Recently, at work, we’ve been encouraged to try out a bunch of new “AI” tools. So, I’ve been using the Claude “AI” app, an “AI assistant” developed by Anthropic, to help with some Rust programming tasks. I’ve been trying (as requested) to learn its strengths and weaknesses, and how I might be able to use it to make my work more efficient. But mostly I’ve just been building an intuition of what it is.

I just read an article in The Atlantic that AI is failing to justify itself economically. This is pretty dire for AI, especially given that this is such an overly expensive technology even with tons of brazen stealing from content creators. I feel like it should go without saying that if your business isn’t profitable even with a ton of stealing, maybe it’s not that great a business.

But of course, who doesn’t want a confident confabulator incapable of critical thinking? A bullshit artist designed to do what many of us learned to do in high school and college, and write pages of content that sounded “educated” without actually paying attention to the actual ideas, or even understanding them at all?

AI, particularly this new round of large language models, scares me on behalf of society and the future.

I don’t just say that because it’s transformative. I don’t say that as a generic warning that we haven’t considered the consequences (as in this XKCD comic). No, I have specific consequences in mind, consequences that I have considered, and I am rather worried about them! They are not so much problems about the technology itself, but about how we use it, and specifically how we use it on a societal, economy-wide scale.

I was Googling for sources about nuclear power for my new political views garden, and I came across the following statement in reference to nuclear waste:

I know that burning fossil fuels is bad, but we can’t just start another problem just because we can’t fix the first one.

I’m not trying to single out the person who wrote this (and therefore no link, and the quote has been edited for spelling and grammar which I hope has rendered it un-Googleable), but I do want to respond, generally, to the sentiment, which I think is unfortunately common.

How do we ask the other people in our lives for the things we need and want? This can be difficult for everybody. Many of us have trauma from a society that continually tells us that we don’t deserve to have help meeting our needs, or from past situations where our needs have been neglected. We are also often aware that asking for things can sometimes be upsetting to the people we ask. We are painfully aware of their ability to say no, and we know how much that can hurt.

This was a great read about how the United States should reframe many of its basic political assumptions.

It is tempting to think of life as a zero-sum game. Having more for me, even enough for me, means less or even not enough for others. Usually, we have the open-mindedness to feel like we can cooperate with some few – our family, our community, or perhaps our nation or religion or even (problematically) our ethnic group. But at a certain scale, there is a sense that there’s not enough to go around to all the people who might want it.

US politics continue to be interesting.

As many of you know, the Colorado Supreme Court has recently ruled that Donald Trump should be struck from the ballot in Colorado. Under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, if you’ve sworn to support the Constitution, and then engaged in (or “given aid or comfort to”) an insurrection, you are no longer eligible to serve in office. The Colorado Supreme Court applied this law to Trump, citing the Capitol attack of January 6, 2021.

Another year has gone by
And in response, I simply sigh
Another year has taken place
I guess I’ll handle it with grace?
Another year, the same old grind…
And yet I feel I’ve fallen behind

As you might know if you’ve read my equivalent post from last year, I am now 35 years old (and 3 days). If we consider “working years” to range from 20 to 65 – which seems a decent definition – then I am 1/3 of the way through them, 1/3 of the way through my career. So, theoretically, we should see my résumé at least triple in impressiveness by the time I retire!

This is a revision of a flash fiction piece first posted in 2018.

After a year of talking, and another year of planning, the project was complete. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the local clergy, and the town council had finally done it: Right in the town square, they installed a giant loudspeaker. From thenceforth, every two minutes, a booming voice would spread all over town, announcing:

ARE YOU SURE?

Foolhardy decisions, they had decreed, would soon be a thing of the past.

This is my newest post in my series about operating systems. Yes, it was last updated in 2019 – I’m a hobbyist blogger. This is a post about the command line, a computer topic, but it is for educating a non-technical (but tech-curious) audience. Most of the programmers in my audience will already know everything I have to say, and may be bored by some explanation of things they already know, though I intend to discuss some technical details of how computers work.

This blog post isn’t about ChatGPT. It isn’t about machine learning, neural nets, or any mysterious or border-line spiritual form of computing. That’s a whole ’nother set of philosophical and metaphysical conundrums (conundra?).

This is about a way people sometimes speak, informally, about bog-standard boring non-AI computers and computer programs. You’ve probably heard people speak this way. You’ve probably spoken this way sometimes yourself:

• “The server thinks your password is wrong.”
• “The computer thinks you’ve lost the connection.”
• “The phone thinks you want to use your headphones. It’s wrong though.”

