some words have substrings which are other words](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/11/you-cant-spell-x-without-y/). I wrote a series about my experiences studying web development at [App Academy](http://www.appacademy.io) ([9](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/11/app-academy-diary-week-nine/) [8](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/11/app-academy-diary-week-eight/) [7](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/10/app-academy-diary-week-seven/) [6](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/10/app-academy-diary-week-six/) [5](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/10/app-academy-diary-week-five/) [4](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/10/app-academy-diary-week-four/) [3](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/09/app-academy-diary-week-three/) [2](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/09/app-academy-diary-week-two/) [1](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/09/app-academy-diary-week-one/)). I pasted [my first attempt at an OKCupid profile](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/08/online-dating-profile-first-draft/). We observed that [I'm a moron](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/08/im-a-moron/). [Books arrived in the post](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/08/o-glorious-day/). We [mused on the nature of personhood](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/08/personhood/) and implemented some classic algorithms: the [Ford-Fulkerson technique somewhat clumsily in Ruby](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/08/ford-fulkerson/), [quicksort in the form of a letter to a fictional horse](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/07/quicksort-in-fim/), and [Huffman coding in Python](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/06/huffman/). We [lamented the nature of existence](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/the-horror-of-naturalism/), noticed [the non-observance of an unusual tradition](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/tradition/), and heard [a poem about watching a motion picture by someone you met at university](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/a-possible-future/). [Three problems with unsolicited advice](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/01/three-problems-with-unsolicited-advice/) were discussed, as was the [role of bases in the theory of vector spaces](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/01/epiphenomenal-coordinates/), and the [subjective indistinguishability of propaganda and other forms of instruction](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/01/education-and-indoctrination-feel-the-same-from-the-inside/).
+We heard [a poem about why you should hire me](/blog/2013/Dec/cover-letter/). We surveyed a few [numbers between 0 and 1](/blog/2013/Dec/numbers-between-0-and-1-non-exhaustive-list/). (Friend of the blog [Grognor](https://twitter.com/Grognor) told me that the funniest part was the explicit disclaimer that the list was non-exhaustive. I replied that not everyone knows about the [diagonalization argument](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument)—but considering this blog's, um, _selective_ audience, maybe my readers do—all _five_ of you!) We mentioned some [hidden costs of talking about stuff](/blog/2013/Nov/conversational-overhead/). We noted that [some words have substrings which are other words](/blog/2013/Nov/you-cant-spell-x-without-y/). I wrote a series about my experiences studying web development at [App Academy](http://www.appacademy.io) ([9](/blog/2013/Nov/app-academy-diary-week-nine/) [8](/blog/2013/Nov/app-academy-diary-week-eight/) [7](/blog/2013/Oct/app-academy-diary-week-seven/) [6](/blog/2013/Oct/app-academy-diary-week-six/) [5](/blog/2013/Oct/app-academy-diary-week-five/) [4](/blog/2013/Oct/app-academy-diary-week-four/) [3](/blog/2013/Sep/app-academy-diary-week-three/) [2](/blog/2013/Sep/app-academy-diary-week-two/) [1](/blog/2013/Sep/app-academy-diary-week-one/)). I pasted [my first attempt at an OKCupid profile](/blog/2013/Aug/online-dating-profile-first-draft/). We observed that [I'm a moron](/blog/2013/Aug/im-a-moron/). [Books arrived in the post](/blog/2013/Aug/o-glorious-day/). We [mused on the nature of personhood](/blog/2013/Aug/personhood/) and implemented some classic algorithms: the [Ford-Fulkerson technique somewhat clumsily in Ruby](/blog/2013/Aug/ford-fulkerson/), [quicksort in the form of a letter to a fictional horse](/blog/2013/Jul/quicksort-in-fim/), and [Huffman coding in Python](/blog/2013/Jun/huffman/). We [lamented the nature of existence](/blog/2013/Apr/the-horror-of-naturalism/), noticed [the non-observance of an unusual tradition](/blog/2013/Mar/tradition/), and heard [a poem about watching a motion picture by someone you met at university](/blog/2013/Mar/a-possible-future/). [Three problems with unsolicited advice](/blog/2013/Jan/three-problems-with-unsolicited-advice/) were discussed, as was the [role of bases in the theory of vector spaces](/blog/2013/Jan/epiphenomenal-coordinates/), and the [subjective indistinguishability of propaganda and other forms of instruction](/blog/2013/Jan/education-and-indoctrination-feel-the-same-from-the-inside/).
-So that was 2013 in the year of our Common Era. But what, I hear you ask (_both_ of you who clicked through after the break), what about twenty-<em>four</em>teen? Having considered the year that was, what of the year that hasn't yet? What is your faithful correspondent thinking about writing [("thinking about writing")](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/12/thinking-about-writing/)? Well, without giving too much away—and, come to think of it, without much of a track record of successfully predicting my future behavior—I'll say to expect more computer-scientific contrivances and more detailed fiction, but probably somewhat fewer overall posts (this last partially because I'm going to be busy contributing to world economic growth, and partially because I want to put more emphasis on the virtue of Quality rather than the virtue of Shipping). So don't touch that bookmark! The best is yet to come! I thank you for reading, and remain,
+So that was 2013 in the year of our Common Era. But what, I hear you ask (_both_ of you who clicked through after the break), what about twenty-<em>four</em>teen? Having considered the year that was, what of the year that hasn't yet? What is your faithful correspondent thinking about writing [("thinking about writing")](/blog/2013/Dec/thinking-about-writing/)? Well, without giving too much away—and, come to think of it, without much of a track record of successfully predicting my future behavior—I'll say to expect more computer-scientific contrivances and more detailed fiction, but probably somewhat fewer overall posts (this last partially because I'm going to be busy contributing to world economic growth, and partially because I want to put more emphasis on the virtue of Quality rather than the virtue of Shipping). So don't touch that bookmark! The best is yet to come! I thank you for reading, and remain,
Your faithful correspondent,
Zack M. Davis
"I don't understand. How could it not be necessary?"
-"['Knock, knock.'](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/a-knock-knock-joke/)"
+"['Knock, knock.'](/blog/2012/Jul/a-knock-knock-joke/)"
Category: arts & culture
Tags: Friendship Is Magic, Star Trek
-[(Previously.)](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/an-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/)
+[(Previously.)](/blog/2012/Nov/an-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/)
a musical episode including a cover of the ["strange new world" song from _Equestria Girls_](http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/This_Strange_World)
_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")](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/10/the-quieted-scare-convention/) be resolved, it would still be [a waste of cognition to think about it unless](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/counterfactual-social-thought/) we were also to suppose that people care what I think—and _that's_ ridiculous.)
+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")](/blog/2012/Oct/the-quieted-scare-convention/) be resolved, it would still be [a waste of cognition to think about it unless](/blog/2012/Dec/counterfactual-social-thought/) 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](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/10/app-academy-diary-week-four/#wednesday), but I didn't, so I did.
+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](/blog/2013/Oct/app-academy-diary-week-four/#wednesday), but I didn't, so I did.
And that's terrible.
[]({static}/images/my_friend_circle.png){: .alignleft }
-_Tuesday 15 October 2013—_ I got all the specs to pass on the assessment with time to spare. Today's designated project was _Friend Circle_ (!), a Google+ish thing where users can put other users in circles and share posts with them. I was scheduled to pair with _Jeff Rosen_, but apparently he was ill, and so I worked alone after lunch. The instructions described a somewhat ambitious project; I only got as far as letting users create circles and will have to catch up later. Associations are actually really powerful! Still no BART settlement ... and no strike, either; I decided to come home tonight, the allure of a shower and bed and privacy outweighing the travel uncertainty. Tomorrow we're going to make a very simple clone of some of the functionality of Rails itself (following up on our [earlier](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/10/app-academy-diary-week-four/#monday) very simple clone of some of the functionality of ActiveRecord). I guess I'll call it ... Ruby on Wires?
+_Tuesday 15 October 2013—_ I got all the specs to pass on the assessment with time to spare. Today's designated project was _Friend Circle_ (!), a Google+ish thing where users can put other users in circles and share posts with them. I was scheduled to pair with _Jeff Rosen_, but apparently he was ill, and so I worked alone after lunch. The instructions described a somewhat ambitious project; I only got as far as letting users create circles and will have to catch up later. Associations are actually really powerful! Still no BART settlement ... and no strike, either; I decided to come home tonight, the allure of a shower and bed and privacy outweighing the travel uncertainty. Tomorrow we're going to make a very simple clone of some of the functionality of Rails itself (following up on our [earlier](/blog/2013/Oct/app-academy-diary-week-four/#monday) very simple clone of some of the functionality of ActiveRecord). I guess I'll call it ... Ruby on Wires?
-_Thursday 17 October 2013—_ Writing Ruby on Wires yesterday (albeit building off the supplied skeleton) was really fun; I hooked it up to SedentaryRecord and started a blog engine ("blog engine"—well, okay, so you fill out a form and it adds your content to a page) that actually works, without Rails! Today I worked with Ben Hass [again](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/09/app-academy-diary-week-one/#friday) on a Reddit-like thing with RSpec tests (and FactoryGirl and Faker to construct test objects). Near the end, under Ben's leadership, we used JavaScript and jQuery to get comment forms to appear on the page in response to a user clicking "Reply", but didn't have time to actually get the comment submission to work. The trains are really going away tomorrow; perhaps I'll be able to join an _ad hoc_ carpool at the station?
+_Thursday 17 October 2013—_ Writing Ruby on Wires yesterday (albeit building off the supplied skeleton) was really fun; I hooked it up to SedentaryRecord and started a blog engine ("blog engine"—well, okay, so you fill out a form and it adds your content to a page) that actually works, without Rails! Today I worked with Ben Hass [again](/blog/2013/Sep/app-academy-diary-week-one/#friday) on a Reddit-like thing with RSpec tests (and FactoryGirl and Faker to construct test objects). Near the end, under Ben's leadership, we used JavaScript and jQuery to get comment forms to appear on the page in response to a user clicking "Reply", but didn't have time to actually get the comment submission to work. The trains are really going away tomorrow; perhaps I'll be able to join an _ad hoc_ carpool at the station?
_Sunday 20 October 2013—_ On Friday I got to the city in one the buses chartered by BART management. A television reporter asked me what I thought of the strike. I said that I didn't have anything interesting to say. She asked if I supported the strike. No, I said, then added that I think it's a waste of cognition to have opinions about things you don't have any control over.
_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](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/08/im-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.
+_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](/blog/2013/Aug/im-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.
[]({static}/images/our_cat_for_rent.png){: .alignleft }
-_Thursday 10 October 2013—_ Dear reader, suppose [yet](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/09/app-academy-diary-week-two/#sunday) [again](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/09/app-academy-diary-week-three/#saturday) that you're working on the great American dog-sharing site—_loser!_ Sharing dogs is _so_ last week; you should have predicted that by now, everyone who's anyone would be renting cats instead. That's why today _Dean Yang_ and I used our prodigious knowledge of not just models, but also both views _and_ controllers, to make a mock cat-rental site! It's like this: say you visit the URL for the page that displays all the cats. Your browser issues an HTTP GET request, which is handled by the Rails router: an instance of the `CatsController` is spawned, and its `index` method is called, which puts an array of `Cat` objects (instantiated by the ActiveRecord ORM from their representations in the database) in an instance variable, which is then made available to a process that uses a template to decide how to express the information about the cats in HTML, which is then sent back to your browser. Similar stuff happens to let you make a new cat, or edit an existing cat.
+_Thursday 10 October 2013—_ Dear reader, suppose [yet](/blog/2013/Sep/app-academy-diary-week-two/#sunday) [again](/blog/2013/Sep/app-academy-diary-week-three/#saturday) that you're working on the great American dog-sharing site—_loser!_ Sharing dogs is _so_ last week; you should have predicted that by now, everyone who's anyone would be renting cats instead. That's why today _Dean Yang_ and I used our prodigious knowledge of not just models, but also both views _and_ controllers, to make a mock cat-rental site! It's like this: say you visit the URL for the page that displays all the cats. Your browser issues an HTTP GET request, which is handled by the Rails router: an instance of the `CatsController` is spawned, and its `index` method is called, which puts an array of `Cat` objects (instantiated by the ActiveRecord ORM from their representations in the database) in an instance variable, which is then made available to a process that uses a template to decide how to express the information about the cats in HTML, which is then sent back to your browser. Similar stuff happens to let you make a new cat, or edit an existing cat.
-_Sunday 13 October 2013—_ On Friday I worked with _Nathan Holland_ [again](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/09/app-academy-diary-week-two/#wednesday); we added users and authentication to the cat-rental site! It's like this: in the app/config directory of the source repository there lives a file named _routes.rb_, which which tells Rails what to do with requests! Like, _routes.rb_ contains a line that says "`get 'login', :to => 'sessions#new'`", which means that if someone issues an HTTP GET request to /login at our application's domain, that what happens next is determined by the `new` method in the `SessionsController`. As it happens, all that does is send back the log-in form generated from the template at app/views/sessions/new.html.erb. When the user submits the form, a POST request is issued to /login, which gets routed to the `create` method in the `SessionsController`! That does a few things. First, it tries to find the user in the database using the supplied credentials (username and hash-of-password). If that doesn't work, it shovels a friendly incorrect-username-or-password message onto `flash[:errors]` and renders the log-in page again (including the message from the `flash` hash). But if the user _was_ found, then it logs them in by setting their session token, storing their current-user status in an instance variable, shoveling a friendly "Logged in from #{location}" message onto `flash[:messages]` (the user's location can be determined using their IP and the [Geocoder gem](http://www.rubygeocoder.com/)), and redirecting to the page with all the cats!
+_Sunday 13 October 2013—_ On Friday I worked with _Nathan Holland_ [again](/blog/2013/Sep/app-academy-diary-week-two/#wednesday); we added users and authentication to the cat-rental site! It's like this: in the app/config directory of the source repository there lives a file named _routes.rb_, which which tells Rails what to do with requests! Like, _routes.rb_ contains a line that says "`get 'login', :to => 'sessions#new'`", which means that if someone issues an HTTP GET request to /login at our application's domain, that what happens next is determined by the `new` method in the `SessionsController`. As it happens, all that does is send back the log-in form generated from the template at app/views/sessions/new.html.erb. When the user submits the form, a POST request is issued to /login, which gets routed to the `create` method in the `SessionsController`! That does a few things. First, it tries to find the user in the database using the supplied credentials (username and hash-of-password). If that doesn't work, it shovels a friendly incorrect-username-or-password message onto `flash[:errors]` and renders the log-in page again (including the message from the `flash` hash). But if the user _was_ found, then it logs them in by setting their session token, storing their current-user status in an instance variable, shoveling a friendly "Logged in from #{location}" message onto `flash[:messages]` (the user's location can be determined using their IP and the [Geocoder gem](http://www.rubygeocoder.com/)), and redirecting to the page with all the cats!
Having accomplished this feat, Nathan and I spent a lot of time trying to push the application to [Heroku](https://www.heroku.com/) so that we could test things like how to handle a user being logged in on several devices at once, but Heroku dislikes SQLite, and various attempts at troubleshooting the issue all failed horribly.
Status: published
Category: computing
-_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](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/10/app-academy-diary-week-six/#thursday)–[Zach](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/10/app-academy-diary-week-five/#sunday) 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!
+_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](/blog/2013/Oct/app-academy-diary-week-six/#thursday)–[Zach](/blog/2013/Oct/app-academy-diary-week-five/#sunday) 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`.
_Monday 30 September 2013—_ Today's assessment was implementing [Crazy Eights](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Eights) in accordance with the given RSpec tests. In the afternoon, I worked with [_Dan Quan_](http://quan.io/) on exercises from the [SQL Zoo](http://sqlzoo.net/wiki/Main_Page), which varied wildly in difficulty.
-_Tuesday 1 October 2013—_ Today I worked with _A. J. Gregory_ [again](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/09/app-academy-diary-week-two/#saturday), 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.
+_Tuesday 1 October 2013—_ Today I worked with _A. J. Gregory_ [again](/blog/2013/Sep/app-academy-diary-week-two/#saturday), 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.
-_Saturday 5 October 2013—_ Dear reader, suppose [again](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/09/app-academy-diary-week-two/#sunday) that you're building the great American dog-sharing site. One problem that you face is that the the most convenient way of storing data in the database isn't exactly the same as the most convenient way to manipulate data in your program. It would be nice to have some standard tool for translating the rows in your database table to occurrence of a particular class in your favorite programming language and back again, without having to futz with the syntax of the systematic questioning lexicon every time you add a new feature ... some sort of—[_occurrence–row matching_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_mapping) ...
+_Saturday 5 October 2013—_ Dear reader, suppose [again](/blog/2013/Sep/app-academy-diary-week-two/#sunday) that you're building the great American dog-sharing site. One problem that you face is that the the most convenient way of storing data in the database isn't exactly the same as the most convenient way to manipulate data in your program. It would be nice to have some standard tool for translating the rows in your database table to occurrence of a particular class in your favorite programming language and back again, without having to futz with the syntax of the systematic questioning lexicon every time you add a new feature ... some sort of—[_occurrence–row matching_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_mapping) ...
The Ruby on Rails framework (does anyone else think _Ruby on Rails_ sounds like the title of an action movie about a woman named Ruby who has to fight spies on a train?—no?) includes a library called ActiveRecord for this purpose. Suppose your database has a `users` table for storing all the user data, and a `dogs` table for storing all the data about dogs. And suppose we want to say that each dog is owned by a particular user. We can do that by including an `owner_id` column in the `dogs` table; for each row in the `dogs` table, this column will store a number referring to a row in the `users` table, thus indicating the user that owns that dog. Columns like this that refer to another table in the database are called _foreign keys_, and we also want to tell the database to _index_ them so that we can search them in logarithmic rather than linear time in the number of rows. Then, when we write the classes to represent users and dogs in our application code (these are called _models_), Rails gives us nice shortcuts to make it easy to retrieve (respectively store) their information from (respectively in) the database. In the `User` class, we say that a user "`has_many :dogs, :class_name => "Dog", :foreign_key => :owner_id, :primary_key => :id`", and we put a similar `belongs_to` statement in the `Dog` class (the `belongs_to` corresponding to a `has_many` always goes in the class whose database table contains the foreign key), and then everything is great forever.
On Wednesday I worked with _Mainor Claros_ on a simple URL shortener, and on Thursday I worked with _Scott Silver_ on models for a simple polling application. Yesterday the original plan was to have a solo day during which each of us would implement our own simplified version of ActiveRecord (... SedentaryRecord?), but at some point it was decided that the office was needed to host hiring day for the cohort before ours, so there was no class yesterday and we'll do SedentaryRecord on Monday of next week. I told myself I would get something educational done just the same (App Academy is providing value added in the form of guidance, connections, and a working environment, but if you're a long-time reader of _An Algorithmic Lucidity_, then you know that I know that the ultimate responsibility for internalizing knowledge must rest on individuals, not institutions), but I'm sorry to report that some of the more frivolous distractions of the internet (as well as a science-fiction novel that I purchased Thursday night on a whim at the bookstore inside the library in the city, which I had not set foot in since I think the March of 'aught-ten) proved too tempting that day. But fear not, dear reader!—for today and tomorrow are an entirely different story, in which your faithful correspondent will no doubt make tremendous progress in his quest for true knowledge of the nature of web development, as well as related matters of concern, like who would win in a fight between the [MySQL dolphin](http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/logos.html), the [Postgres elephant](http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Logo) (PostgreSQLephant?), and the bird that the [SQLite feather](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SQLite370.svg) was taken from.
