there  could  be  snakes  in  here

I reviewed Prévert, phenomenology of computing , and the New Testament in Scots. I reviewed Taleb as an evolutionary epistemologist and angry apolitician. I translated a Tang octave. I wrote a poem about the NHS. I again reflected on the awfulness of identity via a thought experiment. I translated a Golden Age Viennese lyric. I drew equivalences between key concepts in maths, object-oriented code, and metaphysics. I learned how to code out loud. I reviewed Putnam, Waugh and a sad Australian cynic. I reviewed an appalling academic paper I was made to read. I psychologised academics who cling to one method. I enjoyed Werner Herzog and listed casualties in his vicinity. I made an attempt to criticise our new century's zeitgeist. I pulled fragments from DFW's last nachlass. I reviewed the very best book on late-70s / early-80s pop music. I distinguished a toolchain from a stack. I reviewed lots of things I shouldn't have been reading and learned Javascript. I quoted Huxl...

A camera hung from every arm. And here I noticed first one of those small phenomena which (I thought fancifully) might unravel a whole society for me if I could only understand it: the flurry of Chinese snapshots was directed not at this beautiful and curious valley, but exclusively at one another. A place seemed to take its meaning only from a person's presence there. Sometimes I received the overwhelming impression that these snapshots were really statements of identity, that to be commemorated at a famous site was to be touched by its mana. 'You're travelling alone?' I was later asked, ' Then how do you manage to photograph? '       ...These ritual snapshots seemed the heart of their journey. They never stopped to read the ancient poems carved in the cliffs, or to look down at the mottled beauty of the lake. I could not tell whether they admired the scenery at all, or simply cherished the idea of themselves in it.       By nine...

customising bash and gitconfig for fun and profit Git is amazing but verbose. (The awkward length of its commands may well be a feature, since awkward things force us us think, and careful thinking kinda behooves nonlinear distributed development.) We are trying to balance two forces: 1) every increase in typing ease means an increase in the risk of typo error. 2) Every ounce of effort that source control takes is subtracted from actual development. The really terse aliases (one word, like "gits") require us to configure the bash shell rather than the git client running in it. First create a ".bashrc" file in your git bash current directory (i.e. in " ~ "): touch ~/.bashrc gedit ~/.bashrc [Enter aliases you want, save] source ~/.bashrc [Profit] For the git aliases just put em in here (starting with [alias] ) > gedit ~/.gitconfig If you want to keep Git's excellent branch-name auto-complete working on your aliases, you'll nee...

telematics (n.): Telecommunications informatics; that is, horrendous employee micromanagement via wireless reporting devices. scofflaw (n.): person who disrespects the law. Particularly of proud drinkers during Prohibition. havey-cavey (adj.): dubious, shady, 'the property of having hidden metaphorical caves'?. rive (v.): To split violently. See frost riving , the destruction of rock by repeated thermal contraction of water inside it. See also "reave". lookbook (n.): A model's or photographer's portfolio. Awful Ophiuchus (proper n.): A constellation and the 13th zodiac sign, excluded from the usual blah because astrology is a cold, dead system invented by people without a fraction of our information, maintained by people with no intellectual courage. Yet another world-cultural reference I received dimly and very indirectly from Final Fantasy . (see also Grendel, Behemoth, Leviathan, Gilgamesh, Quezacotl, Lamia, Wendigo, Sephirot , Heidegger, Bug...

(c) Ian Baker (2012) PHP, the language which runs 80% of the known internet , is renowned for its fundamentally poor design . The language began as a few little functions letting non-programmers manage rudimentary web forms. But it has expanded into the 7th most popular language there is, a very fast , mature object-oriented thing which tries hard to manage its primary burden: itself . (Much of the horror has been patched over since PHP5 , I am told by grizzled veterans.) The lead dev at my work, who's spent 10 years with it, admits that it " keeps you on your toes ". (However, one would prefer that one's tools were transparent, an extension of the arm.) Neal Stephenson notes that source code comments (the backstage cribs of your software) read like the terse mutterings of pilots wrestling with the controls of damaged airplanes. The general feel is of a thousand monumental but obscure struggles seen in the stop-action light of a strobe. This struggle is th...

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony. Since we can't extract beauty from life, let's at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life. I often wonder what kind of person I would be if I had been protected from the cold wind of fate by the screen of wealth... to reach the tawdry heights of being a good assistant book-keeper in a job that is about as demanding as an afternoon nap and offers a salary that gives me just enough to live on. I know that, had that non-existent past existed, I would not now be capable of writing these pages, which, though few, I would have undoubtedly have only day-dreamed about given more comfortable circumstances. For banality is a form of intelligence, and reality, especially if it is brutish and rough, forms a natural complement to the soul. Much of what I feel and think I owe t...