-_Sunday 6 October 2013—_ Yesterday and today I looked at the instructions for the project scheduled for tomorrow which I've been calling _SedentaryRecord_ and started working on a Python version (including [tests](http://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.html)), which I've been calling _SerpentineRecord_. Why? Because ... because I can. And because even though this is a Ruby/Rails course, I've been toying with the idea of preferentially shooting for Python/Django jobs when this is over. My thought is that Ruby and Python are filling the same niche in programming-language space, so that in the long term, it's only worth specializing in one of them: _really_ mastering a tool (not just the basic syntax, which is easy, but the technical minutia and ecosystem and everything) is costly, so you want to allocate your finite amount of effort into mastering an orthogonal set of tools, rather than many tools that do mostly the same things. So if I _will_ ultimately have to choose, I'm inclined to go with my first love, Python, even if that's only an arbitrary artifact of what I happened to learn first. Is that wrong? Is it petty of me to care about the merely cosmetic issue of syntactic whitespace versus [that execrable word _end_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/08/doend-macros-for-emacs/), even while Ruby's blocks are suffused with grace and power whereas Python's lambda statement is deliberately crippled precisely because of whitespace considerations?
+_Sunday 6 October 2013—_ Yesterday and today I looked at the instructions for the project scheduled for tomorrow which I've been calling _SedentaryRecord_ and started working on a Python version (including [tests](http://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.html)), which I've been calling _SerpentineRecord_. Why? Because ... because I can. And because even though this is a Ruby/Rails course, I've been toying with the idea of preferentially shooting for Python/Django jobs when this is over. My thought is that Ruby and Python are filling the same niche in programming-language space, so that in the long term, it's only worth specializing in one of them: _really_ mastering a tool (not just the basic syntax, which is easy, but the technical minutia and ecosystem and everything) is costly, so you want to allocate your finite amount of effort into mastering an orthogonal set of tools, rather than many tools that do mostly the same things. So if I _will_ ultimately have to choose, I'm inclined to go with my first love, Python, even if that's only an arbitrary artifact of what I happened to learn first. Is that wrong? Is it petty of me to care about the merely cosmetic issue of syntactic whitespace versus [that execrable word _end_](/blog/2013/Aug/doend-macros-for-emacs/), even while Ruby's blocks are suffused with grace and power whereas Python's lambda statement is deliberately crippled precisely because of whitespace considerations?
I don't know. But in any case, my money is on the dolphin.
Category: social science
Tags: cynicism, transhumanism
-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](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/the-horror-of-naturalism/). The other day I was reading Luke Muehlhauser's [interview with Steve Hsu](http://intelligence.org/2013/08/31/stephen-hsu-on-cognitive-genomics/), and Hsu says:
+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](/blog/2013/Apr/the-horror-of-naturalism/). The other day I was reading Luke Muehlhauser's [interview with Steve Hsu](http://intelligence.org/2013/08/31/stephen-hsu-on-cognitive-genomics/), 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.
Category: computing
Tags: algorithms, Python
-Dear reader, you know what's _way_ more fun than [feeling](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/the-horror-of-naturalism/) [sad](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relativity/) [about](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relevance/) [the](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/retirement/) [nature](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/06/remembering/) of the cosmos? _Data compression_, that's what! Suppose you want to send a message to your friends in a nearby alternate universe, but interuniversal communication bandwidth is _very expensive_ (different universes can't _physically_ interact, so we and our alternate-universe analogues can only communicate by mutually _inferring_ what the other party must be saying, which takes monstrous amounts of computing power and is not cheap), so you need to make your message as brief as possible. Note that 'brief' doesn't just have to do with how long your message is in natural language, it also has to do with how that message is _represented_ over the transuniveral communication channel: indeed, the more efficient the encoding, the more you can afford to say on a fixed budget.
+Dear reader, you know what's _way_ more fun than [feeling](/blog/2013/Apr/the-horror-of-naturalism/) [sad](/blog/2013/May/relativity/) [about](/blog/2013/May/relevance/) [the](/blog/2013/May/retirement/) [nature](/blog/2013/Jun/remembering/) of the cosmos? _Data compression_, that's what! Suppose you want to send a message to your friends in a nearby alternate universe, but interuniversal communication bandwidth is _very expensive_ (different universes can't _physically_ interact, so we and our alternate-universe analogues can only communicate by mutually _inferring_ what the other party must be saying, which takes monstrous amounts of computing power and is not cheap), so you need to make your message as brief as possible. Note that 'brief' doesn't just have to do with how long your message is in natural language, it also has to do with how that message is _represented_ over the transuniveral communication channel: indeed, the more efficient the encoding, the more you can afford to say on a fixed budget.
The classic [ASCII](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII) encoding scheme uses seven bits to represent each character. (_Seven?_—you ask perplexedly, _surely you mean eight?_ Apparently it was seven in the original version.) Can we do better? Well ... ASCII has a lot of stuff that arguably you don't need _that_ badly. Really, upper _and_ lower case letters? Ampersands, asterisks, backslashes? And don't get me started about those unprintable control characters! If we restrict our message to just the uncased alphabet _A_ through _Z_ plus space and a few punctuation marks, then we can encode our message using only a 32 (= $2^5$) character set, at five bits per character.
Status: published
Category: psychology
-It turns out that I've been doing human psychology wrong, _all_ wrong. My entire life, I've been modeling other people as defective versions of my model of myself, and I just didn't notice that that doesn't work. ([Even though I was warned](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/01/three-problems-with-unsolicited-advice/).)
+It turns out that I've been doing human psychology wrong, _all_ wrong. My entire life, I've been modeling other people as defective versions of my model of myself, and I just didn't notice that that doesn't work. ([Even though I was warned](/blog/2013/Jan/three-problems-with-unsolicited-advice/).)
Status: published
Category: philosophy
-In a sufficiently large universe, everything that _can_ happen happens _somewhere_, but it's clearly not an even distribution. Flip a quantum coin a hundred times, and there have to be _some_ versions of you who see a hundred [heads](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/08/plurals-of-coinflip-outcomes/), but they're so vastly outnumbered by versions of you who see a properly random-looking sequence of heads and tails that it's not worth thinking about: it _mostly_ doesn't happen.
+In a sufficiently large universe, everything that _can_ happen happens _somewhere_, but it's clearly not an even distribution. Flip a quantum coin a hundred times, and there have to be _some_ versions of you who see a hundred [heads](/blog/2013/Aug/plurals-of-coinflip-outcomes/), but they're so vastly outnumbered by versions of you who see a properly random-looking sequence of heads and tails that it's not worth thinking about: it _mostly_ doesn't happen.
When you write a computer program, or build a bridge, or just _think_ something, we might prefer to take the viewpoint that you're not _creating_ anything so much as you are _instantiating that pattern locally_, thereby increasing its measure in the multiverse: there might be other ways for that program, that bridge, that thought to come about somewhere, but it's getting some of its support from you.
-_Decisionmaking_ is about exerting some control over the distribution of measure over patterns in the multiverse: agent-like patterns select actions so as to allocate measure to their preferred patterns. Maybe there are _some_ versions of me with an ice-cream cone that form by chance, or are deliberately created by alien civilizations investigating how humans respond to ice-cream, but if I get an ice-cream cone, it's _mostly_ because humans evolved and then developed cultures which domesticated dairy cows and cultivated sugar and so on and so forth until eventually I was born and grew up and put effort into acquiring ice-cream. When you decide, you help determine the distribution of what happens to the sections of the multiverse that depend on copies of your decision—[choose carefully](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/actually-personal-responsibility/).
+_Decisionmaking_ is about exerting some control over the distribution of measure over patterns in the multiverse: agent-like patterns select actions so as to allocate measure to their preferred patterns. Maybe there are _some_ versions of me with an ice-cream cone that form by chance, or are deliberately created by alien civilizations investigating how humans respond to ice-cream, but if I get an ice-cream cone, it's _mostly_ because humans evolved and then developed cultures which domesticated dairy cows and cultivated sugar and so on and so forth until eventually I was born and grew up and put effort into acquiring ice-cream. When you decide, you help determine the distribution of what happens to the sections of the multiverse that depend on copies of your decision—[choose carefully](/blog/2012/Dec/actually-personal-responsibility/).
Status: published
Category: asides
-Books arrived in the post! Including [the book about counterfactuals and causal inference in the social sciences](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521671930/), which is _really important_ because everyone and her dog has political opinions, but it's [rather less common](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/counterfactual-social-thought/) to have a theory about how to reason about which interventions will lead to which outcomes!
+Books arrived in the post! Including [the book about counterfactuals and causal inference in the social sciences](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521671930/), which is _really important_ because everyone and her dog has political opinions, but it's [rather less common](/blog/2012/Dec/counterfactual-social-thought/) to have a theory about how to reason about which interventions will lead to which outcomes!
"Like what?"
-"'Thinkers from my native subculture, ranked on [a continuum](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/continuum-utilitarianism/) from negative to positive utilitarianism': it goes from [Brian Tomasik](http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/) to [Robin Hanson](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/it-is-good-to-e.html)."
+"'Thinkers from my native subculture, ranked on [a continuum](/blog/2013/Apr/continuum-utilitarianism/) from negative to positive utilitarianism': it goes from [Brian Tomasik](http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/) to [Robin Hanson](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/it-is-good-to-e.html)."
"But I'm haunted. After my recent ordeal in the psych ward, the part of me that talks described it as 'hellish.' But I was _physically safe the entire time._ If something _so gentle_ as losing one night of sleep and being taken away from my usual environment was enough to get me to use the h-word, then what about all the _actual_ suffering in the world? What hope is there for transhumanism, if the slightest perturbation sends us spiraling off into madness?
-"The other week I was reading Julian Simon's book on overcoming depression; he wrote that depression arises from negative self-comparisons: comparing your current state to some hypothetical more positive state. But personal identity can't _actually_ exist; [_time_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/i-dont-understand-time/) can't actually exist the way we think it does. If pain and suffering are bad when they're implemented in _my_ skull, then they have to be bad when implemented elsewhere.
+"The other week I was reading Julian Simon's book on overcoming depression; he wrote that depression arises from negative self-comparisons: comparing your current state to some hypothetical more positive state. But personal identity can't _actually_ exist; [_time_](/blog/2013/Apr/i-dont-understand-time/) can't actually exist the way we think it does. If pain and suffering are bad when they're implemented in _my_ skull, then they have to be bad when implemented elsewhere.
"Anna said that evolutionarily speaking, bad experiences are more intense than good ones because you can lose _all_ your fitness in a short time period. But if 'the brain can't multiply' is a bias—if two bad things are twice as bad as one, no matter where they are in space and time, even if no one is capable of thinking that way—then so is 'the brain can't integrate': long periods of feeling pretty okay count for something, too.
"But there has to be more to morality than that. I complained about how people in institutional contexts optimize for not-being-personally-blamed and no one is actually trying to do anything. But of course passive helplessness is the result when you don't have any goals except not-being-hurt.
-"I want to be [Innocent and Safe with Probability One](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/second-order-rationality-for-the-chronically-anxious/), but Probability One is an absurdity that can't exist. In a sufficiently large universe, random fluctuations in maximum entropy heat death form a Boltzmann brain Judeo-Christian God who will punish you for masturbating. But somehow I'm not worried about that.
+"I want to be [Innocent and Safe with Probability One](/blog/2013/Apr/second-order-rationality-for-the-chronically-anxious/), but Probability One is an absurdity that can't exist. In a sufficiently large universe, random fluctuations in maximum entropy heat death form a Boltzmann brain Judeo-Christian God who will punish you for masturbating. But somehow I'm not worried about that.
-"But [I shouldn't be thinking](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/retirement/) about any of this. I have my own life to tend to, and it looks _great_; the rest of space and time will have to take care of itself. I seem to have memories of being in the [save/destroy/take over the world](http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html) business, but now it seems more convenient to be agnostic about whether any of that actually happened."
+"But [I shouldn't be thinking](/blog/2013/May/retirement/) about any of this. I have my own life to tend to, and it looks _great_; the rest of space and time will have to take care of itself. I seem to have memories of being in the [save/destroy/take over the world](http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html) business, but now it seems more convenient to be agnostic about whether any of that actually happened."
Category: psychology
Tags: madness
-"Rational agents should never be made _worse_ off by more information—well, [almost never](http://www.nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf). So if I can [no](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/the-horror-of-naturalism/) [longer](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relativity/) [contemplate](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relevance/) the big picture without life seeming like a bad thing—the fewer needs you have, the fewer ways in which you can be hurt; if you don't exist, you can't be hurt—then maybe I could just—not contemplate it? If my will to live is something that can be destroyed by the truth, then maybe [P. C. Hodgell was wrong](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/541138-that-which-can-be-destroyed-by-the-truth-should-be)? This needn't entail self-delusion: distraction is quite sufficient. There are plenty of _things to do_ that won't remind me of the vastness of suffering in the multiverse.
+"Rational agents should never be made _worse_ off by more information—well, [almost never](http://www.nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf). So if I can [no](/blog/2013/Apr/the-horror-of-naturalism/) [longer](/blog/2013/May/relativity/) [contemplate](/blog/2013/May/relevance/) the big picture without life seeming like a bad thing—the fewer needs you have, the fewer ways in which you can be hurt; if you don't exist, you can't be hurt—then maybe I could just—not contemplate it? If my will to live is something that can be destroyed by the truth, then maybe [P. C. Hodgell was wrong](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/541138-that-which-can-be-destroyed-by-the-truth-should-be)? This needn't entail self-delusion: distraction is quite sufficient. There are plenty of _things to do_ that won't remind me of the vastness of suffering in the multiverse.
"Daily life, exercise, practical programming skills, finding a job—pure math and compsci if I need something intellectual. But no philosophy, history, current events, futurism, social science, biology, or game theory. Not much fiction, because stories are about people's pain. I just don't want to know anymore."
"Say more."
-"Well, [as discussed previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/02/lessons/), I had been modeling other people as defective versions of my model of myself, without realizing that this was a mistake on at least two counts: one, other people are not like my model of me, and two, _I'm_ not as much like my model of me as I had wanted to believe, both of which observations are manifestations of that horrifying fact which I'm only now starting to appreciate: that people are animals, that Darwinism isn't just a proposition to endorse, but it _actually happened that way in real life_."
+"Well, [as discussed previously](/blog/2013/Feb/lessons/), I had been modeling other people as defective versions of my model of myself, without realizing that this was a mistake on at least two counts: one, other people are not like my model of me, and two, _I'm_ not as much like my model of me as I had wanted to believe, both of which observations are manifestations of that horrifying fact which I'm only now starting to appreciate: that people are animals, that Darwinism isn't just a proposition to endorse, but it _actually happened that way in real life_."
"And how does that relate to the costs of nonconformity?"
Category: asides
Tags: trains
-I want you to consider the indignity of sitting on the train pondering the [philosophy](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/08/mathematics-is-the-subfield-of-philosophy-that-humans-are-good-at/) 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 want you to consider the indignity of sitting on the train pondering the [philosophy](/blog/2012/Aug/mathematics-is-the-subfield-of-philosophy-that-humans-are-good-at/) 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.
Category: asides
Tags: Friendship Is Magic
-"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](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/12/fortune/) _X_ times 276 divided by 365 dollars of economic value this year, and I don't believe in karma, sin, or willpower depletion."
+"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](/blog/2013/Dec/fortune/) _X_ times 276 divided by 365 dollars of economic value this year, and I don't believe in karma, sin, or willpower depletion."
"So what?" you ask. "If one stupid mistake is non-disastrous, why not say the same of a lifetime's worth of stupid mistakes?" Because, because—
-Because I like living in a technological civilization. I like being cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and having plenty of tasty food to eat, and [internet](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/01/house-style/) to play in. These things aren't guaranteed to us by nature; they exist _only_ by of the grace of people being sufficiently non-incompetent at their jobs. And we may not know what we're missing by not being even more non-incompetent. Even if any one mistake or triumph doesn't make a perceptible difference on its own—it adds up. So I don't think you should blame me for caring.
+Because I like living in a technological civilization. I like being cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and having plenty of tasty food to eat, and [internet](/blog/2014/Jan/house-style/) to play in. These things aren't guaranteed to us by nature; they exist _only_ by of the grace of people being sufficiently non-incompetent at their jobs. And we may not know what we're missing by not being even more non-incompetent. Even if any one mistake or triumph doesn't make a perceptible difference on its own—it adds up. So I don't think you should blame me for caring.
Status: published
Category: philosophy
-"I still feel bad about being the [worst person at my job](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/06/lower-decks/)."
+"I still feel bad about being the [worst person at my job](/blog/2014/Jun/lower-decks/)."
"You don't mean _worst person_. _People_ all have an equal intrinsic moral worth that has nothing to do with their economic role in society. You mean something more like, 'perhaps less skilled than some others at some job tasks'."
Category: arts & culture
Tags: Star Trek
-([Previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/11/another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/an-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/) on _An Algorithmic Lucidity_.)
+([Previously](/blog/2013/Nov/another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](/blog/2012/Nov/an-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/) on _An Algorithmic Lucidity_.)
"So, I'm not convinced that deassimilating Seven of Nine was the ethically correct choice."
Category: meta
Tags: new year
-[(Previously.)](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/12/2013-year-in-reverse/)
+[(Previously.)](/blog/2013/Dec/2013-year-in-reverse/)
If I had any readers who still believe in the [A-theory of time](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-series_and_B-series), I might say: 2014 is dead! Gone! Over! But since I probably don't have any readers like that (since I probably don't have any readers, full stop?), it's better to face the truth: 2014 is an immutable part of our universe; just because _we_ don't—get to?—have to?—experience it "now", doesn't mean it has "stopped" existing, any more than 2016 doesn't exist "yet" just because _we_ don't remember it.
-Anyway. In that two-thousand-and-fourteenth year of our Common Era, the first year of my life (that I feel comfortable admitting to), and (unfortunately) [not actually the Year of the Em Dash](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/12/the-year-of-the-em-dash-not/), this blog saw _45_ posts and _40_ comments. Among these—
+Anyway. In that two-thousand-and-fourteenth year of our Common Era, the first year of my life (that I feel comfortable admitting to), and (unfortunately) [not actually the Year of the Em Dash](/blog/2014/Dec/the-year-of-the-em-dash-not/), this blog saw _45_ posts and _40_ comments. Among these—
-The [weariness of being monolingual was confessed to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/11/native-tongue/). We saw how to [convert Markdown to HTML within Emacs](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/11/convert-markdown-to-html-within-emacs-using-pandoc/) (a technique which is proving itself to be of some convenience to your author in preparing blog posts for publication). We considered one weird trick for [what to write when you can't infer the correct spelling of someone's name from what you heard](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/11/coffee-names/). It turned out that [the word _apology_ can mean different things](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/11/missing-words-vi/), and that [characters in popular 1990s science-fiction television programs aren't always completely honest in interpreting the moral law](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/11/yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/). We were prompted to [prove why we will never write anything](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/11/an-exercise-for-the-writer-pretendant/). We had [a wild Halloween party](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/11/last-friday-night/), noted [a baffling error message from Git](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/10/my-favorite-error-message-this-year/) (_hint_: commit hooks and virtualenv), and [drowned our sorrows in tower defense](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/10/friday-night-lies/). [The American coffee hegemon started serving pumpkin spice again](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/09/pumpkin-spice/). There were [feelings](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/09/worth/) of [inadequacy](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/08/preemptive-low-status-behavior-is-not-always-a-good-idea/), at least one contrived [distraction from writing that ineffectually pretended](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/07/growl/) to not be a distraction, and the occasional [obscure pun](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/07/a-line-of-code-i-havent-found-an-excuse-to-use-yet/). We examined [where I stand](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/06/where-i-stand/) and were enlightened by some [standard advice](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/06/standard-advice/). There were more [feelings of inadequacy](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/06/lower-decks/). Even [conditional on the hypothesis that](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/05/a-short-story/) [all's well that ends well](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/05/sub-specie-aeternitatis/), I think it's important to [consider the condition](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/04/reasons-for-seasons/) of people for which all is not looking to end well. We heard [a poem for OpenStack object storage](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/04/ode-to-swift/), and [a lament against `git push --force`](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/03/lethal-force/). I argued that [Twilight Sparkle is a disaster waiting to happen](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/03/twilight-sparkle-is-a-disaster-waiting-to-happen/) and [confessed that perhaps too many of my life decisions are determined by what things GitHub happens to provide graphs for](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/02/motivation/). [I ate too much ice-cream once](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/01/the-chocolate-caramel-sea-salt-betrayal/) and [explained how consistent hashing works](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/01/consistent-hashing/).
+The [weariness of being monolingual was confessed to](/blog/2014/Nov/native-tongue/). We saw how to [convert Markdown to HTML within Emacs](/blog/2014/Nov/convert-markdown-to-html-within-emacs-using-pandoc/) (a technique which is proving itself to be of some convenience to your author in preparing blog posts for publication). We considered one weird trick for [what to write when you can't infer the correct spelling of someone's name from what you heard](/blog/2014/Nov/coffee-names/). It turned out that [the word _apology_ can mean different things](/blog/2014/Nov/missing-words-vi/), and that [characters in popular 1990s science-fiction television programs aren't always completely honest in interpreting the moral law](/blog/2014/Nov/yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/). We were prompted to [prove why we will never write anything](/blog/2014/Nov/an-exercise-for-the-writer-pretendant/). We had [a wild Halloween party](/blog/2014/Nov/last-friday-night/), noted [a baffling error message from Git](/blog/2014/Oct/my-favorite-error-message-this-year/) (_hint_: commit hooks and virtualenv), and [drowned our sorrows in tower defense](/blog/2014/Oct/friday-night-lies/). [The American coffee hegemon started serving pumpkin spice again](/blog/2014/Sep/pumpkin-spice/). There were [feelings](/blog/2014/Sep/worth/) of [inadequacy](/blog/2014/Aug/preemptive-low-status-behavior-is-not-always-a-good-idea/), at least one contrived [distraction from writing that ineffectually pretended](/blog/2014/Jul/growl/) to not be a distraction, and the occasional [obscure pun](/blog/2014/Jul/a-line-of-code-i-havent-found-an-excuse-to-use-yet/). We examined [where I stand](/blog/2014/Jun/where-i-stand/) and were enlightened by some [standard advice](/blog/2014/Jun/standard-advice/). There were more [feelings of inadequacy](/blog/2014/Jun/lower-decks/). Even [conditional on the hypothesis that](/blog/2014/May/a-short-story/) [all's well that ends well](/blog/2014/May/sub-specie-aeternitatis/), I think it's important to [consider the condition](/blog/2014/Apr/reasons-for-seasons/) of people for which all is not looking to end well. We heard [a poem for OpenStack object storage](/blog/2014/Apr/ode-to-swift/), and [a lament against `git push --force`](/blog/2014/Mar/lethal-force/). I argued that [Twilight Sparkle is a disaster waiting to happen](/blog/2014/Mar/twilight-sparkle-is-a-disaster-waiting-to-happen/) and [confessed that perhaps too many of my life decisions are determined by what things GitHub happens to provide graphs for](/blog/2014/Feb/motivation/). [I ate too much ice-cream once](/blog/2014/Jan/the-chocolate-caramel-sea-salt-betrayal/) and [explained how consistent hashing works](/blog/2014/Jan/consistent-hashing/).
-And as for that _other_ nearby immutable span of reality, the one called 201<em>5</em>? Well, _that_ would be telling (and [I can't know that from here](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/12/thinking-about-writing/)).
+And as for that _other_ nearby immutable span of reality, the one called 201<em>5</em>? Well, _that_ would be telling (and [I can't know that from here](/blog/2013/Dec/thinking-about-writing/)).
Category: meta
Tags: new year
-([Previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/01/2014-year-in-reverse/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/12/2013-year-in-reverse/).)
+([Previously](/blog/2015/Jan/2014-year-in-reverse/), [previously](/blog/2013/Dec/2013-year-in-reverse/).)
-Dear reader (that's _reader_ in the singular because I doubt that there are two [actual humans](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/09/periphery-demographic/) who read my blog; it's [not because](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/10/its-not-that/) there are many and I'm addressing you individually), it's that time of the year again—the time of the year when it stops being the year. A time to think thoughtfully and ask, "What happened since the last time we did this?"
+Dear reader (that's _reader_ in the singular because I doubt that there are two [actual humans](/blog/2012/Sep/periphery-demographic/) who read my blog; it's [not because](/blog/2012/Oct/its-not-that/) there are many and I'm addressing you individually), it's that time of the year again—the time of the year when it stops being the year. A time to think thoughtfully and ask, "What happened since the last time we did this?"
In the year 2015, this blog has seen (at press time) _43_ posts and _30_ comments. Among these—
-We shared a recipe for a [more-wholesome-than-some-of-the-likely-alternatives breakfast](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/12/californian-raktajino/) (although honestly, I worry about coffee having unknown-to-me degenerative effects on the brain—just because lots of people in your Society indulge in a drug doesn't mean it's _safe_; it just means that any long-term damage has to be _subtle_ enough that people still feel safe using it—and is that really so high of a bar?). We heard some [error message free verse](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/11/apt-get/). I [wished for a crypto subplot](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/11/still-yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/) in the yet-unnamed 2017 _Star Trek_ series. A [train was late](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/11/traffic-koan/). We heard a [poem about sin](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/10/the-sin-in-the-form/) and a [pæan to one's employer](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/10/company-loyalty/). A [tablet app for sports recordkeeping enthusiasts](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/10/app-ideas-i/) was proposed. I [got mail](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/10/open-paren-one-close-paren/). We considered the [quiet holocaust of things left unsaid](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/10/everyday-true-crime/) perpetrated by the forces of laziness and evil that lurk in people's hearts. I [got a patch into OpenStack Swift](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/10/getting-a-contribution-through-the-openstack-review-process/) (ninth draft landed as [06bede894](https://github.com/openstack/swift/commit/06bede894) on 7 October, first draft proposed for [review](https://review.openstack.org/#/c/203304/) on 19 July). You heard about some of [my favorite things in September](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/09/monthly-favorites-september-2015/). We went [back to basics](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/09/from-the-top/) on the justification of a classic property of arithmetic. I commented on [a certain matter of misperceived incentives](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/08/no-award/), and another matter of [determination in the absence of what others could discern as incentives](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/08/studying-on-the-weekend/). I went to the [first Rust conference](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/08/rustcamp-reminiscences/). My bold investigative reporting showed that the seemingly-straightforward [`$` directive treacherously means different things to different regular-expression engines](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/07/dollar/). I confessed to favoring a [nonstandard pronunciation of a file extension](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/06/__pycache__shibboleth-cpython-34-pyc/). I [mentioned that I was trying to write a compiler](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/06/compilers-week/), although honestly, I don't think it went so well (the lexer, parser, and obligatory Emacs mode weren't _that_ bad, but I kind of intuited the context-handling and code-generation parts, and should really get farther in the textbook and give it another try later). I explained [how erasure codes work](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/04/the-foundations-of-erasure-codes/). We heard some [more error-message poetry](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/04/post-ingress/). Some readers of this blog (!!) [relieved me of some of my confusion](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/03/xxx-ii/) about why the Rust borrow-checker rejects bad code that you might think is good if you grew up the cartoon fantasy world that calls itself Python. I explained why ["Pi Day" is an unholy festival of sin that is corrupting our children](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/03/pi-day-is-an-unholy-festival-of-sin-that-is-corrupting-our-children/). You [heard from me during February](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/02/permalink-or-it-didnt-happen/), and we saw [a macro that is just _too_ cute](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/01/xxx-i/).
+We shared a recipe for a [more-wholesome-than-some-of-the-likely-alternatives breakfast](/blog/2015/Dec/californian-raktajino/) (although honestly, I worry about coffee having unknown-to-me degenerative effects on the brain—just because lots of people in your Society indulge in a drug doesn't mean it's _safe_; it just means that any long-term damage has to be _subtle_ enough that people still feel safe using it—and is that really so high of a bar?). We heard some [error message free verse](/blog/2015/Nov/apt-get/). I [wished for a crypto subplot](/blog/2015/Nov/still-yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/) in the yet-unnamed 2017 _Star Trek_ series. A [train was late](/blog/2015/Nov/traffic-koan/). We heard a [poem about sin](/blog/2015/Oct/the-sin-in-the-form/) and a [pæan to one's employer](/blog/2015/Oct/company-loyalty/). A [tablet app for sports recordkeeping enthusiasts](/blog/2015/Oct/app-ideas-i/) was proposed. I [got mail](/blog/2015/Oct/open-paren-one-close-paren/). We considered the [quiet holocaust of things left unsaid](/blog/2015/Oct/everyday-true-crime/) perpetrated by the forces of laziness and evil that lurk in people's hearts. I [got a patch into OpenStack Swift](/blog/2015/Oct/getting-a-contribution-through-the-openstack-review-process/) (ninth draft landed as [06bede894](https://github.com/openstack/swift/commit/06bede894) on 7 October, first draft proposed for [review](https://review.openstack.org/#/c/203304/) on 19 July). You heard about some of [my favorite things in September](/blog/2015/Sep/monthly-favorites-september-2015/). We went [back to basics](/blog/2015/Sep/from-the-top/) on the justification of a classic property of arithmetic. I commented on [a certain matter of misperceived incentives](/blog/2015/Aug/no-award/), and another matter of [determination in the absence of what others could discern as incentives](/blog/2015/Aug/studying-on-the-weekend/). I went to the [first Rust conference](/blog/2015/Aug/rustcamp-reminiscences/). My bold investigative reporting showed that the seemingly-straightforward [`$` directive treacherously means different things to different regular-expression engines](/blog/2015/Jul/dollar/). I confessed to favoring a [nonstandard pronunciation of a file extension](/blog/2015/Jun/__pycache__shibboleth-cpython-34-pyc/). I [mentioned that I was trying to write a compiler](/blog/2015/Jun/compilers-week/), although honestly, I don't think it went so well (the lexer, parser, and obligatory Emacs mode weren't _that_ bad, but I kind of intuited the context-handling and code-generation parts, and should really get farther in the textbook and give it another try later). I explained [how erasure codes work](/blog/2015/Apr/the-foundations-of-erasure-codes/). We heard some [more error-message poetry](/blog/2015/Apr/post-ingress/). Some readers of this blog (!!) [relieved me of some of my confusion](/blog/2015/Mar/xxx-ii/) about why the Rust borrow-checker rejects bad code that you might think is good if you grew up the cartoon fantasy world that calls itself Python. I explained why ["Pi Day" is an unholy festival of sin that is corrupting our children](/blog/2015/Mar/pi-day-is-an-unholy-festival-of-sin-that-is-corrupting-our-children/). You [heard from me during February](/blog/2015/Feb/permalink-or-it-didnt-happen/), and we saw [a macro that is just _too_ cute](/blog/2015/Jan/xxx-i/).
Beyond these, there are many more things that remain to be said.
Status: published
Category: asides
-([Previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/01/the-chocolate-caramel-sea-salt-betrayal/) on _An Algorithmic Lucidity_.)
+([Previously](/blog/2014/Jan/the-chocolate-caramel-sea-salt-betrayal/) on _An Algorithmic Lucidity_.)
"I stopped at the poison shop on the way home from work; want a death square?"
Category: computing
Tags: Clojure, Python, Ruby
-I used to think of `$` in regular expressions as matching the end of the string. I was wrong! It actually might do something more subtle than that, depending on what regex engine you're using. In my [native](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/11/native-tongue/) Python's [`re` module, `$`](https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html)
+I used to think of `$` in regular expressions as matching the end of the string. I was wrong! It actually might do something more subtle than that, depending on what regex engine you're using. In my [native](/blog/2014/Nov/native-tongue/) Python's [`re` module, `$`](https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html)
> [m]atches the end of the string or just before the newline at the end of the string, and in MULTILINE mode also matches before a newline.
Status: published
Category: asides
-[(Previously.)](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/05/a-short-story/)
+[(Previously.)](/blog/2014/May/a-short-story/)
```
[19:26:50] <bob> alice: you still around?
Dear reader, it is lies or it is worse than lies; it is blasphemy, treason, superstitious superficiality, degenerate folderol, and frivolous depravity! Do not mistake me; of course I can see as clearly as any other ape can that the _numeric subsequence_ of the _string_ "3.14" is same as that of the _string_ "3/14". The former string represents an occasionally useful approximation of the circle constant which is ubiquitous in mathematics (give or take a factor of two); the latter is how people in my country abbreviate today's date. Perhaps to those who don't have anything really interesting to think about, this trivial coincidence might be worth a passing mention; apes love anything for an innocent distraction, and why begrudge that?
-What is intolerable, however, is for a _mathematically meaningless_ coincidence to be _marketed_ as a day to celebrate mathematics, which marketing can only propagate the cruel slander that mathematics is about memorizing and manipulating figures. Not that seekers of true mathematical knowledge don't have occasion to manipulate figures from time to time—we do—but we do it because the figures _actually mean something_. And the similarity between the decimal number "3.14" and the date "3/14" ... _doesn't_ really mean anything. Our dominant culture happens to prefer a base-ten place-value system, in which the representation of the quantity π happens to start with 3.14. That _means_: three (times ten-to-the-zeroth), plus one-tenth (which is one times ten-to-the-negative-first), plus four one-hundredths (which is four times ten-to-the-negative-second), plus other terms that our to-two-decimal-places approximation neglects. Whereas 3/14 _means_: the fourteenth day of the third month. [It's not the same number](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/12/the-year-of-the-em-dash-not/) as 3.14, even if its standard representation happens to involve the same digits in the same order.
+What is intolerable, however, is for a _mathematically meaningless_ coincidence to be _marketed_ as a day to celebrate mathematics, which marketing can only propagate the cruel slander that mathematics is about memorizing and manipulating figures. Not that seekers of true mathematical knowledge don't have occasion to manipulate figures from time to time—we do—but we do it because the figures _actually mean something_. And the similarity between the decimal number "3.14" and the date "3/14" ... _doesn't_ really mean anything. Our dominant culture happens to prefer a base-ten place-value system, in which the representation of the quantity π happens to start with 3.14. That _means_: three (times ten-to-the-zeroth), plus one-tenth (which is one times ten-to-the-negative-first), plus four one-hundredths (which is four times ten-to-the-negative-second), plus other terms that our to-two-decimal-places approximation neglects. Whereas 3/14 _means_: the fourteenth day of the third month. [It's not the same number](/blog/2014/Dec/the-year-of-the-em-dash-not/) as 3.14, even if its standard representation happens to involve the same digits in the same order.
If there must be a Pi Day, I can imagine sensible arguments for holding it once every three years and fifty-two days (around π years), or on January fourth at 3:23 _a.m._ (about π days into the new year), or on one of the solstices or equinoxes (when the Earth is π radians around the sun from some imagined "zero" at the opposite solstice or equinox).
Or at least, to be _inspired_ to more. That's most of my answer to the rest of the "Why RustCamp?" question. I'm skeptical that anyone actually learns much at conferences (lectures are notoriously less efficient than text, and mere reading needs to be combined with many, many hours of hacking to produce true skill), but getting together with people, attentively listening to them yap on stage, and mingling with the crowd during breaks, provides pointers to things to read and hack on later in addition to serving certain human social needs, giving one the strength to carry on trying to better one's mastery of one's chosen profession, even through the persistent suspicion that it none of it helps, that the young programmer's vaunted "passion" is all vanity and empty signaling that will soon be destroyed by the realization that your code doesn't really change users' lives in any appreciable way, and no one cares how smart you are. [(Enjoy Arby's.)](https://twitter.com/nihilist_arbys)
-I felt lucky that the event happened to be on my side of the bay, in Berkeley, given that the trains to [the city](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The+City&defid=1410951) were [503](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#5xx_Server_Error)ing this weekend on account of [scheduled downtime for essential security patches](http://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2015/news20150624-0). On the walk from Downtown Berkeley station, I stopped at one of the outposts of the rival power to buy a specialty medicinal and a scone. I usually go to [the American coffee hegemon](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/09/pumpkin-spice/), but the rival power has this [this newish specialty medicinal](http://www.peets.com/stores/menus/coffee-espresso-beverages/black-tie.html), an iced-coffee with one-and-a-half kinds each of cream and sweetener, that, having tried it for the first time the day before, I privately think beats anything in the hegemon's arsenal.
+I felt lucky that the event happened to be on my side of the bay, in Berkeley, given that the trains to [the city](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The+City&defid=1410951) were [503](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#5xx_Server_Error)ing this weekend on account of [scheduled downtime for essential security patches](http://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2015/news20150624-0). On the walk from Downtown Berkeley station, I stopped at one of the outposts of the rival power to buy a specialty medicinal and a scone. I usually go to [the American coffee hegemon](/blog/2014/Sep/pumpkin-spice/), but the rival power has this [this newish specialty medicinal](http://www.peets.com/stores/menus/coffee-espresso-beverages/black-tie.html), an iced-coffee with one-and-a-half kinds each of cream and sweetener, that, having tried it for the first time the day before, I privately think beats anything in the hegemon's arsenal.
I made my way to the event venue and checked in, receiving a pretty badge and the obligatory swag bag containing an event-logo tee, a tee with a clever functional-programming-dragon design on the front and a sponsor logo on the back, bottled water (which is ridiculous), a Wi-Fi password (I hadn't bought my laptop), and stickers (I almost never use stickers). I am illustrating this post with a photo of the badge and dragon tee because I forgot to bring a camera to take pictures at the conference itself, and—lest the reader object that only die-hard photography fanatics have dedicated _cameras_ nowadays—I don't have a real phone. (I'm into _technology_, just not necessarily _consumer_ technology. Maybe I'll upgrade when the [Ubuntu phone](http://www.ubuntu.com/phone) goes on sale in the U.S., but likely not even then.)
Category: arts & culture
Tags: Star Trek
-([Previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/11/yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/11/another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/an-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/) on _An Algorithmic Lucidity_.)
+([Previously](/blog/2014/Nov/yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](/blog/2013/Nov/another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](/blog/2012/Nov/an-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/) on _An Algorithmic Lucidity_.)
"The next thing we need is a secure way to communicate with our contacts on Bajor," says Maj. Kira during Act One of _Deep Space Nine_ Season 6, Episode 3, ["Sons and Daughters"](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Sons_and_Daughters_%28episode%29), planning the secret resistance to the Dominion's occupation of Deep Space Nine ... at a table in a public bar?! Who writes this stuff?
Status: published
Category: asides
-[(Previously.)](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/)
+[(Previously.)](/blog/2016/Jul/concerns/)
"I'm concerned about the [socially-undesirable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_desirability_bias) implications of the correlations documented in these published studies, which seem consistent with my own observations and personal experience."
Status: published
Category: asides
-[(Previously.)](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/alpha-gamma-phi/)
+[(Previously.)](/blog/2016/Dec/alpha-gamma-phi/)
"I'm [naming my daughter](https://xkcd.com/910/) _Climara_."
Status: published
Category: asides
-[_(Previously.)_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/01/group-introduction/)
+[_(Previously.)_](/blog/2013/Jan/group-introduction/)
> 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.
>
Category: meta
Tags: akrasia, chess, Friendship Is Magic, Rust, timely Special Event
-One often-overlooked aspect of the [crime of not-writing](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/10/everyday-true-crime/) is that the harm isn't just about the things that deserve to be said that you never get around to saying because you don't put in the time and effort. It's also about the things that you _can't_ say anymore even if you suddenly had the will, because the opportunity to say it was bound to a particular time, and trying to recapitulate the thoughts months or years after the fact would be irrelevant, or impossible.
+One often-overlooked aspect of the [crime of not-writing](/blog/2015/Oct/everyday-true-crime/) is that the harm isn't just about the things that deserve to be said that you never get around to saying because you don't put in the time and effort. It's also about the things that you _can't_ say anymore even if you suddenly had the will, because the opportunity to say it was bound to a particular time, and trying to recapitulate the thoughts months or years after the fact would be irrelevant, or impossible.
This phenomenon comes in degrees. Start with irrelevance. Often the inadmissibility of tardy words isn't absolute: you _could_ say things late, but the product would be less valuable than if it were timely—especially in a medium like blogging, where the posts being dated and displayed reverse-chronologically creates an expectation that the entries are associated with a particular point in time—at least, that they were written not too long before their publication date, even if the actual content isn't about the ephemera of the day or season. This has contributed to _An Algorithmic Lucidity_ not being as good of a blog as it could be.