Breaking Smart, 'Season' 1 (2015) by Venkatesh Rao. A grandiose and low-res narrative covering all of history from the perspective of technology (or, rather, the perspective of the tech industry (or, rather, of the solutionists )) in 30,000 words. Rao is one of the big in-house theorists for Silicon Valley*, and this is reflected in his contagious enthusiasm for just how much is becoming possible so quickly, the degree to which this time actually is different ("Software is eating the world"). Second half of this season attempts to generalise software engineering ideas - Agile , forking, sprints and all that - to all human endeavour (...) As a simple example, a 14-year-old teenager today (too young to show up in labor statistics) can learn programming, contribute significantly to open-source projects, and become a talented professional-grade programmer before age 18. This is breaking smart : an economic actor using early mastery of emerging technological levera...

When I was wee and being taught maths in the bad standard manner, I instinctively came up with little characterisations of various mathematical objects, to protect myself from boredom: The positive and negative numbers are mortally opposed armies; the modulus denotes the size of each army; each unit can handle one unit of the enemy before dying (evaporating together, in fact). Addition and subtraction are fair fights upon the field; multiplication and division are espionage and political overthrow. The negatives hate each other as much as they hate positives (-10 x -10 = 100). The positives are very simple and can be easily tricked into fighting for the other side (-1 x 1,000,000 = -1,000,000). Differentiation is desecration and zoom. Integration is reconsecration and overview. Going by the basic fairy-tale story arc , then, differdesecration is never the real end-point; a calculation isn't complete until it is brought back to the initial function... (Here we see the beginning o...

' primary ' (n. and adj.): Useful term in the modern free-love movement : one's most significant romantic partner (n.), or most significant relationship (adj.), as measured by emotional intensity, tacit commitment, logistical entanglement (cohabitation, children, bank accounts), and their formal priority over others. Of course, this is basically what traditional relationships mean by 'a relationship' (or, better, by 'next of kin') but it's a very good idea to be explicit about these things even if, like me, you're not especially modern. Not least, this allows us to understand what it actually means to commit oneself in the standard manner; to question the bits of it that are stupid or overgeneralised ; and to think of all other-seeking humans as sharing a great deal of motivation and emotional whatnot, whether they are swinger, asexual, Bostonian , polyamorist or monogamist. ' aromantic ' (adj.): Not experiencing romantic attraction (as o...

Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that I must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary. "Which brings me back to those American doctors. Three of them were psychiatrists... We just couldn't believe our ears. They never attack [illness] on all the fronts; they only attack on about hal...

(c) PuppyOnTheRadio (2011) To do web dev, I need an incantation: " ES6, Atom, Mocha, Mongo, V8, Node + Promises, npm, Express, Docker, Grunt, Ractive, VMware, Git, Gitlab, JIRA !" Together, these technologies form a toolchain and a stack . (To clarify: each of the above are different programs, or frameworks, all used in making one other program. Each link in the chain has quirks and an internal mini-language to learn. And this is all besides the home-grown scaffold the target program actually uses / consists in.) Two months ago, I'd no idea that people use a dozen widgets to get large projects up and talking; I had no acquaintance with most links in the above chain. But I'm being melodramatic: we use these because the project I'm working on is so large; all of the links make my life easier, and most are unobtrusive (to the point where they don't need launching, even). And it is easy enough to get by with only a fewer components . It's jus...

(c) DCLCQ (2014) I made a Markov chain of my social media data recently. Here are my cherry-picks (out of perhaps 300 seeds): What an option for underhand comments made as just data. I'm being a first-world problem? I think the inevitable is still on loan from the History Department. will smash them. ran out of your 'reality' bullshit. We're the lowest of others; we continue in our children, and in Libya. scratching a certain region of spacetime. gee thanks bud. Ah, my cruelty. I am currently reading Robbie Williams' thought-provoking autobiography... metaphysics really want us to perve. A city full of men die like dogs, for telling your name, sacred music in the matter. I think, too account for the softer tribes living in the missing beats. I'm moving closer to you, but it never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation. my epaulettes, ripped off While desire focuses on the line of flame that characterizes the universe in terms of b...

Fragments of fragments:  To me, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ and ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way… I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down. The reason for this public ignorance is not secrecy. The real reason why US citizens were/are not aware of these conflicts, changes and stakes is that the whole subject of tax policy and administration is dull. Massively, spectacularly dull. It is impossible to ov...