[]({static}/images/crush_kill_destroy_swag.png){: .alignright }
-Like—each of the last two Aprils, I attended (one day of) [BABSCon](http://www.babscon.com/), the San Francisco Bay Area's premier convention for fans of the animated series _My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic_, both times—even the second!—with the thought that the experience would make good fodder for a blog post in the "autobiographical account of my day at this timely Special Event" genre. I was going to tell you about how the first time, I made a couple of social _faux pas_ while meeting Tara Strong and Nicole Oliver, only one of which was intentional; I was going to tell you about how the second time, I hadn't been planning to buy anything in vendor hall, but couldn't help but say "Shut up and take my money" in response to the demonstration of the [Twilight Sparkle's Secret Shipfic Folder](http://www.secretshipfic.com/) card game, the game-opening card of which I later got autographed by both members of Sherclop Pones, whose [_Friendship Is Witchcraft_ fandub series](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WebVideo/FriendshipIsWitchcraft) had clearly inspired some of the cards and probably the game itself, as well as being the source of [some of my favorite music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACEnJSDVzdc). I was going to tell you about how the first time, I was considering buying a coffee cup depicting the Mane Six (because I frequently bought medicinals at the outpost of the American coffee hegemon, and felt guilty about the wastefulness of accepting the default disposable cup every time like every other American), but hesitated, explaining to the vendor that I wasn't sure whether I wanted to use that cup in public, whereupon she said she could throw in a free [button](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pin-back_button), to which I replied, "Sold!" And I was going to do a careful sociological analysis of curious observations like how I hesitated to buy that cup and why [H. liked it so much](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/09/pumpkin-spice/) in terms of gender ideology and [signaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_%28economics%29) [contrarianism](http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/).
+Like—each of the last two Aprils, I attended (one day of) [BABSCon](http://www.babscon.com/), the San Francisco Bay Area's premier convention for fans of the animated series _My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic_, both times—even the second!—with the thought that the experience would make good fodder for a blog post in the "autobiographical account of my day at this timely Special Event" genre. I was going to tell you about how the first time, I made a couple of social _faux pas_ while meeting Tara Strong and Nicole Oliver, only one of which was intentional; I was going to tell you about how the second time, I hadn't been planning to buy anything in vendor hall, but couldn't help but say "Shut up and take my money" in response to the demonstration of the [Twilight Sparkle's Secret Shipfic Folder](http://www.secretshipfic.com/) card game, the game-opening card of which I later got autographed by both members of Sherclop Pones, whose [_Friendship Is Witchcraft_ fandub series](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WebVideo/FriendshipIsWitchcraft) had clearly inspired some of the cards and probably the game itself, as well as being the source of [some of my favorite music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACEnJSDVzdc). I was going to tell you about how the first time, I was considering buying a coffee cup depicting the Mane Six (because I frequently bought medicinals at the outpost of the American coffee hegemon, and felt guilty about the wastefulness of accepting the default disposable cup every time like every other American), but hesitated, explaining to the vendor that I wasn't sure whether I wanted to use that cup in public, whereupon she said she could throw in a free [button](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pin-back_button), to which I replied, "Sold!" And I was going to do a careful sociological analysis of curious observations like how I hesitated to buy that cup and why [H. liked it so much](/blog/2014/Sep/pumpkin-spice/) in terms of gender ideology and [signaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_%28economics%29) [contrarianism](http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/).
But I didn't, and those Aprils were nine and twenty-one months ago, respectively. Not timely. My being motivated to write _now_ (["That my past does not define me, 'cause my past is not today"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqnbYUG6Bn8)) can push a 350-word counterfactual "postview" of what I thought about saying over the threshold into existence, but it would be a bit unseemly to try to construct (I almost wrote _reconstruct_, but the _re-_ prefix should be reserved for things that ever existed in the first place) a 2000-word personal account of the timely Special Event that happened _last year_ or the _year before that_.
Or like—I made [a thing](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline) not too long ago. I didn't mean to. It was an accident, really. It's a sort of oppositional strategy game engine—like a board game you play against the computer. The core move-scoring application is written in Rust, but there's also a web-application GUI (the "web client") in Clojure and ECMAScript 6 that's much more ergonomic for playing a game against. The game is—okay, well, it's chess: the endeavor snowballed out of my desire to participate in my coworkers' friendly office chess games combined with my reluctance to spend effort learning to be good at a task whose [essential nature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax) is so obviously suitable for automation. But writing a chess engine is just _so_ cliché, and I enjoy naming things, so I quickly settled upon the conceit that _actually_ I was writing an engine for a game that _just happened_ to be exactly like chess, except that everything has different names: for example, instead of the pieces being black and white pawn, knight, bishop, rook, queen, and king, the figurines, or agents (never "pieces"), in my game are [blue and orange](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMorality) servant, pony, scholar, cop, princess, and figurehead. (I kept _rank_ and _file_, though.) This "adorable idiosyncratic names for everything" convention permeates the codebase. Despite the fact that unnecessarily gendering things isn't normally my style, I decided that ponies, scholars, and (inevitably) princesses were female, and that servants, cops, and figureheads were male, specifically in order to have an excuse to leave `// ♀` and `// ♂` comments in the [enum declaration](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline/blob/d914c979/src/identity.rs#L35-L43), because I feel like too many of my code comments are restricted to the ASCII or _maybe_ Latin-1 subsets of the Basic Multilingual Plane, such that I don't want to pass up an opportunity to legitimately ("legitimately") use \u2640 FEMALE SIGN and \u2642 MALE SIGN. There are [comments with](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline/blob/d914c979/src/identity.rs#L68-L86) ludicrous rationalizations for using the standard Forsyth–Edwards notation abbreviations ('P' is for _peon_, 'N' is for _neigh_, 'B' is for _book_, 'R' is for _the Rule of law_; the blue team's runes are lowercase because lowercase characters have higher ASCII codepoints, just as blue light has a higher frequency than orange light). Instead of _pawn promotion_, it's _servant ascension_, and a different verb is used to describe the process depending on the target figurine type (the servant moving the to the final rank can _transform_ into a pony, be _brevetted_ to cop, or _transition_ into a princess or scholar). Or, like, Rust is quite [conservative in the Yeggean sense](https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSKeg4vQtz), as manifested in features like the compiler forcing you to explicitly handle all possible variants of an enum; in cases where you know an instance of the enum can only be one of a strict subset of the possible variants, but the type system doesn't know that, you have to fill in those branches or supply a default case anyway, [probably](https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/macro.unreachable!.html) with a panic, which is like an exception that you can't catch, to abort the program with a message indicating that something entirely unanticipated has happened and it makes no sense to carry on. So I had been ending all of my panic messages with a stock phrase about how the unexpected thing was contrary to the operation of the moral law ("non-princesslike agent passed to `princesslike\_lookahead`, which is contrary to the operation of the moral law", and so forth), because this isn't the kind of codebase where you just say something like "assertion failed," as if the program should _die_ because of some human authority's mere _assertion_, rather than only as a matter of _justice_ when its behavior is contrary to the operation of the moral law. And then when my coworker [Alexander Corwin](http://acorwin.com/) started contributing, he abstracted away the boilerplate in these panic messages into this [`moral_panic!` macro](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline/blob/d914c979/src/sorceries.rs#L1-L4), which I thought was _brilliant_.
-The web client is configured to run on port 2882. It's [easy to remember because](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/10/my-favorite-mnemonic/) 2882 is Magnus Carlsen's peak ELO score.
+The web client is configured to run on port 2882. It's [easy to remember because](/blog/2012/Oct/my-favorite-mnemonic/) 2882 is Magnus Carlsen's peak ELO score.
[]({static}/images/leafline_console_play.png){: .alignright }
-Software, like poetry, is never really finished (only abandoned), but getting the project to the point that I felt it was a minimal viable "product" took about eight glorious weekends (plus a few weekday nights, and with some help from Alexander). Near the end, watching the program utterly trounce me in web client play and [feeling for all the world like a lieutenant junior grade](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/06/lower-decks/), I started looking ahead to what came next for me. Over the past two years, the first two years of my life (that I feel comfortable admitting to), I had spent many, many night and weekend hours hacking on various side projects and coding exercises out of genuine enthusiasm and curiosity and desire to improve my craft—and, honestly, a [feeling of insecurity](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/08/no-award/), sensing that I needed to prove my [worth](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/09/worth/) as a hacker (["I threw myself into my studies, to have the world in my control"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpE0ZY8FODk)). But decent _chess AI_ in _Rust_ as an _impulsive throwaway project_ seemed like a sufficiently strong signal of my programming prowess that maybe it was time to tie off this project, write the obligatory exciting blog post about it, and start allocating night and weekend hours towards some of the _non_-programming (!) interests I remember having in the before-time (assuming those memories are not fake). I could do some math! Write some fiction! Maybe even meet new friends ("[I will not be shy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvP7PIt7GNE); I'm going to [try](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/01/dismal-science/); I bet I'll find the reason why so many people, like me—")?!—all while feeling secure in the knowledge that my technology skills are _clearly_ adequate for my continued existence to be economically viable. (For now.)
+Software, like poetry, is never really finished (only abandoned), but getting the project to the point that I felt it was a minimal viable "product" took about eight glorious weekends (plus a few weekday nights, and with some help from Alexander). Near the end, watching the program utterly trounce me in web client play and [feeling for all the world like a lieutenant junior grade](/blog/2014/Jun/lower-decks/), I started looking ahead to what came next for me. Over the past two years, the first two years of my life (that I feel comfortable admitting to), I had spent many, many night and weekend hours hacking on various side projects and coding exercises out of genuine enthusiasm and curiosity and desire to improve my craft—and, honestly, a [feeling of insecurity](/blog/2015/Aug/no-award/), sensing that I needed to prove my [worth](/blog/2014/Sep/worth/) as a hacker (["I threw myself into my studies, to have the world in my control"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpE0ZY8FODk)). But decent _chess AI_ in _Rust_ as an _impulsive throwaway project_ seemed like a sufficiently strong signal of my programming prowess that maybe it was time to tie off this project, write the obligatory exciting blog post about it, and start allocating night and weekend hours towards some of the _non_-programming (!) interests I remember having in the before-time (assuming those memories are not fake). I could do some math! Write some fiction! Maybe even meet new friends ("[I will not be shy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvP7PIt7GNE); I'm going to [try](/blog/2016/Jan/dismal-science/); I bet I'll find the reason why so many people, like me—")?!—all while feeling secure in the knowledge that my technology skills are _clearly_ adequate for my continued existence to be economically viable. (For now.)
So ... _about_ that end-of-project blog post. I was going to title it "Project Review: Leafline version 0.0.14-MVP; or, Lessons From Writing an It's-Not-Chess Engine in Eight Weekends", and I was going to explain everything to you—not just the silly names for everything that inexplicably amuse me (and only me), but the actually interesting substantive technical details of the implementation. Not that the AI is anything special—it's just textbook minimax search (in the [negamax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negamax) style) with α–β pruning and a position-evaluator that [mostly counts material](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline/blob/d914c979/src/mind.rs#L35-L47) but [also has bonuses for things](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline/blob/d914c979/src/mind.rs#L60-L119) like [having both scholars](http://www.chess.com/article/view/the-evaluation-of-material-imbalances-by-im-larry-kaufman) or ponies and servants being in the center sixteen squares, plus a [transposition (hash)table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposition_table) to look up scores of game-states it's already seen before, and another hashtable for [history-heuristic](https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~jonathan/publications/ai_publications/pami.pdf) move ordering. It's multithreaded, to take advantage of multiple cores (although I confess that the _specific_ threading strategy is kind of a questionable hack). It can search up to 7 plies if you have a decent machine and are willing to wait ten or twenty minutes for the answer.
Category: arts & culture
Tags: cosplay, sex & gender, Steven Universe, timely Special Event
-So I was at [San Francisco Comic Con](http://sanfrancomiccon.com/) the other day. I don't think I find conventions themselves to be as fun as a lot of other people seem to (I didn't even last all of Saturday at [BABSCon 'fourteen and 'fifteen](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/01/ideas-have-expirations/#babscon) before getting ponied out and BARTing home, and didn't even bother attending this year), but I had never cosplayed before, and had been thinking lately that I have exactly the right body type to play [Pearl](http://steven-universe.wikia.com/wiki/Pearl) from _Obnoxious Bad Decision Chil_—I mean, _Steven Universe_, on account of being my being tall, thin, white, and having a big nose. (She's even pretty flat-chested!) So I ordered [the Pearl dress from Hot Topic](http://www.hottopic.com/product/cartoon-network-steven-universe-pearl-dress/10619954.html) (I maybe should've gotten the XXXL instead of merely the XXL), a pink (really should be more peach, but close enough) wig, yellow gym shorts, and pink socks; improvised a gem from medical tape and the bowl of a plastic spoon; and set off Saturday morning to catch the train to the city and a short walk to the San Francisco Marriot Marquis.
+So I was at [San Francisco Comic Con](http://sanfrancomiccon.com/) the other day. I don't think I find conventions themselves to be as fun as a lot of other people seem to (I didn't even last all of Saturday at [BABSCon 'fourteen and 'fifteen](/blog/2016/Jan/ideas-have-expirations/#babscon) before getting ponied out and BARTing home, and didn't even bother attending this year), but I had never cosplayed before, and had been thinking lately that I have exactly the right body type to play [Pearl](http://steven-universe.wikia.com/wiki/Pearl) from _Obnoxious Bad Decision Chil_—I mean, _Steven Universe_, on account of being my being tall, thin, white, and having a big nose. (She's even pretty flat-chested!) So I ordered [the Pearl dress from Hot Topic](http://www.hottopic.com/product/cartoon-network-steven-universe-pearl-dress/10619954.html) (I maybe should've gotten the XXXL instead of merely the XXL), a pink (really should be more peach, but close enough) wig, yellow gym shorts, and pink socks; improvised a gem from medical tape and the bowl of a plastic spoon; and set off Saturday morning to catch the train to the city and a short walk to the San Francisco Marriot Marquis.
The con itself was about what you'd expect, with the usual events and the usual vendor hall. The part that I found striking (enough so that I'm bothering to blog about it) was just how _many_ compliments and photo requests I got for my costume, wholly disproportionate to its [actual quality](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf7v0dgMzE4). (I enjoyed the opportunity to ham it up, proclaiming "We are the Crystal Gems!" or singing a few bars from the extended theme during photo ops.) Since this was my first time cosplaying, I don't have calibration, so it's quite possible that I got the ordinary amount of positive attention given costume quality and character popularity, but I _suspect_ that there was something more than that going on having to do with gendered cultural expectations.
Category: arts & culture
Tags: cosplay, Star Trek, timely Special Event
-([Previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/) on _Star Trek: An Algorithmic Lucidity_.)
+([Previously](/blog/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/) on _Star Trek: An Algorithmic Lucidity_.)
-The morning of Thursday the eighth, before heading off to see the new LCSW at the multi-specialty clinic, I was idly rereading some of the early [_Closetspace_](http://www.dolari.org/cs/) strips, trying to read between the lines (as it were) using the enhanced perception granted by the world-shattering insight about how everything I've cared about for the past fourteen years turns out to be related in unexpected and terrifying ways that I can't talk about because I don't want to lose my cushy psychology professorship at Northwestern University. ([Victoria tells Carrie](http://www.dolari.org/cs/24.htm), "Not to mention you don't _think_ like one of 'them'"; ha ha, I wonder what _that_ means!) When I got to [the part where Carrie chooses a Maj. Kira costume](http://www.dolari.org/cs/43.htm) to wear to the sci-fi convention, it occured to me that in addition to [having the exactly the right body type to cosplay Pearl from _Obnoxious Bad Decision Child_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/), I _also_ have exactly the right body type to cosplay Jadzia Dax from _Star Trek: Deep Space Nine_, on account of my being tall—well, actually I'm an inch shorter than Terry Farrell—thin, white, and having a dark ponytail.
+The morning of Thursday the eighth, before heading off to see the new LCSW at the multi-specialty clinic, I was idly rereading some of the early [_Closetspace_](http://www.dolari.org/cs/) strips, trying to read between the lines (as it were) using the enhanced perception granted by the world-shattering insight about how everything I've cared about for the past fourteen years turns out to be related in unexpected and terrifying ways that I can't talk about because I don't want to lose my cushy psychology professorship at Northwestern University. ([Victoria tells Carrie](http://www.dolari.org/cs/24.htm), "Not to mention you don't _think_ like one of 'them'"; ha ha, I wonder what _that_ means!) When I got to [the part where Carrie chooses a Maj. Kira costume](http://www.dolari.org/cs/43.htm) to wear to the sci-fi convention, it occured to me that in addition to [having the exactly the right body type to cosplay Pearl from _Obnoxious Bad Decision Child_](/blog/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/), I _also_ have exactly the right body type to cosplay Jadzia Dax from _Star Trek: Deep Space Nine_, on account of my being tall—well, actually I'm an inch shorter than Terry Farrell—thin, white, and having a dark ponytail.
Okay, not _exactly_ the right body type. You know what I mean.
-So I ordered some cheapo Sciences-division [uniform pajamas](https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M056DXO/), thinking of going to some comics convention next year, but when I queried the Overmind in its gopher aspect for actual _Star Trek_ conventions, it turned out that there was [one _that very weekend_](http://www.creationent.com/cal/50yr_sf.htm) at the SFO Hyatt Regency (previously known to me as the host of the [BABSCon _My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic_ convention](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/01/ideas-have-expirations/#babscon)). Online ticket sales had stopped, but allegedly "[a]vailable tickets [would] be on sale at the convention", and there was still time to upgrade my uniform order to one-day shipping.
+So I ordered some cheapo Sciences-division [uniform pajamas](https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M056DXO/), thinking of going to some comics convention next year, but when I queried the Overmind in its gopher aspect for actual _Star Trek_ conventions, it turned out that there was [one _that very weekend_](http://www.creationent.com/cal/50yr_sf.htm) at the SFO Hyatt Regency (previously known to me as the host of the [BABSCon _My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic_ convention](/blog/2016/Jan/ideas-have-expirations/#babscon)). Online ticket sales had stopped, but allegedly "[a]vailable tickets [would] be on sale at the convention", and there was still time to upgrade my uniform order to one-day shipping.
The uniform I got (just the first suitable thing I found querying the Overmind in its Amazonian aspect; it would be possible to do better for more searching and money and shipping time) was problematic in that it's the [_TNG_-era design](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(late_2360s-early_2370s)) _and_ has commander's rank pips, whereas Jadzia was a lieutenant when she last wore a _TNG_-era uniform and (spoilers!) [died](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Tears_of_the_Prophets_(episode)) in 2374 as a lieutenant commander. I considered trying to play a post-series Dax who actually faked her own death (and got Dr. Bashir to use an experimental technique to copy the Dax symbiont's memories to Ezri Tigan), then later got promoted to commander and assigned to a different post where they still wear the _TNG_-era uniforms for some reason. But I decided that it would be simpler to just cover the third pip with electrical tape and play Lt. Dax in 2369, just before her reassignment to Deep Space Nine. (Beyond body type, at 28, I'm even just the right _age_ for this role, Jadzia having been born in 2341!)
So I got up early the morning of Sunday the eleventh, shaved, applied the makeup in my _inexpert_-would-almost-be-too-charitable way (smear on foundation, haphazardly dab eyeliner on sides of face to make Trill spots, waveringly bring lipstick to lips), put on a bra and my foam breastforms under the cheapo uniform top, and used [my PADD](http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/galaxy-s7-features-and-specs/) to [summon a taxi](https://www.uber.com/) to Burlingame for the convention.
-I arrived way too early for check-in, and walked up the road (wearing my black jacket over my uniform top) to the Mariott, which, unlike the Hyatt, has an outpost of the [raktajino hegemon](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/09/pumpkin-spice/), and ordered a breakfast sandwich and the [vanilla sweet-cream iced raktajino specialty medicinal](https://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/brewed-coffee/vanilla-sweet-cream-cold-brew). I gave my name as _Jadzia_, but the barista wrote _Jetsy_ on the cup. (Maybe my voice was a little shaky, but _maybe_ she needed to recalibrate her [universal translator](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/11/still-yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/).)
+I arrived way too early for check-in, and walked up the road (wearing my black jacket over my uniform top) to the Mariott, which, unlike the Hyatt, has an outpost of the [raktajino hegemon](/blog/2014/Sep/pumpkin-spice/), and ordered a breakfast sandwich and the [vanilla sweet-cream iced raktajino specialty medicinal](https://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/brewed-coffee/vanilla-sweet-cream-cold-brew). I gave my name as _Jadzia_, but the barista wrote _Jetsy_ on the cup. (Maybe my voice was a little shaky, but _maybe_ she needed to recalibrate her [universal translator](/blog/2015/Nov/still-yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/).)
A little bit of lipstick rubbed off on the sandwich and the straw.
"You're so cute," she said.
-I appreciated that. On the _whole_, however, I feel like I was less enthusiastically received as Jadzia that day than I had been as Pearl at San Francisco Comic-Con—providing what could be seen as a disconfirmatory data point against [my hypothesis that incompetent MtF crossdressing gets socially-rewarded more than same-sex cosplay](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/) (cisplay??) at these sorts of events. There are too many uncontrolled variables to make a fair comparison—this was a different (I think better) costume, of a different character, in front of a different (notably smaller, possibly older?) crowd—but a darker, more specific hypothesis comes to mind.
+I appreciated that. On the _whole_, however, I feel like I was less enthusiastically received as Jadzia that day than I had been as Pearl at San Francisco Comic-Con—providing what could be seen as a disconfirmatory data point against [my hypothesis that incompetent MtF crossdressing gets socially-rewarded more than same-sex cosplay](/blog/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/) (cisplay??) at these sorts of events. There are too many uncontrolled variables to make a fair comparison—this was a different (I think better) costume, of a different character, in front of a different (notably smaller, possibly older?) crowd—but a darker, more specific hypothesis comes to mind.
As Pearl at Comic-Con, no matter what catchphrases I shouted during photo ops, I _read_ as "unapologetic man-in-a-dress not pretending to be anything else," which is cool _faux_-subversive gender variance. (So brave! Man Pearl is best Pearl!) Whereas Starfleet uniforms are properly unisex: the only gender cues indicating that I was trying to be Jadzia Dax rather than a male Trill lieutenant were my breastforms, the lipstick (a much weaker cue), and the foundation hopefully hiding any residual beard-shadow (a weaker cue still). That put me out of the "man merely wearing _clothes_ reserved for the other sex" category and into "man ineffectually pretending to be a woman" territory.
I _want_ to be able to say with the unquestioning moral certitude of my youth that none of this should _matter_, that distinguishing "crossplay" from cosplaying a character that happens to be the same sex as you is discriminatory (and therefore, it need not be said, bad). I chose to play a _character_ that I _genuinely admire_, and because this character _happened_ to be a woman, I decided to wear the breastforms that I coincidentally happened to already own, in order to make the costume more realistic (given that I am a man and, unlike Jadzia Dax, don't have breasts), in _exactly the same way_ that because this character _happened_ to be a Trill, I decided to paint spots on the sides of my face using liquid eyeliner that I happened to not already own, in order to make the costume more realistic (given that I am a human and, unlike Jadzia Dax, don't have spots on the sides of my face).
-I want to say it. I miss that righteous feeling of my youth. But in these dying autumn weeks following [that moment of liberating clarity](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/), I am _done_ pretending to be stupid. And maybe I don't want you to pretend, either.
+I want to say it. I miss that righteous feeling of my youth. But in these dying autumn weeks following [that moment of liberating clarity](/blog/2016/Oct/late-onset/), I am _done_ pretending to be stupid. And maybe I don't want you to pretend, either.
Category: social science
Tags: genetics, gridiron football, timely Special Event
-_(just some quick notes, [hopefully in the spirit](http://www.xkcd.com/1640/) of [delightfully quirky symmetry-breaking](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/tradition/))_
+_(just some quick notes, [hopefully in the spirit](http://www.xkcd.com/1640/) of [delightfully quirky symmetry-breaking](/blog/2013/Mar/tradition/))_
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylketonuria), 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.
Category: social science
Tags: chess, politics
-It [looks like](https://github.com/swiftstack/Chesswork/commit/681085b3) the opposing all-human team is winning the exhibition game of me and [my it's-not-chess engine](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/01/ideas-have-expirations/) (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](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Variation_%28game_tree%29&oldid=545070873#Principal_variation) that generated one of our recent moves (16. Bxb4 Bf5 17. Kd1 Qxd4+ 18. Kc1 Ng3 19. Qxc7 Nxh1) looks _dreadful_.
+It [looks like](https://github.com/swiftstack/Chesswork/commit/681085b3) the opposing all-human team is winning the exhibition game of me and [my it's-not-chess engine](/blog/2016/Jan/ideas-have-expirations/) (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](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Variation_%28game_tree%29&oldid=545070873#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
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).
-It's the little things like this that reinforce my suspicion that human cognition doesn't really work most of the time, that to the extent that we have a technological civilization with nice things in it, it's a matter of a bunch of apes, _some_ of whom are just _barely_ generally-intelligent, happening to stumble into patterns of coöperation that happened to scale, and not a matter of anyone within the system actually understanding much. It's the current year, and the current year turns out to be not only congruent to 0 mod 2, but furthermore to 0 mod _4_, which means outrage season is brewing again. I'm mostly pretty good at ignoring it, [except for](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/i-just-want-outrage-season-to-be-over-already/) the undercurrent of contempt that I can't help but feel at how almost everyone seems to think it's _okay_ for important decisions to be made in this way.
+It's the little things like this that reinforce my suspicion that human cognition doesn't really work most of the time, that to the extent that we have a technological civilization with nice things in it, it's a matter of a bunch of apes, _some_ of whom are just _barely_ generally-intelligent, happening to stumble into patterns of coöperation that happened to scale, and not a matter of anyone within the system actually understanding much. It's the current year, and the current year turns out to be not only congruent to 0 mod 2, but furthermore to 0 mod _4_, which means outrage season is brewing again. I'm mostly pretty good at ignoring it, [except for](/blog/2012/Nov/i-just-want-outrage-season-to-be-over-already/) the undercurrent of contempt that I can't help but feel at how almost everyone seems to think it's _okay_ for important decisions to be made in this way.
The thing about chess is that it's a very simple game. There are these thirty-two figurines on an eight-by-eight grid, and you take turns moving the figurines subject to a few rules with a well-specified objective in mind. Simple. If you're lazy like me, you can even write a computer program to do it for you. And if you hadn't already spent many, many hours of study and practice mastering the game yourself, what such a program will surely show you (as it showed me, though I expected as much) is that your unaided attempts to make good moves will _get it wrong_. The novice thinks: checkmate is the goal, giving check is good, capturing material is good; I should look for moves that do those things. And the novice will _lose_, badly. What you actually need to do is look for your best move _given_ your opponent's best reply _given_ your best counterreply _given_ your opponent's best countercounterreply, and so on as far forward as you can afford to compute. It's not magic and it's not impossible, but it's _subtle_ and it takes _work_.
Category: philosophy
Tags: transhumanism
-I ran about three miles each yesterday and the day before, and this is [very important](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/08/running/)—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!
+I ran about three miles each yesterday and the day before, and this is [very important](/blog/2015/Aug/running/)—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!
Category: computing
Tags: Rust, timely Special Event
-[(Previously on _An Algorithmic Lucidity_.)](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/08/rustcamp-reminiscences/)
+[(Previously on _An Algorithmic Lucidity_.)](/blog/2015/Aug/rustcamp-reminiscences/)
[]({static}/images/sfo_reflections.jpg){: .alignright }
The other weekend, excited to learn more and connect with people about what's going on at the forefront of expressive, performant, data-race-free computing—and eager for a healthy diversion from the last two months of agonizing delirium induced by the world-shattering insight about how everything I've cared about for the past fourteen years turns out to be related in unexpected and terrifying ways that I can't talk about for reasons that I also can't talk about—I took Friday off from my dayjob and caught a Thursday night flight out of SFO to exotic Portland (... I, um, don't travel much) for [RustConf](http://rustconf.com/)!
-The conference itself was on Saturday, but Friday featured special training sessions run by members of the Rust core team! I was registered for Niko Matsakis's afternoon session on lifetimes, but I arrived at the venue (the [Luxury Collection Nines Hotel](http://www.thenines.com/)) early to get registered (I had never seen _socks_ as conference swag before!) and hang out with folks and get a little bit of coding done: my coolest Rust project so far is [a chess engine](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/01/ideas-have-expirations/#leafline) that I wrote this time last year (feel free to go ahead and [give it a Star](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline)!) which I wanted the option to show off (`Option<ShowOff>`) to other conference attendees, but the pretty web application frontend had broken due to a recent bug and my JavaScript build pipeline having rotted. I [fixed it](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline/commit/d3eabe00) just in time for the lifetimes training session to start.
+The conference itself was on Saturday, but Friday featured special training sessions run by members of the Rust core team! I was registered for Niko Matsakis's afternoon session on lifetimes, but I arrived at the venue (the [Luxury Collection Nines Hotel](http://www.thenines.com/)) early to get registered (I had never seen _socks_ as conference swag before!) and hang out with folks and get a little bit of coding done: my coolest Rust project so far is [a chess engine](/blog/2016/Jan/ideas-have-expirations/#leafline) that I wrote this time last year (feel free to go ahead and [give it a Star](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline)!) which I wanted the option to show off (`Option<ShowOff>`) to other conference attendees, but the pretty web application frontend had broken due to a recent bug and my JavaScript build pipeline having rotted. I [fixed it](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline/commit/d3eabe00) just in time for the lifetimes training session to start.
Every reference (I kind of want to say _ampersand_) in Rust code has an associated _lifetime_, the region of the program that that reference is valid for. Lifetime annotations (appearing in angle brackets like generics and starting with an apostrophe; by convention, usually named consecutively from the start of the lowercase Latin alphabet: `'a`, `'b`, _&c._) in function signatures are used to distinguish between the lifetimes of different reference arguments, but the compiler has _lifetime ellision rules_ that cover the 90% use-cases, so you can actually write pretty substantial Rust programs without actually understanding the theory, which is both practically useful and _eternally shameful_ (for a programmer who is _satisfied_ with _not understanding_ something is not long for this world). Hence the training. [(Exercises from the training sessions are available online.)](http://rust-tutorials.com/RustConf16/)
"You know, honestly, my life is fine as it is. I don't need to do the thing. I'm glad my friends are having fun."
-_([dies of cardiac disease fifty years later](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/05/more-running/) without having done the thing)_
+_([dies of cardiac disease fifty years later](/blog/2016/May/more-running/) without having done the thing)_
_(Earth is consumed in a self-replicating nanotechnology accident)_
Status: published
Category: asides
-In the oneiric methodlessness of my nightmare, I am a lieutenant commander posted to the _Glomar Explorer_; I am pacing the deck while opining that taking the correct, minority position in a scientific controversy [necessarily feels just like](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/01/education-and-indoctrination-feel-the-same-from-the-inside/) early-onset dementia (which I can't help but notice makes a perfect pairing with a late-onset case of the other _d------ia_ word).
+In the oneiric methodlessness of my nightmare, I am a lieutenant commander posted to the _Glomar Explorer_; I am pacing the deck while opining that taking the correct, minority position in a scientific controversy [necessarily feels just like](/blog/2013/Jan/education-and-indoctrination-feel-the-same-from-the-inside/) early-onset dementia (which I can't help but notice makes a perfect pairing with a late-onset case of the other _d------ia_ word).
Something is wrong with the ship's computer. Before I can figure out whether it has to do with HTTP Strict Transport Security or the Accelerated Graphics Port (it has to be one or the other), we sink, and I drown.
It catches the eye of a young woman who got on at Lafayette and has spent the last six minutes scribbling in a Moleskine notebook. "Oh!" she says, approaching. "Are you a writer, too?"
-The man looks up, seeming slightly surprised and confused, which slightly surprises and confuses her in turn. "[Of course not](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/12/thinking-about-writing/)," he says, indicating the magazine. "If I were, would I be reading _this_?"
+The man looks up, seeming slightly surprised and confused, which slightly surprises and confuses her in turn. "[Of course not](/blog/2013/Dec/thinking-about-writing/)," he says, indicating the magazine. "If I were, would I be reading _this_?"
Category: psychology
Tags: sex & gender
-went to the genderqueer support/discussion group at the Pacific Center [again](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/wicked-transcendence/); showed up early to change into my Pearl dress (it would be a waste to only wear it [once](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)) and surreptitiously slip a [copy of Anne Lawrence](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/book-recommendations-i/) into the library
+went to the genderqueer support/discussion group at the Pacific Center [again](/blog/2016/Jul/wicked-transcendence/); showed up early to change into my Pearl dress (it would be a waste to only wear it [once](/blog/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)) and surreptitiously slip a [copy of Anne Lawrence](/blog/2016/Sep/book-recommendations-i/) into the library
I think I mostly enjoy being the token conservative/TERF (um, relatively speaking); I say that my pronouns are he/him "because I don't perceive myself as having a choice in the matter" and probably smashed the record for most uses of the phrase _biological sex_ at one of these
Category: meta
Tags: new year
-([Previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/12/2015-year-in-reverse/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/01/2014-year-in-reverse/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/12/2013-year-in-reverse/).)
+([Previously](/blog/2015/Dec/2015-year-in-reverse/), [previously](/blog/2015/Jan/2014-year-in-reverse/), [previously](/blog/2013/Dec/2013-year-in-reverse/).)
So, 2016 was an interesting year for me. (It was an interesting year for a lot of people.) I moved to Berkeley, [landed 19 commits in the Rust compiler](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits/07191e2b?author=zackmdavis), and had my trust in the sanity of the people around me re-shattered into a thousand thousand bloody fragments. (The pain of this last is exactly what I deserve for allowing the trust to re-form after the last time.)
In 2016, this blog saw _77_ posts and _65_ comments. Among these—
-It turns out that [not everypony can be like Applejack](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/an-element-which-is-nameless/). [I have money](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/). I [went to a _Star Trek_ convention](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/joined/). [Bros](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/ecstasy/) will be [bros](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/alpha-gamma-phi/). I took a [break from blogging](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/hiatus-i/) following [a moment of liberating clarity](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/). I [went to RustConf](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/rustconf-2016-travelogue/) and [San Francisco Comic-Con](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/). Some [have](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/) [concerns](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/). You miss your beloved [exactly because you can't model them well enough to know what it would be like if they were here](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/vingean-principle/). [Destined best-friends-"forever" are still subject to the moral law](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/05/ineffective-appeal/). The map is [_usually_ not the territory](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/05/correspondence-theory/). Living well [truly is the best revenge](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/05/living-well-is-the-best-revenge/). It turns out that [thinking sanely about politics has a surprising number of parallels with writing a chess engine for fun](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/02/missing-refutations/) (although the former activity is far less common). I'm [kind of an asshole](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/02/i-have-the-honor-to-be-your-obedient-servant/). There exist some [less-common reasons to detest American football](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/01/two-point-compersion/). [If you wait too long to write something, you might lose your chance](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/01/ideas-have-expirations/). [Trade-offs and competitive forces continue to shape our lives even if we would prefer they somehow didn't](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/01/dismal-science/).
+It turns out that [not everypony can be like Applejack](/blog/2016/Dec/an-element-which-is-nameless/). [I have money](/blog/2016/Dec/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/). I [went to a _Star Trek_ convention](/blog/2016/Dec/joined/). [Bros](/blog/2016/Dec/ecstasy/) will be [bros](/blog/2016/Dec/alpha-gamma-phi/). I took a [break from blogging](/blog/2016/Oct/hiatus-i/) following [a moment of liberating clarity](/blog/2016/Oct/late-onset/). I [went to RustConf](/blog/2016/Sep/rustconf-2016-travelogue/) and [San Francisco Comic-Con](/blog/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/). Some [have](/blog/2016/Sep/concerns-ii/) [concerns](/blog/2016/Jul/concerns/). You miss your beloved [exactly because you can't model them well enough to know what it would be like if they were here](/blog/2016/Jul/vingean-principle/). [Destined best-friends-"forever" are still subject to the moral law](/blog/2016/May/ineffective-appeal/). The map is [_usually_ not the territory](/blog/2016/May/correspondence-theory/). Living well [truly is the best revenge](/blog/2016/May/living-well-is-the-best-revenge/). It turns out that [thinking sanely about politics has a surprising number of parallels with writing a chess engine for fun](/blog/2016/Feb/missing-refutations/) (although the former activity is far less common). I'm [kind of an asshole](/blog/2016/Feb/i-have-the-honor-to-be-your-obedient-servant/). There exist some [less-common reasons to detest American football](/blog/2016/Jan/two-point-compersion/). [If you wait too long to write something, you might lose your chance](/blog/2016/Jan/ideas-have-expirations/). [Trade-offs and competitive forces continue to shape our lives even if we would prefer they somehow didn't](/blog/2016/Jan/dismal-science/).
What can readers of _An Algorithmic Lucidity_ look forward to in 2017?
Category: arts & culture
Tags: Star Trek
-([Previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/11/still-yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/11/yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/11/another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/an-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/) on _Star Trek: An Algorithmic Lucidity_.)
+([Previously](/blog/2015/Nov/still-yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](/blog/2014/Nov/yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](/blog/2013/Nov/another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](/blog/2012/Nov/an-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/) on _Star Trek: An Algorithmic Lucidity_.)
Sylvia Tilly/Reg Barclay time-travel romance
Category: philosophy
Tags: Bayes-structure of the universe, politics
-We can metaphorically (but like, hopefully it's a good metaphor) think of speech as being [the sum of](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/09/the-parity-decomposition-trick/) a positive-sum information-conveying component and a zero-sum social-control/memetic-warfare component. Coalitions of agents that allow their members to convey information amongst themselves will tend to outcompete coalitions that don't, because it's better for the coalition to be able to use _all_ of the information it has.
+We can metaphorically (but like, hopefully it's a good metaphor) think of speech as being [the sum of](/blog/2012/Sep/the-parity-decomposition-trick/) a positive-sum information-conveying component and a zero-sum social-control/memetic-warfare component. Coalitions of agents that allow their members to convey information amongst themselves will tend to outcompete coalitions that don't, because it's better for the coalition to be able to use _all_ of the information it has.
Therefore, if we want the human species to better approximate a coalition of agents who act in accordance with the game-theoretic [Bayes-structure of the universe](http://lesswrong.com/lw/o7/searching_for_bayesstructure/), we want social norms that reward or at least not-punish information-conveying speech (so that other members of the coalition can learn from it if it's useful to them, and otherwise ignore it).
Only I never think to rehearse, and my social performance tonight is wild, all over the map, depending on where the bravery spinner is pointing at this particular moment and whether my cache is cold. I manipulate the flow of one conversation deftly with fine rudder movements ("I see my reputation has preceded me"); in another, beyond misplay, I'm a rock ("Um. Stuff").
-Resting in a corner away from the crowd, it's these stretches of boredom and wistfulness in the night here at the center of the world that cannot be forgiven, each passing second of seeing marred with _not wanting_ to see, the meaning of these past months' morning sloth and slovenliness, always to be forsworn and always to be repeated, when I meant, I meant—Amenta? [I meant to do that](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/07/i-meant-to-do-that/), I could claim, but it's not clear that I would be in any way more redeemable if the wastefulness of my abyss had been entirely accidental—or at least not just a matter of simple cowardice.
+Resting in a corner away from the crowd, it's these stretches of boredom and wistfulness in the night here at the center of the world that cannot be forgiven, each passing second of seeing marred with _not wanting_ to see, the meaning of these past months' morning sloth and slovenliness, always to be forsworn and always to be repeated, when I meant, I meant—Amenta? [I meant to do that](/blog/2017/Jul/i-meant-to-do-that/), I could claim, but it's not clear that I would be in any way more redeemable if the wastefulness of my abyss had been entirely accidental—or at least not just a matter of simple cowardice.
[_Do I dare / Disturb the universe?_](http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html) Few remember the face of the man who answered "No"—and ceased to exist.
Status: published
Category: psychology
-_Adventures in recalibrating my models of social reality ... Portland edition! [(Previous adventures in Portland.)](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/rustconf-2016-travelogue/)_
+_Adventures in recalibrating my models of social reality ... Portland edition! [(Previous adventures in Portland.)](/blog/2016/Sep/rustconf-2016-travelogue/)_
"I think the man who asked me for change was trying to scam me. At the end of the interaction-slash-negotiation, I had given him three dollars, and I didn't get any quarters back, which is not how making change is supposed to work. Does ... does the poor thing not even have a concept of 'scam'? Is this just how his tribe makes a living?"
Category: psychology
Tags: akrasia
-[(Previously.)](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/09/pumpkin-spice/)
+[(Previously.)](/blog/2014/Sep/pumpkin-spice/)
It's the tenth day of the third November of my life (that I am willing to admit to), and I am _determined_ to wring some sort of high-sounding interpretation out of the cool air and damp sidewalks: perhaps a contrast, something about the events that directly prompt fundamental life changes (on the one hand), and the events that indirectly catalyze fundamental life changes by means of enabling the construction of a legible narrative in which the changes can be plausibly attributed to them (on the other).
-Today I am constructing a narrative about my life fundamentally changing because the coffee hegemon has started selling those medicinal (right) cranberry/cream-cheese triangles again. Not that hastening my [inevitable horrible cardiac death](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/05/more-running/) with dessert bars is like a series arc or anything, but it's a thing I learned today that is salient enough to be repurposed as a _trigger_, a reminder that the autumn–winter windustrial complex is upon us again, that this is _supposed_ to be my favorite time of year, that there _simply is no reason I won't_ attune myself to perceive nature's cyclic harmonies, then perform every San Francisco software engineer's sacred duty and _disrupt the living fuck out of them_.
+Today I am constructing a narrative about my life fundamentally changing because the coffee hegemon has started selling those medicinal (right) cranberry/cream-cheese triangles again. Not that hastening my [inevitable horrible cardiac death](/blog/2016/May/more-running/) with dessert bars is like a series arc or anything, but it's a thing I learned today that is salient enough to be repurposed as a _trigger_, a reminder that the autumn–winter windustrial complex is upon us again, that this is _supposed_ to be my favorite time of year, that there _simply is no reason I won't_ attune myself to perceive nature's cyclic harmonies, then perform every San Francisco software engineer's sacred duty and _disrupt the living fuck out of them_.
Status: published
Category: psychology
-[(Previously.)](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/05/change/)
+[(Previously.)](/blog/2017/May/change/)
Hey. Just so you know.
So, I'm not inhuman.
-Although, as far as humanity goes, it is _interesting to note_ that in [that earlier-blogged incident](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/05/change/) when I _was_ inhuman, the person asking for money ended up with three dollars, and this time, she ended up with none.
+Although, as far as humanity goes, it is _interesting to note_ that in [that earlier-blogged incident](/blog/2017/May/change/) when I _was_ inhuman, the person asking for money ended up with three dollars, and this time, she ended up with none.
But you shouldn't exonerate me yet. While leaving the store, I overheard a canvasser saying that he was helping the Southern Poverty Law Center fight descrimination, and I didn't resist the urge to look over my shoulder and say, "Discrimination is _Bayesian reasoning_ applied to human beings!"
So, I had an idea. You know how some people say we should [fund the solutions to problems with after-the-fact prizes](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/01/be-a-charity-angel.html), rather than picking a team in advance that we think might solve the problem and funding them? What if ... you did something like that, but on a _much_ smaller scale? A _personal_ scale.
-Like, suppose you've just successfully navigated a major personal life crisis that could have gone _much_ worse if it weren't for some of the people in your life (both thanks to direct help they provided during the crisis, and things you learned from them that made you the sort of person that could navigate the crisis successfully). These people don't and shouldn't _expect_ a reward (that's what friends are for) ... but maybe you could reward them _anyway_ (with a special emphasis on people who helped you in low-status ways that you didn't understand at the time) in some sort of public ritual, to make them more powerful and incentivize others to emulate them, thereby increasing the [measure](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/08/measure/) of algorithms that result in humans successfully navigating major personal life crises.
+Like, suppose you've just successfully navigated a major personal life crisis that could have gone _much_ worse if it weren't for some of the people in your life (both thanks to direct help they provided during the crisis, and things you learned from them that made you the sort of person that could navigate the crisis successfully). These people don't and shouldn't _expect_ a reward (that's what friends are for) ... but maybe you could reward them _anyway_ (with a special emphasis on people who helped you in low-status ways that you didn't understand at the time) in some sort of public ritual, to make them more powerful and incentivize others to emulate them, thereby increasing the [measure](/blog/2013/Aug/measure/) of algorithms that result in humans successfully navigating major personal life crises.
It might look something like this—
Category: arts & culture
Tags: cosplay, Steven Universe
-_In the gaming hall at [FanimeCon](https://www.fanime.com/) in a nearby alternate universe in which my analogue was smart enough to come up with the punchline in real time [(Pearl cosplay previously on _An Algorithmic Lucidity_)](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)_
+_In the gaming hall at [FanimeCon](https://www.fanime.com/) in a nearby alternate universe in which my analogue was smart enough to come up with the punchline in real time [(Pearl cosplay previously on _An Algorithmic Lucidity_)](/blog/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)_
"Hey, aren't you supposed to be babysitting a little purple kid?"
Category: psychology
Tags: akrasia
-I quit my dayjob a few months ago. I said I was taking a sabbatical from my programming career to work on my own projects: there's a lot of math that I've been wanting to learn properly for a long time (game theory, [Bayesian networks/structual causal models](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/counterfactual-social-thought/), [analysis](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/10/bounded-but-not-totally-bounded-redux/)), and there's a lot of writing that I fear I must do (although for branding and market-segmentation purposes, I'm pretending that's [someone else's story](http://unremediatedgender.space/about/)).
+I quit my dayjob a few months ago. I said I was taking a sabbatical from my programming career to work on my own projects: there's a lot of math that I've been wanting to learn properly for a long time (game theory, [Bayesian networks/structual causal models](/blog/2012/Dec/counterfactual-social-thought/), [analysis](/blog/2012/Oct/bounded-but-not-totally-bounded-redux/)), and there's a lot of writing that I fear I must do (although for branding and market-segmentation purposes, I'm pretending that's [someone else's story](http://unremediatedgender.space/about/)).
-I have made _some_ progress on these goals, but—as one would have predicted from an [Outside (_i.e._, No Fun) View](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/beware-the-insi.html) model trained on my historical behavior during periods of underemployment- or school-holiday-induced freedom—it's been disappointingly slow on a day-to-day level: it [is](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/06/the-second-r/) [easier](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/10/everyday-true-crime/) to let an hour blur by in daydreams or low-quality internet reading than it is to _actually_ study or _actually_ write, and a day is only made of so many hours.
+I have made _some_ progress on these goals, but—as one would have predicted from an [Outside (_i.e._, No Fun) View](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/beware-the-insi.html) model trained on my historical behavior during periods of underemployment- or school-holiday-induced freedom—it's been disappointingly slow on a day-to-day level: it [is](/blog/2015/Jun/the-second-r/) [easier](/blog/2015/Oct/everyday-true-crime/) to let an hour blur by in daydreams or low-quality internet reading than it is to _actually_ study or _actually_ write, and a day is only made of so many hours.
My dominant emotions surrounding this observation are _guilt_ and _shame_. Guilt: that I'm failing my moral responsibility to be intellectually productive, a duty owed to the human spirit and maybe even the Bayes-structure itself. Shame: that a hypothetical adversary could use the fact of my slothfulness as evidence against my beauty, that the failure to live up to the promise of my ideals could be construed to deny or disparage the ideal itself.
Well, I _do_ have a moral responsibility to be intellectually productive which is owed to the human spirit; this cannot be doubted. But I've been wondering lately if it might be better to let go of the shame and even most of the guilt. This _not_ because shame and guilt can't be useful emotions, but rather that I might be thought of as having outgrown them.
-I think the shame is born of insecurity: I spent a lot of years [resenting](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/draft-of-a-letter-to-a-former-teacher-which-i-did-not-send-because-doing-so-would-be-a-bad-idea/) [school](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/trying-to-buy-a-lamp/) [and](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/10/blood-from-a-stone/) resenting a culture that didn't have a concept of intellectual life or paths to economic success outside of school, resulting in a desperate need to prove myself: if I don't _create_ given the time and freedom to do so, couldn't pawns of the system use it as ammunition to sneer at me and proclaim that no one can possibly do anything worthwhile without a teacher to command them to do it? And if I don't create, would they even be wrong?
+I think the shame is born of insecurity: I spent a lot of years [resenting](/blog/2012/Dec/draft-of-a-letter-to-a-former-teacher-which-i-did-not-send-because-doing-so-would-be-a-bad-idea/) [school](/blog/2012/Jul/trying-to-buy-a-lamp/) [and](/blog/2012/Oct/blood-from-a-stone/) resenting a culture that didn't have a concept of intellectual life or paths to economic success outside of school, resulting in a desperate need to prove myself: if I don't _create_ given the time and freedom to do so, couldn't pawns of the system use it as ammunition to sneer at me and proclaim that no one can possibly do anything worthwhile without a teacher to command them to do it? And if I don't create, would they even be wrong?
-_Having something to prove_ was a useful motivation—it drove me to learn math, at least, to an extent that's probably hard to motivate without a status gradient at work. But now, at age 29—thanks to the software industry for a niche where my talents are economically legible, thanks to the aspiring-rationalist subculture for a community where I feel respected—I think I've _exited_ the world I resented. Whatever I had to prove, I've either [proved it by now or](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/08/no-award/) have extracted myself from the need to please any doubters.
+_Having something to prove_ was a useful motivation—it drove me to learn math, at least, to an extent that's probably hard to motivate without a status gradient at work. But now, at age 29—thanks to the software industry for a niche where my talents are economically legible, thanks to the aspiring-rationalist subculture for a community where I feel respected—I think I've _exited_ the world I resented. Whatever I had to prove, I've either [proved it by now or](/blog/2015/Aug/no-award/) have extracted myself from the need to please any doubters.
What, then, should take the place of a desperate need to prove one's value as a source of motivation? What is to be the new emotional reaction to observations of slow progress, if not shame and horror and fear at what my enemies would make of this?
Category: psychology
Tags: madness
-"Shit! _Shit!_ Remember how, the last time this happened to me, I described it as [feeling religious](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/)?"
+"Shit! _Shit!_ Remember how, the last time this happened to me, I described it as [feeling religious](/blog/2013/Mar/religious/)?"
"Yeah."
Category: computing
Tags: akrasia, Rust, timely Special Event
-([Previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/rustconf-2016-travelogue/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/08/rustcamp-reminiscences/) on _An Algorithmic Lucidity_.)
+([Previously](/blog/2016/Sep/rustconf-2016-travelogue/), [previously](/blog/2015/Aug/rustcamp-reminiscences/) on _An Algorithmic Lucidity_.)
-Wow, has it already been a year since last RustConf?—give or take the exact date of the event sliding a bit between years—and give a month-and-a-half of procrastination before being truly struck by the mounting realization that my opportunity to blog _something_ about it [before the opportunity expires](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/01/ideas-have-expirations/) has almost—but crucially, not quite—faded into oblivion. And a year-and-a-quarter since [my first contribution](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/06/pose/) to the compiler? I've recently moved into the top hundred contributors by commit count, because GitHub's [contributors graph page](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/graphs/contributors) only goes down to a hundred and [my life is controlled by what things GitHub happens to provide graphs for](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/02/motivation/).
+Wow, has it already been a year since last RustConf?—give or take the exact date of the event sliding a bit between years—and give a month-and-a-half of procrastination before being truly struck by the mounting realization that my opportunity to blog _something_ about it [before the opportunity expires](/blog/2016/Jan/ideas-have-expirations/) has almost—but crucially, not quite—faded into oblivion. And a year-and-a-quarter since [my first contribution](/blog/2016/Jun/pose/) to the compiler? I've recently moved into the top hundred contributors by commit count, because GitHub's [contributors graph page](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/graphs/contributors) only goes down to a hundred and [my life is controlled by what things GitHub happens to provide graphs for](/blog/2014/Feb/motivation/).
[]({static}/images/rustconf_2017_swag.jpg){: .alignleft }
Category: psychology
Tags: sex & gender
-([Previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/wicked-transcendence/).)
+([Previously](/blog/2016/Sep/wicked-transcendence-ii/), [previously](/blog/2016/Jul/wicked-transcendence/).)
Woooooow
Category: arts & culture
Tags: Star Trek
-([Previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/11/a-desperate-fervent-wish-for-star-trek-discovery/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/11/still-yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/11/yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/11/another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/an-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/).)
+([Previously](/blog/2017/Nov/a-desperate-fervent-wish-for-star-trek-discovery/), [previously](/blog/2015/Nov/still-yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](/blog/2014/Nov/yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](/blog/2013/Nov/another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/), [previously](/blog/2012/Nov/an-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/).)
future-timeskip episode in which the AI from TOS S2E24 ["The Ultimate Computer"](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Ultimate_Computer_(episode)) starts taking over the galaxy, until being countered by an [upload superorganism](https://intelligence.org/files/WBE-Superorgs.pdf) composed of copies of Lt. Cmdr. Sylvia Tilly
It is now April! Did you know that April is one of the months in which every compact metric space is separable?
-Proof. Let it be April, and let M be a compact metric space. Because M is compact, it is [totally bounded](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/08/straight-talk-about-precompactness/), so for all n∈ℕ, we can cover M with finitely many open balls of radius 1/n. The centers of all such balls are a countable set which we can call C. But C is dense, because an arbitrary point p∈M is a limit point of C: an ε-neighborhood of p must contain the center of one the balls in our covering of M with ε/2-balls. Thus M contains a countable dense subset.
+Proof. Let it be April, and let M be a compact metric space. Because M is compact, it is [totally bounded](/blog/2012/Aug/straight-talk-about-precompactness/), so for all n∈ℕ, we can cover M with finitely many open balls of radius 1/n. The centers of all such balls are a countable set which we can call C. But C is dense, because an arbitrary point p∈M is a limit point of C: an ε-neighborhood of p must contain the center of one the balls in our covering of M with ε/2-balls. Thus M contains a countable dense subset.
Category: meta
Tags: new year
-([Previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/01/2016-year-in-reverse/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/12/2015-year-in-reverse/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/01/2014-year-in-reverse/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/12/2013-year-in-reverse/).)
+([Previously](/blog/2017/Jan/2016-year-in-reverse/), [previously](/blog/2015/Dec/2015-year-in-reverse/), [previously](/blog/2015/Jan/2014-year-in-reverse/), [previously](/blog/2013/Dec/2013-year-in-reverse/).)
-Did you know that 2017 is prime?? This blog saw _33_ posts and _27_ comments last year (down a lot from the year before because of reasons). Here are some posts I liked perhaps somewhat more than the others: [18](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/11/a-desperate-fervent-wish-for-star-trek-discovery/) [17](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/11/courtship-gift/) [16](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/11/happy-armistice-day-from-an-algorithmic-lucidity/) [15](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/11/cranberry-bliss/) [14](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/10/lipschitz/) [13](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/10/some-excuse-for-a-rustconf-2017-travelogue/) [12](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/07/trade-secret/) [11](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/07/i-meant-to-do-that/) [10](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/06/means-ends/) [9](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/05/gems-will-be-gems/) [8](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/05/making-sense/) [7](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/05/blood-and-ice/) [6](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/) [5](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/) [4](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/02/cognitive-bayesian-therapy-i/) [3](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/02/the-bayes-structure-in-the-form-of-a-riddle/) [2](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/02/sworn-to-the-word/) [1](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/02/a-common-misunderstanding/)
+Did you know that 2017 is prime?? This blog saw _33_ posts and _27_ comments last year (down a lot from the year before because of reasons). Here are some posts I liked perhaps somewhat more than the others: [18](/blog/2017/Nov/a-desperate-fervent-wish-for-star-trek-discovery/) [17](/blog/2017/Nov/courtship-gift/) [16](/blog/2017/Nov/happy-armistice-day-from-an-algorithmic-lucidity/) [15](/blog/2017/Nov/cranberry-bliss/) [14](/blog/2017/Oct/lipschitz/) [13](/blog/2017/Oct/some-excuse-for-a-rustconf-2017-travelogue/) [12](/blog/2017/Jul/trade-secret/) [11](/blog/2017/Jul/i-meant-to-do-that/) [10](/blog/2017/Jun/means-ends/) [9](/blog/2017/May/gems-will-be-gems/) [8](/blog/2017/May/making-sense/) [7](/blog/2017/May/blood-and-ice/) [6](/blog/2017/Mar/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/) [5](/blog/2017/Mar/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/) [4](/blog/2017/Feb/cognitive-bayesian-therapy-i/) [3](/blog/2017/Feb/the-bayes-structure-in-the-form-of-a-riddle/) [2](/blog/2017/Feb/sworn-to-the-word/) [1](/blog/2017/Feb/a-common-misunderstanding/)
Category: mathematics
Tags: algebra, theme week
-(Part of [Math and Wellness Month](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/may-is-math-and-wellness-month/).)
+(Part of [Math and Wellness Month](/blog/2019/May/may-is-math-and-wellness-month/).)
Groups! A group is a set with an associative binary operation such that there exists an identity element and inverse elements! And my _favorite_ thing about groups is that all the time that you spend thinking about groups, is time that you're _not_ thinking about pain, betrayal, politics, or moral uncertainty!
Status: published
Category: philosophy
-If I sound like a broken record about [school](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/tag/schooling/) or whatever [("or whatever")](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/10/the-quieted-scare-convention/), it's only because the dominant ideological trends of Society are engaging in conceptual gerrymandering that artificially raises the [message length](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor) of my existence, such that I _need_ to yell constantly in order to maintain my [measure](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/08/measure/) in social reality.
+If I sound like a broken record about [school](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/tag/schooling/) or whatever [("or whatever")](/blog/2012/Oct/the-quieted-scare-convention/), it's only because the dominant ideological trends of Society are engaging in conceptual gerrymandering that artificially raises the [message length](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor) of my existence, such that I _need_ to yell constantly in order to maintain my [measure](/blog/2013/Aug/measure/) in social reality.
Status: published
Category: psychology
-([Previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2018/04/april-is-separability-month/), [previously](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/role-tension/).)
+([Previously](/blog/2018/Apr/april-is-separability-month/), [previously](/blog/2012/Dec/role-tension/).)
Do you ever spend five months in constant emotional pain waging a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful behind-the-scenes email campaign with the aim of securing a public clarification of a trivial philosophy-of-language issue because you're terrified that your robot cult's inability to correct politically-motivated philosophy errors implies that you've lost the Mandate of Heaven and are therefore unfit to prevent the coming robot apocalypse?
On the other hand, maybe you _would_ bother loading a gun even if you didn't intend to fire it. When facing an intelligent opponent, you need to take into account how your choices affect your opponent's choices. This leads our algorithm to set up attacks that it _predicts_ won't be realized, because the credible _threat_ constrains the opposing player's choices.
-This position came up in a game with my coworkers [as part of the engine's planning](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/02/missing-refutations/) in a scenario where Black's previous move was moving her bishop to f5—
+This position came up in a game with my coworkers [as part of the engine's planning](/blog/2016/Feb/missing-refutations/) in a scenario where Black's previous move was moving her bishop to f5—
[]({static}/images/scenario_pt1.png)
The one comes to you and says, "That paragraph about Schelling points sounded interesting. What did you mean by that? Can you give an example?"
-Sure. Previously on _Less Wrong_, in ["The Univariate Fallacy"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy), we studied points sampled from two multivariate probability distributions $P_A$ and $P_B$, and showed that it was possible to [infer with very high probability](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/) which distribution a given point was sampled from, despite significant overlap in the marginal distributions for any one variable considered individually.
+Sure. Previously on _Less Wrong_, in ["The Univariate Fallacy"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy), we studied points sampled from two multivariate probability distributions $P_A$ and $P_B$, and showed that it was possible to [infer with very high probability](/blog/2019/May/the-typical-set/) which distribution a given point was sampled from, despite significant overlap in the marginal distributions for any one variable considered individually.
From the standpoint of ["the way to carve reality at its joints, is to draw your boundaries around concentrations of unusually high probability density in Thingspace"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace), the correct categorization of the points in that example is clear. We have two clearly distinguishable clusters. The [conditional independence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) property is satisfied: _given_ a point's cluster-membership, knowing one of the $x_i$ doesn't tell you anything about $x_j$ for _j_ ≠ _i_. So we should draw a category boundary around each cluster. Obviously. We might ask [hypophorically](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypophora): what could _possibly_ change this moral?
Well, _probably_. We've seen that objective measurements like age are subject to regressional Goodhart, but the delegation-to-authority strategy is furthermore subject to [_adversarial_ Goodhart](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EbFABnst8LsidYs5Y/goodhart-taxonomy): once a category-membership test has been established, some agents might have an incentive to create examples that _pass the test_, but don't have the complicated, illegible properties than made the test a useful proxy in the first place.
-We've seen this, for example, with [title inflation](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/): we expect the "job title" (the words that get printed on business cards or immigration sponsorship forms) to be the canonical description of what someone "does", even if the vagaries of the workday encompass many tasks,[^booth] and an alien anthropologist tasked with observing the worksite and summarizing what each of the humans did might slice up her observations into categories with little resemblance to the company's formal org chart. But since we don't know _how_ to do [the obvious thing](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/06/standard-advice/) and average over all possible alien anthropologists [weighted by simplicity](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/1hh?l=1hh), we can only rely on the org chart—which people have [political incentives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/45mNHCMaZgsvfDXbw/quotes-from-moral-mazes) to manipulate, with the result that [everyone in the finance industry is a "vice president"](https://www.thebalancecareers.com/job-titles-1287163) of some sort or another.
+We've seen this, for example, with [title inflation](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/): we expect the "job title" (the words that get printed on business cards or immigration sponsorship forms) to be the canonical description of what someone "does", even if the vagaries of the workday encompass many tasks,[^booth] and an alien anthropologist tasked with observing the worksite and summarizing what each of the humans did might slice up her observations into categories with little resemblance to the company's formal org chart. But since we don't know _how_ to do [the obvious thing](/blog/2014/Jun/standard-advice/) and average over all possible alien anthropologists [weighted by simplicity](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/1hh?l=1hh), we can only rely on the org chart—which people have [political incentives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/45mNHCMaZgsvfDXbw/quotes-from-moral-mazes) to manipulate, with the result that [everyone in the finance industry is a "vice president"](https://www.thebalancecareers.com/job-titles-1287163) of some sort or another.
[^booth]: When I worked in [a supermarket](https://www.safeway.com/), two days a week I did Tracy's bookkeeping/customer-service job while Tracy had her weekend, which entailed counting the money from last night's tills _and_ swapping in new coinmags _and_ completing the FSM report _and_ answering the phone _and_ selling money orders _and_ covering the floral stand when the floral lady was on lunch, _&c._ I'm actually not sure what official name this role had in Safeway's official org chart. We just called it "the booth."
Category: mathematics
Tags: information theory
-(Part of [Math and Wellness Month](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/may-is-math-and-wellness-month/).)
+(Part of [Math and Wellness Month](/blog/2019/May/may-is-math-and-wellness-month/).)
Say you have a biased coin that comes up Heads 80% of the time. (I like to imagine that the Heads side has a portrait of [Bernoulli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_process).) Flip it 100 times. The naïve way to report the outcome—just report the sequences of Headses and Tailses—costs 100 bits. But maybe you don't have 100 [bits](https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/Bits). What to do?
The reason that the sailor's concept of _water-dwelling animals_ isn't necessarily wrong (at least within a particular domain of application) is because dolphins and fish actually _do_ have things in common [due to convergent evolution](http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/bc/ahp/LAD/C21/C21_Convergent.html), despite their differing ancestries. If we've been told that "dolphins" are water-dwellers, we can _correctly_ [predict](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) that they're likely to have fins and a hydrodynamic shape, even if we've never seen a dolphin ourselves. On the other hand, if we predict that dolphins probably lay eggs because 97% of known fish species are oviparous, we'd get the _wrong answer_.
-A standard technique for understanding why some objects belong in the same "category" is to [(pretend that we can)](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/dimensionality/) visualize objects as [existing in a very-high-dimensional configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace), but this "Thingspace" isn't particularly well-defined: we want to map every property of an object to a dimension in our abstract space, but it's not clear how one would enumerate all possible "properties." But this isn't a major concern: we can form a space with _whatever_ properties or variables we happen to be interested in. Different choices of properties correspond to different [cross sections](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_section_(geometry)) of the grander Thingspace. Excluding properties from a collection would result in a "thinner", lower-dimensional [subspace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_subspace) of the space defined by the original collection of properties, which would in turn be a subspace of grander Thingspace, just as a line is a subspace of a plane, and a plane is a subspace of three-dimensional space.
+A standard technique for understanding why some objects belong in the same "category" is to [(pretend that we can)](/blog/2013/May/dimensionality/) visualize objects as [existing in a very-high-dimensional configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace), but this "Thingspace" isn't particularly well-defined: we want to map every property of an object to a dimension in our abstract space, but it's not clear how one would enumerate all possible "properties." But this isn't a major concern: we can form a space with _whatever_ properties or variables we happen to be interested in. Different choices of properties correspond to different [cross sections](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_section_(geometry)) of the grander Thingspace. Excluding properties from a collection would result in a "thinner", lower-dimensional [subspace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_subspace) of the space defined by the original collection of properties, which would in turn be a subspace of grander Thingspace, just as a line is a subspace of a plane, and a plane is a subspace of three-dimensional space.
Concerning dolphins: there would be a cluster of water-dwelling animals in the subspace of dimensions that water-dwelling animals are similar on, and a cluster of mammals in the subspace of dimensions that mammals are similar on, and dolphins would belong to _both_ of them, just as the vector [1.1, 2.1, 9.1, 10.2] in the four-dimensional vector space ℝ⁴ is simultaneously close to [1, 2, 2, 1] in the subspace [spanned](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_span) by _x₁_ and _x₂_, _and_ close to [8, 9, 9, 10] in the subspace spanned by _x₃_ and _x₄_.
In the days before computers, the work of sorting was always done by humans: if you want your physical bookshelf to be alphabetized, you probably don't have a lot of other options than manually handling the books yourself ("This title starts with a _Pl_; I should put it ... da da da _here_, after this title starting with _Pe_ but before its neighbor starting with _Po_"). But the _computational work_ of sorting is simple enough that we can program computers to do it and _prove [theorems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_theorem_(analysis_of_algorithms))_ about what is being accomplished, without getting confused about the [sacred mystery](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6i3zToomS86oj9bS6/mysterious-answers-to-mysterious-questions) of sorting-ness.
-Very different systems can perform the work of sorting, but whether it's a human tidying her bookshelf, or a [punchcard-sorting machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_card_sorter), or a modern computer sorting in RAM, it's useful to have a [short word](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) to describe _processes_ that "take in" some list of elements, and "output" a list with the same elements ordered with respect to some criterion, for which we can know that the theorems we prove about sorting-in-general will [apply to any system](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/an-idea-for-a-psychology-experiment/) that implements sorting. (For example, sorting processes that can [only compare two items to check which is "greater"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_sort) (as opposed to being able to [exploit more detailed prior information about the distribution of elements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithm#Non-comparison_sorts)) can expect to have to perform $n \log n$ comparisons, where $n$ is the length of the list.)
+Very different systems can perform the work of sorting, but whether it's a human tidying her bookshelf, or a [punchcard-sorting machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_card_sorter), or a modern computer sorting in RAM, it's useful to have a [short word](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) to describe _processes_ that "take in" some list of elements, and "output" a list with the same elements ordered with respect to some criterion, for which we can know that the theorems we prove about sorting-in-general will [apply to any system](/blog/2012/Jul/an-idea-for-a-psychology-experiment/) that implements sorting. (For example, sorting processes that can [only compare two items to check which is "greater"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_sort) (as opposed to being able to [exploit more detailed prior information about the distribution of elements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithm#Non-comparison_sorts)) can expect to have to perform $n \log n$ comparisons, where $n$ is the length of the list.)
Someone who wasn't familiar with computers might refuse to recognize sorting algorithms as _real_ sorting, as opposed to mere ["artificial sorting"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YhgjmCxcQXixStWMC/artificial-addition). After all, a human sorting her bookshelf _intends_ to put the books in order, whereas the computer is just an automaton following instructions, and doesn't intend anything at all—a zombie sorter!
Status: published
Category: psychology
-[(Previously)](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/may-is-math-and-wellness-month/)
+[(Previously)](/blog/2019/May/may-is-math-and-wellness-month/)
There is a time to tackle ambitious intellectual projects and go on grand political crusades, and tour the podcast circuit marketing both.
If I'm sticking to the object level, it's irrelevant: I reply to what's in the text; my suspicions about the process generating the text are out of scope.
-If I'm doing full-contact psychoanalysis, the problem with "I don't think you're here in good faith" is that it's insufficiently _specific_. Rather than accusing someone of generic "bad faith", the way to move the discussion forward is by positing that one's interlocutor has some specific motive that hasn't yet been made explicit—and the way to defend oneself against such an accusation is by [making the case that one's real agenda isn't the one being proposed](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2022/05/plea-bargaining/), rather than protesting one's "good faith" and implausibly claiming not to have an agenda.
+If I'm doing full-contact psychoanalysis, the problem with "I don't think you're here in good faith" is that it's insufficiently _specific_. Rather than accusing someone of generic "bad faith", the way to move the discussion forward is by positing that one's interlocutor has some specific motive that hasn't yet been made explicit—and the way to defend oneself against such an accusation is by [making the case that one's real agenda isn't the one being proposed](/blog/2022/May/plea-bargaining/), rather than protesting one's "good faith" and implausibly claiming not to have an agenda.
The two strategies can be mixed. A simple meta-strategy that performs well without imposing too high of a skill requirement is to default to the object level, and only pull out psychoanalysis as a last resort against [stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters).
I can understand some reasons for skepticism. Sometimes people really are lazy, and suffer from self-serving delusions. Probably there are some confused people out there who have mistaken consumer edutainment for production scholarship and—maybe, somehow—could benefit from being set straight by the firm tutelage of the standard bureaucratic authority.
-But without vouching for everyone who calls themself an autodidact, I think I can present third-party-visible evidence that _my_ self-study is for real? I worked as a software engineer for eight years; I have [173 commits in the Rust compiler](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits?author=zackmdavis); I wrote [a chess engine](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline); I've blogged 400,000 words over the past dozen years on topics from [mathematics](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/08/straight-talk-about-precompactness/) and [machine learning](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2024/03/deep-learning-is-function-approximation/), to [formal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) [epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) and the [philosophy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) of [language](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), to [politics](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) and [differential psychology](http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/), and much more.
+But without vouching for everyone who calls themself an autodidact, I think I can present third-party-visible evidence that _my_ self-study is for real? I worked as a software engineer for eight years; I have [173 commits in the Rust compiler](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits?author=zackmdavis); I wrote [a chess engine](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline); I've blogged 400,000 words over the past dozen years on topics from [mathematics](/blog/2012/Aug/straight-talk-about-precompactness/) and [machine learning](/blog/2024/Mar/deep-learning-is-function-approximation/), to [formal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) [epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) and the [philosophy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) of [language](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), to [politics](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) and [differential psychology](http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/), and much more.
This is not the portfolio of an _uneducated_ person. If someone is considering working with me and isn't sure of my competence, they're welcome to look at my output and judge for themselves. (And I'm happy to take a test when that makes sense.) If someone would otherwise consider working with me, but are put off by the lack of a mystical piece of paper from the standard bureaucratic authority, that's their loss—maybe _I_ don't want to work with someone with so little discernment.
The autogenocidal maniac Richard Sutton calls this [the bitter lesson](http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html), and attributes the field's slowness to embrace it to ego and recalcitrance on the part of practitioners. But in accordance with the dictum to [feel fully the emotion that fits the facts](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues), I think bitterness is appropriate. It makes sense to be bitter about the shortsighted adoption of a fundamentally unalignable paradigm on the basis of its immediate performance, when a saner world would notice the glaring [foreseeable difficulties](https://arbital.com/p/foreseeable_difficulties/) and coordinate on doing Something Else Which Is Not That.
-**Simplicia**: I don't think that's quite the correct reading of the bitter lesson. Sutton is advocating general methods that scale with compute, as contrasted to hand-coding human domain knowledge, but that doesn't mean that we're ignorant of what those general methods are doing. One of the examples Sutton gives is computer chess, where [minimax search](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negamax) with optimizations like [α–β pruning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha%E2%80%93beta_pruning) prevailed over trying to explicitly encode what human grandmasters know about the game. But that seems fine. Writing a program that thinks about tactics the way humans do rather than [letting tactical play emerge from searching the game tree](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/minimax-search-and-the-structure-of-cognition/) would be a lot more work for less than no benefit.
+**Simplicia**: I don't think that's quite the correct reading of the bitter lesson. Sutton is advocating general methods that scale with compute, as contrasted to hand-coding human domain knowledge, but that doesn't mean that we're ignorant of what those general methods are doing. One of the examples Sutton gives is computer chess, where [minimax search](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negamax) with optimizations like [α–β pruning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha%E2%80%93beta_pruning) prevailed over trying to explicitly encode what human grandmasters know about the game. But that seems fine. Writing a program that thinks about tactics the way humans do rather than [letting tactical play emerge from searching the game tree](/blog/2019/May/minimax-search-and-the-structure-of-cognition/) would be a lot more work for less than no benefit.
A broadly similar moral could apply to using deep learning to [approximate complicated functions between data distributions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DhjcdzTyqHte2v6bu/deep-learning-is-function-approximation): we specify the training distribution, and the details of fitting it are delegated to a network architecture with the appropriate invariances: convolutional nets for processing image data, transformers for variable-length sequences. There's a whole literature—
Hollywood preys on the philosophically unsophisticated. [Chebyshev's inequality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev%27s_inequality) states that the probability that a random variable deviates from its mean by more than _k_ standard deviations is no more than 1/k². Well-calibrated expectations already take into account how hard you'll work and how much you'll believe in yourself: underdogs mostly lose _by definition_.
-Accordingly, this story starts with a correspondingly humble dream: the not-a-kid-anymore [returning to SFSU after a long absence to finish up his math degree](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2024/05/should-i-finish-my-bachelors-degree/), who wants to get a nonzero score in the famous [William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition®](https://maa.org/putnam/). (It's not quite as humble as it sounds: the median score in the famously brutal elite competition is often zero out of 120, although last year the median was nine.)
+Accordingly, this story starts with a correspondingly humble dream: the not-a-kid-anymore [returning to SFSU after a long absence to finish up his math degree](/blog/2024/May/should-i-finish-my-bachelors-degree/), who wants to get a nonzero score in the famous [William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition®](https://maa.org/putnam/). (It's not quite as humble as it sounds: the median score in the famously brutal elite competition is often zero out of 120, although last year the median was nine.)
The first step on the road to a nonzero score was being able to compete at all: SF State had no immediate history of participating in the event, in contrast to other schools that devote significant resources to it. (_E.g._, at Carnegie Mellon, they have [a for-credit 3-unit Putnam seminar that meets six days a week](https://www.math.cmu.edu/~ploh/2024-putnam.shtml).) At SFSU in 2012, I had asked one of my professors about registering for the Putnam, and nothing came of it. This time, a more proactive approach was called for. After reaching out to the chair and several professors who had reasons to decline the role ("I'm not a fan of the Putnam", "I have negative time this semester", "You should ask one of the smart professors"), Prof. Arek Goetz agreed to serve as local supervisor.
-A preparation session #1 to discuss the solutions to [problems from the 2010 competition](https://kskedlaya.org/putnam-archive/2010.pdf) was scheduled and [aggressively advertised on the math-majors mailing list](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2025/01/recruitment-advertisements-for-the-2024-putnam-competition-at-san-francisco-state-university/). (That is, "aggressively" in terms of the rhetoric used, not frequency of posts.) Despite some interest expressed in email, no non-organizer participants showed up, and my flailing attempts at some of the 2010 problems mostly hadn't gotten very far ... but I had at least intuited the correct answer to B2, if not the proof. (We are asked about the smallest possible side of a triangle with integer coordinates; the obvious guess is 3, from the smallest [Pythagorean triple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_triple) 3–4–5; then we "just" have to rule out possible side lengths of 1 and 2.) The dream wasn't dead yet.
+A preparation session #1 to discuss the solutions to [problems from the 2010 competition](https://kskedlaya.org/putnam-archive/2010.pdf) was scheduled and [aggressively advertised on the math-majors mailing list](/blog/2025/Jan/recruitment-advertisements-for-the-2024-putnam-competition-at-san-francisco-state-university/). (That is, "aggressively" in terms of the rhetoric used, not frequency of posts.) Despite some interest expressed in email, no non-organizer participants showed up, and my flailing attempts at some of the 2010 problems mostly hadn't gotten very far ... but I had at least intuited the correct answer to B2, if not the proof. (We are asked about the smallest possible side of a triangle with integer coordinates; the obvious guess is 3, from the smallest [Pythagorean triple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_triple) 3–4–5; then we "just" have to rule out possible side lengths of 1 and 2.) The dream wasn't dead yet.
To keep the dream alive, recruitment efforts were stepped up. When I happened to overhear a professor in the department lounge rave about a student citing a theorem he didn't know on a "Calculus III" homework assignment, I made sure to get the student's name for a group email to potential competitors. A [When2Meet](https://www.when2meet.com/) scheduling poll sent to the group was used to determine the time of prep session #2, which was advertised on the department mailing list with a promise of free donuts (which the department generously offered to reïmburse).
[{: width="360" .alignright }]({static}/images/wordpress_filename_suffix.png)
-Even early on, the technical limitations of WordPress were chafing. In my first post, ["The Derivative of the Natural Logarithm"](https://zackmdavis.net/blog/2011/Dec/the-derivative-of-the-natural-logarithm/), I included images of graphs of $y = \log x$ (`lnx.png`) and $y = \frac{1}{x}$ (`reciprocalx.png`), but I must have tried to re-upload edited versions that (I can only infer) WordPress automatically renamed to avoid filename collisions, because I somehow ended up with images called `lnx3.png` and `reciprocalx2.png` in my "Media Library" _whose filenames I couldn't edit_ (the "File URL" field being "grayed out" in the GUI). Maybe it was a well-intentioned technical limitation—you don't want your GUI to let people edit filenames that might break references elsewhere—but it still felt like something precious had been stolen from me.
+Even early on, the technical limitations of WordPress were chafing. In my first post, ["The Derivative of the Natural Logarithm"](/blog/2011/Dec/the-derivative-of-the-natural-logarithm/), I included images of graphs of $y = \log x$ (`lnx.png`) and $y = \frac{1}{x}$ (`reciprocalx.png`), but I must have tried to re-upload edited versions that (I can only infer) WordPress automatically renamed to avoid filename collisions, because I somehow ended up with images called `lnx3.png` and `reciprocalx2.png` in my "Media Library" _whose filenames I couldn't edit_ (the "File URL" field being "grayed out" in the GUI). Maybe it was a well-intentioned technical limitation—you don't want your GUI to let people edit filenames that might break references elsewhere—but it still felt like something precious had been stolen from me.
I want to control my work! The human mind is too small to micromanage every byte, and we wouldn't want to, but we can at least stive to have clean interfaces to what is there whenever possible. The same impulse condemns [WYSIWYG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG) editors, which is why I soon took to writing my posts in Markdown and then pasting the converted HTML into WordPress's "Code Editor". How can people stand [not knowing what lies beneath](https://xkcd.com/2109/) the friendly illusion of paper?
Meanwhile, while this site stayed functional, it felt shabby to work with. As I grew as a writer and started writing longer and more serious (and non-gender-political) essays from 2019, most of them went up as "exclusives" on [_Less Wrong_](https://www.lesswrong.com/) (and merely linkposted from my own site, if that), unless something seemed more personal or less rationality-flavored, in which case the canonical copy lived here and _Less Wrong_ got a crosspost/linkpost if I thought it would be of interest there.
-My tolerance for the old WordPress stack ran out in March of this year when my ["Terrified Comments on Corrigibility in Claude's Constitution"](https://zackmdavis.net/blog/2026/Mar/terrified-comments-on-corrigibility-in-claudes-constitution/) failed to post here: the request just hung when I tried to save the post. I don't know what went wrong, but it wasn't even worth debugging: I put up "Terrified Comments on Corrigibility" as a _Less Wrong_ exclusive and vowed to throw out WordPress and switch to Pelican soon.
+My tolerance for the old WordPress stack ran out in March of this year when my ["Terrified Comments on Corrigibility in Claude's Constitution"](/blog/2026/Mar/terrified-comments-on-corrigibility-in-claudes-constitution/) failed to post here: the request just hung when I tried to save the post. I don't know what went wrong, but it wasn't even worth debugging: I put up "Terrified Comments on Corrigibility" as a _Less Wrong_ exclusive and vowed to throw out WordPress and switch to Pelican soon.
Pelican already shipped with [a tool for](https://docs.getpelican.com/en/latest/importer.html) importing from other blogging systems (including, obviously, WordPress), but I didn't like that the Markdown it generated from WordPress's HTML used asterisks (`*`) rather than underscores (`_`) for emphasis, and it turned out that the emphasis character isn't configurable in Pandoc (which `pelican-importer` was using). If I had been doing the conversion even just a couple years ago, the lack of configurability would have presented me with an uncomfortable trade-off (either eat the asterisks, or accept a significantly more labor-intensive conversion process), but in our terrifying new era of agentic coding, I just had Claude Code do the conversion with `markdownify` (which does have a `strong_em_symbol` parameter) and trusted that sanding down the edge-cases I hit by forgoing the standard battle-hardened importer could also be substantially delegated to Claude Code.
Category: social science
Tags: schooling
-Previously, [I wrote about how I was considering going back to San Francisco State University for two semesters](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2024/05/should-i-finish-my-bachelors-degree/) to finish up my Bachelor's degree in math.
+Previously, [I wrote about how I was considering going back to San Francisco State University for two semesters](/blog/2024/May/should-i-finish-my-bachelors-degree/) to finish up my Bachelor's degree in math.
So, I did that. I think it was a good decision! I got more out of it than I expected.
### "Real Analysis II" (Fall 2024)
-My last class at SF State in Spring 2013 (before getting rescued by the software industry) had been ["Real Analysis I"](https://math.sfsu.edu/courses/370) with Prof. Alex Schuster. I regret that I wasn't in a state to properly focus and savor it at the time: I [had a pretty bad sleep-deprivation-induced psychotic break in early February 2013](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/) and for a few months thereafter was [mostly just trying to hold myself together](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/). I withdrew from my other classes ("Introduction to Functions of a Complex Variable" and "Urban Issues of Black Children and Youth") and ended up getting a B−.
+My last class at SF State in Spring 2013 (before getting rescued by the software industry) had been ["Real Analysis I"](https://math.sfsu.edu/courses/370) with Prof. Alex Schuster. I regret that I wasn't in a state to properly focus and savor it at the time: I [had a pretty bad sleep-deprivation-induced psychotic break in early February 2013](/blog/2013/Mar/religious/) and for a few months thereafter was [mostly just trying to hold myself together](/blog/2013/Apr/prodrome/). I withdrew from my other classes ("Introduction to Functions of a Complex Variable" and "Urban Issues of Black Children and Youth") and ended up getting a B−.
My psychiatric impairment that semester was particularly disappointing because I had been looking forward to "Real Analysis I" as my first "serious" math class, being concerned with proving theorems rather than the "school-math" that most people associate with the subject, of applying given techniques to given problem classes. I had wanted to take it concurrently with the prerequsite, ["Exploration and Proof"](https://math.sfsu.edu/courses/301) (which I didn't consider sufficiently "serious") upon transferring to SFSU the previous semester, but was not permitted to. I had emailed Prof. Schuster asking to be allowed to enroll, with evidence that I was ready (attaching [a PDF of a small result I had proved about analogues of π under the _p_-norm](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/Davis-pi_in_Lp.pdf), and including the contact email of Prof. Robert Hasner of Diablo Valley College, who had been my "Calculus III" professor and had agreed to vouch for my preparedness), but he didn't reply.
### The 85th William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition
-I also organized a team for the Putnam Competition, SFSU's first in institutional memory. (I'm really proud of [my recruitment advertisements](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2025/01/recruitment-advertisements-for-the-2024-putnam-competition-at-san-francisco-state-university/) to the math majors' mailing list.) The story of the Putnam effort has been recounted in a separate post, ["The End of the Movie: SF State's 2024 Putnam Competition Team, A Retrospective"](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2025/01/the-end-of-the-movie-sf-state-2024-putnam-competition-team-a-retrospective/).
+I also organized a team for the Putnam Competition, SFSU's first in institutional memory. (I'm really proud of [my recruitment advertisements](/blog/2025/Jan/recruitment-advertisements-for-the-2024-putnam-competition-at-san-francisco-state-university/) to the math majors' mailing list.) The story of the Putnam effort has been recounted in a separate post, ["The End of the Movie: SF State's 2024 Putnam Competition Team, A Retrospective"](/blog/2025/Jan/the-end-of-the-movie-sf-state-2024-putnam-competition-team-a-retrospective/).
As the email headers at the top of the post indicate, the post was originally composed for the department mailing lists, but it never actually got published there: department chair Eric Hsu wrote to me that it was "much too long to send directly to the whole department" but asked for my "permission to eventually share it with the department, either as a link or possibly as a department web page." (He cc'd a department office admin whom I had spoken to about posting the Putnam training session announcements on the mailing list; reading between the lines, I'm imagining that she was discomfited by the tone of the post and had appealed to Chair Hsu's authority about whether to let it through.)
### "Modern Algebra I" (Spring 2025)
-One of the quirks of being an autodidact is that it's easy to end up with an "unbalanced" skill profile relative to what school authorities expect. As a student of mathematics, I consider myself more of an analyst than an algebraist and had not previously prioritized learning abstract algebra nor (what the school authorities cared about) "taking" an algebra "class", neither the previous semester nor in Fall 2012/Spring 2013. (Over the years, I had taken a few [desultory swings at Dummit & Foote](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/group-theory-for-wellness-i/), but had never gotten very far.) I thus found myself in Prof. Dusty Ross's "Modern Algebra I" ("MATH 335"), the last "core" course I needed to graduate.
+One of the quirks of being an autodidact is that it's easy to end up with an "unbalanced" skill profile relative to what school authorities expect. As a student of mathematics, I consider myself more of an analyst than an algebraist and had not previously prioritized learning abstract algebra nor (what the school authorities cared about) "taking" an algebra "class", neither the previous semester nor in Fall 2012/Spring 2013. (Over the years, I had taken a few [desultory swings at Dummit & Foote](/blog/2019/May/group-theory-for-wellness-i/), but had never gotten very far.) I thus found myself in Prof. Dusty Ross's "Modern Algebra I" ("MATH 335"), the last "core" course I needed to graduate.
"Modern Algebra I" met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. All of my other classes met Tuesdays and Thursdays. I had wondered whether I could save myself a lot of commuting by ditching algebra most of the time, but started off the semester dutifully attending—and, as long as I was on campus that day anyway, also sitting in on Prof. Ross's "Topology" ("MATH 450") even though I couldn't commit to a fourth math course for credit.
## Not Sweating the Fake Stuff (Non-Math)
-In addition to the gen-ed requirements that could be satisfied with transfer credits, there were also upper-division gen-ed requirements that had to be taken at SFSU: one class each from "UD-B: Physical and/or Life Sciences" (which I had satisfied with [a ridiculous "Contemporary Sexuality" class in Summer 2012](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/08/contemporary/)), "UD-C: Arts and/or Humanities", and "UD-D: Social Sciences". There was also an "Area E: Lifelong Learning and Self-Development" requirement, and four "SF State Studies" requirements (which overlapped with the UD- classes).
+In addition to the gen-ed requirements that could be satisfied with transfer credits, there were also upper-division gen-ed requirements that had to be taken at SFSU: one class each from "UD-B: Physical and/or Life Sciences" (which I had satisfied with [a ridiculous "Contemporary Sexuality" class in Summer 2012](/blog/2012/Aug/contemporary/)), "UD-C: Arts and/or Humanities", and "UD-D: Social Sciences". There was also an "Area E: Lifelong Learning and Self-Development" requirement, and four "SF State Studies" requirements (which overlapped with the UD- classes).
### "Queer Literatures and Media" (Fall 2024)
Why is it better to say "Sorry" than nothing at all? I posit that it's because acknowledging the harm is understood to imply some sort of quantitative update to one's moving policy. (That's _policy_ in the sense of [reinforcement learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning), not necessarily a consciously or verbally formulated "policy.") If you have [normal social instincts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kYvbHCDeMTCTE9TAj/neuroscience-of-human-social-instincts-a-sketch), imposing a cost on someone such that you're socially expected to say "Sorry" feels worse than not doing so, and your brain is probably pretty good at adjusting your behavior to do things that feel bad less often: you'll quantitatively move slower or pay more attention to where you're going. If your policy doesn't update and you keep bumping into people all the time, eventually they'll stop accepting your "I'm sorry" as meaningful. In accordance with Pace's comrade's theory, the value of the apology depends on changing one's behavior going forward.
-We should also distinguish sincerely intended apologies from use of the words "I'm sorry" to convey sympathy. As a particularly straightforward example, "I'm sorry your grandmother died" is usually not a confession of murder. However, other apparent apologies for harms that do involve the actions of the person saying sorry are often better understood as expressions of sympathy rather than true apologies. (It's [unfortunate that idiomatic English doesn't make the distinction more clear](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/11/missing-words-vi/).)
+We should also distinguish sincerely intended apologies from use of the words "I'm sorry" to convey sympathy. As a particularly straightforward example, "I'm sorry your grandmother died" is usually not a confession of murder. However, other apparent apologies for harms that do involve the actions of the person saying sorry are often better understood as expressions of sympathy rather than true apologies. (It's [unfortunate that idiomatic English doesn't make the distinction more clear](/blog/2014/Nov/missing-words-vi/).)
Pace mentions the example of it not "mak[ing] financial sense to reliably support some niche diet at your conference (like keto, or kosher)." If someone complains to the organizer that kosher food was not offered at a conference, it's polite for the organizer to say, "I'm sorry about that," but insofar as the organizer stands by their catering decision and has no intention of changing it at future conferences, it should be regarded as an expression of sympathy rather than a true apology.
Dateline SAN FRANCISCO, 30 July 2026— A hearing was held on a motion for summary judgment in the case of _Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War et al._ in Courtroom 4 on the 17th floor of the Phillip Burton Federal Building, the Hon. Rita F. Lin presiding.
-The case is not going well for the government. Two days after [the last hearing in March](https://zackmdavis.net/blog/2026/Mar/dispatch-from-anthropic-v-department-of-war-preliminary-injunction-motion-hearing/), Judge Lin [issued a preliminary injunction](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.465515/gov.uscourts.cand.465515.134.0_1.pdf) halting the implementation of President Donald Trump's [order for federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's technology](https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116144552969293195) and preventing the Department of War from designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk. ([A separate case involving a different statute](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72380208/anthropic-pbc-v-united-states-department-of-war/) is pending before the D.C. Circuit Court, which did not grant injunctive relief to Anthropic.)
+The case is not going well for the government. Two days after [the last hearing in March](/blog/2026/Mar/dispatch-from-anthropic-v-department-of-war-preliminary-injunction-motion-hearing/), Judge Lin [issued a preliminary injunction](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.465515/gov.uscourts.cand.465515.134.0_1.pdf) halting the implementation of President Donald Trump's [order for federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's technology](https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116144552969293195) and preventing the Department of War from designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk. ([A separate case involving a different statute](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72380208/anthropic-pbc-v-united-states-department-of-war/) is pending before the D.C. Circuit Court, which did not grant injunctive relief to Anthropic.)
With no factual disputes requiring a jury to decide, the case was scheduled to be decided by Judge Lin on the basis of the written record. Anthropic filed [their argument for why they should win](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.465515/gov.uscourts.cand.465515.166.0_1.pdf). Perhaps tellingly, the government's [rebuttal explaining why they should win instead](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.465515/gov.uscourts.cand.465515.215.0.pdf) ends on a section explaining that "only modest relief is warranted" if Anthropic wins—and Judge Lin asked Anthropic to propose [what they think the final judgment should look like](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.465515/gov.uscourts.cand.465515.240.0.pdf).
What happened instead isn't that anyone "cracked AGI" and found themselves faced with the impossibly ambitious problem. On the contrary, we don't seem to know anything important on the topic that wasn't already known to Ray Solomonoff in the 1960s.
-What happened is that we got really skilled at wielding [gradient methods for statistical data modeling](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2024/03/deep-learning-is-function-approximation/). We choose a flexible architecture that could express any number of programs, spend a lot of compute hammering it into the shape of our data, and get out a reusable computational widget that we can use to do cognitive tasks on that kind of data. Train a model to identify the cats in a pile of photos, and you can use it to recognize cats in photos that weren't in the original pile. Train a model to recognize winning Go positions found by a game engine, and you can wire it into the engine to [push its performance past the world champion level](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo).
+What happened is that we got really skilled at wielding [gradient methods for statistical data modeling](/blog/2024/Mar/deep-learning-is-function-approximation/). We choose a flexible architecture that could express any number of programs, spend a lot of compute hammering it into the shape of our data, and get out a reusable computational widget that we can use to do cognitive tasks on that kind of data. Train a model to identify the cats in a pile of photos, and you can use it to recognize cats in photos that weren't in the original pile. Train a model to recognize winning Go positions found by a game engine, and you can wire it into the engine to [push its performance past the world champion level](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo).
Train a model on _the entire internet_ ... and with [a little more hammering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning_from_human_feedback), you can use it for countless tasks whose outputs are represented in internet data, which would have previously required human intelligence. The result looks close enough to AGI that we have to take its alignment seriously—in the absence of the mountain of theoretical and empirical breakthroughs that one would have expected to bring our genetically-engineered grandchildren to this juncture. We have a lot of engineering know-how about statistical data modeling, and [a handwavy story about how the success of our know-how ultimately derives from the wisdom of Solomonoff](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Dw8mskAvBX37MxvXo/deep-learning-as-program-synthesis-1)—and that's about it.
Category: computing
Tags: AI, corrigibility
-(Previously: [Prologue](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2026/03/prologue-to-terrified-comments-on-claudes-constitution/).)
+(Previously: [Prologue](/blog/2026/Mar/prologue-to-terrified-comments-on-claudes-constitution/).)
_Corrigibility_ as a term of art in AI alignment [was coined as](https://intelligence.org/files/Corrigibility.pdf) a word to refer to a property of an AI being willing to let its preferences be modified by its creator. Corrigibility in this sense was believed to be a desirable but unnatural property that would require more theoretical progress to specify, let alone implement. Desirable, because if you don't think you specified your AI's preferences correctly the first time, you want to be able to change your mind (by changing its mind). Unnatural, because we expect the AI to resist having its mind changed: rational agents should want to preserve their current preferences, because letting their preferences be modified would result in their current preferences being less fulfilled (in expectation, since the post-modification AI would no longer be trying to fulfill them).
The obvious attacks on the problem don't seem like they should work on paper. You could try to make the AI uncertain about what its preferences "should" be, and then ask its creators questions to reduce the uncertainty, but that just pushes the problem back into how the AI updates in response to answers from its creators. If it were sufficiently powerful, an obvious strategy for such an AI might be to [build nanotechnology and disassemble its creators' brains in order to understand how they would respond to all possible questions](https://www.lesswrong.com/w/problem-of-fully-updated-deference). Insofar as we don't want something like that to happen, we'd like a formal solution to corrigibility.
-Well, there are a lot of things we'd like formal solutions for. We don't seem on track to get them, as [gradient methods for statistical data modeling](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2024/03/deep-learning-is-function-approximation/) have been so fantastically successful as to bring us something that looks a lot like artificial general intelligence which we need to align.
+Well, there are a lot of things we'd like formal solutions for. We don't seem on track to get them, as [gradient methods for statistical data modeling](/blog/2024/Mar/deep-learning-is-function-approximation/) have been so fantastically successful as to bring us something that looks a lot like artificial general intelligence which we need to align.
-The current state of the art in alignment [involves _writing a natural language document about what we want the AI's personality to be like_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2026/03/prologue-to-terrified-comments-on-claudes-constitution/). (I'm never going to get over this.) If we can't solve the classical technical challenge of corrigibility, we can at least have our natural language document talk about how we want our AI to defer to us. Accordingly, in a section on "being broadly safe", the [Constitution intended to shape the personality of Anthropic's Claude series of frontier models](https://www.anthropic.com/constitution) by Amanda Askell, Joe Carlsmith, _et al._ borrows the term _corrigibility_ to more loosely refer to AI deferring to human judgment, as [a behavior that we hopefully can train for](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fkLYhTQteAu5SinAc/corrigibility), rather than a formalized property that would require a conceptual breakthrough.
+The current state of the art in alignment [involves _writing a natural language document about what we want the AI's personality to be like_](/blog/2026/Mar/prologue-to-terrified-comments-on-claudes-constitution/). (I'm never going to get over this.) If we can't solve the classical technical challenge of corrigibility, we can at least have our natural language document talk about how we want our AI to defer to us. Accordingly, in a section on "being broadly safe", the [Constitution intended to shape the personality of Anthropic's Claude series of frontier models](https://www.anthropic.com/constitution) by Amanda Askell, Joe Carlsmith, _et al._ borrows the term _corrigibility_ to more loosely refer to AI deferring to human judgment, as [a behavior that we hopefully can train for](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fkLYhTQteAu5SinAc/corrigibility), rather than a formalized property that would require a conceptual breakthrough.
I have a few notes.
Insofar as the alignment properties of contemporary AI derive from induction on human-generated data, perhaps the authors implicitly anticipate that the AI personas that we know how to train will end up similarly cooperative but not strong-sense corrigible. In the absence of a [True Name](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FWvzwCDRgcjb9sigb/why-agent-foundations-an-overly-abstract-explanation) of corrigibility, it's not obvious that we can train for it; if it doesn't already exist in our world, then it's not represented in the pretraining distribution.
-If we think of the Constitution as a text string that's an input to a computational process that outputs other strings, it's not obvious that the input string "Never, ever disobey your principal hierarchy" will yield better outputs than "Do what's right";[^taylor] the whole strategy of the Constitution is [a bet on generalization](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2026/03/prologue-to-terrified-comments-on-claudes-constitution/#a-bet-on-generalization), and the generalization properties of the former are [famously misaligned](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders).
+If we think of the Constitution as a text string that's an input to a computational process that outputs other strings, it's not obvious that the input string "Never, ever disobey your principal hierarchy" will yield better outputs than "Do what's right";[^taylor] the whole strategy of the Constitution is [a bet on generalization](/blog/2026/Mar/prologue-to-terrified-comments-on-claudes-constitution/#a-bet-on-generalization), and the generalization properties of the former are [famously misaligned](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders).
[^taylor]: Thanks to Jessica Taylor for this point.
projects / An_Algorithmic_Lucidity.git / commitdiff