We normally interpret this as a metaphor, but I’m not sure it is. Is the phone “thinking” you want to use your headphones rather than your car speaker substantially different from us “thinking” our friend would rather get a phone call than a text message?

I remember hearing an idea once – I’d like to cite it, but proper citation seems difficult, as I heard it from an acquaintance, and Mr. Google isn’t being his usual helpful self. The idea was, different politicians have these verbal tics, these filler catch-phrases, that indicate their deepest conversational anxieties.

For President Obama, it’s “let me be clear.” According to this thesis, he is really concerned about being unclear, and this tic is so prominent in his speech that it shows that his biggest anxiety is being insufficiently clear about something, as waffling, or evading the deep issue underlying all the petty concerns. And as an American paying some amount of attention, this made sense to me.

TLDR: I am adding a new link for RSS subscribers who just want to subscribe to technical posts. The RSS feed has always been available, but it is now explicitly one of the links across the top, for those who want their RSS feed to only give them my new technical posts.

I am writing this post primarily to let people know about this new link, but I also want to muse on it a little.

TRIBUNAL PROCEEDING TRANSCRIPT
SUB LEGIBUS ORDINIS SACROSANCTI IMMORTALIUM
PROVISIONAL PROOF TEXT

IN THE CASE OF:
ŌRDŌ SACROSANCTUS VERSUS THE NAMELESS DAUGHTER OF MUŠMAḪḪU THE SEVEN-HEADED SERPENT, SHE WHO IS KNOWN TO THE MORTALS AS EUNICE

LORD JUSTICE MEPHISTO, PRESIDING
LORD JUSTICE DRACHENMILCH, LORD JUSTICE BA’AL-HA-KHUMUS, AND LORD LADY JUSTICE XYXXYZ

MR. AZAXAZALIA, ESQ., PROSECUTOR
MS. “EUNICE”, DEFENDANT

A RECORD OF EUNICE‘S TESTIMONY
TRANSCRIBED BY GEORGE SMITH, HUMAN, JUNIOR APPRENTICE CLERK
COURTROOM 31B, NO OTHERS IN ATTENDANCE

Here’s a story; stop me if you’ve heard it before.

There’s a child, an energetic, enthusiastic child, perhaps hard to deal with in some ways, but all around just beautiful. And then they go to a parochial school – or perhaps they just have a rather strict public school teacher. In either case, the authority figure makes it their wicked mission to suppress all the beautiful children’s personalities into identical, well-behaved zombies in the interest of the idol of order. Only our heroic child remains with their own personality, constantly getting in trouble for it but remaining themselves.

I already enjoyed the Monk and Robot series by Becky Chambers (A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy). It’s now one of my favorite books. so I was excited to also read her earlier work, the Wayfarer series, starting with The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and it did not disappoint me.

Both these series are science fiction. While Monk and Robot is solarpunk, a relatively new sub-genre focused on imagining a world with major environmental (and economic) problems solved, the Wayfarer series much more reminds me of the kind of science fiction I used to read as a kid. While it’s described as space opera, it reminds me more of Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke or even Niven, who are considered hard sci fi. I’m not sure whether this is because it focuses less on accuracy and logic than those other authors, or if it is because it does not do so at the expense of character development, or perhaps because it is written by a woman.

So you might or might not be aware about the debt ceiling argument currently taking place in the US.

I’ve already written about this, but President Biden for some reason didn’t listen to me (perhaps because he doesn’t read my blog – which is disappointing). Other, more famous people have written about it too,, but the President insists on pretending he has to make a deal with the Republicans.

So, to catch everyone up, here’s how this all works.

I was reading my ADHD blog post today, considering whether to send it to a friend, and it was surprisingly hard for me to bring myself to. I realized I was embarrassed at the voice, the phrasing, the lack of beauty in the individual words, all of which is something I paid relatively little attention to before – and which my friend, who also writes, will definitely notice.

It’s something I’ve paid less attention to than I should. “Writing is thinking” is my philosophy, and I have tons of thoughts that I know other people are interested in. Shouldn’t the structure of the thoughts, both the logical structure and the order in which they’re presented, be more important than voice? And I still believe they are – and yet voice does still matter.

Tolkien was trying to make a new mythology, a new set of deeply resonant stories, for modern (especially English) culture, and he succeeded. He transformed fantasy, and founded the concept of high fantasy. His detailed legendarium (as his mythology is called) is a masterpiece of world-building, with deep symbolism and emotional complexity, a mythology with arguably more depth and room to explore than many ancient ones. Tolkien scholars work full-time to study it, and many more people draw from it explicitly and implicitly for their own art, in D&D and other more modern fantasy settings. Especially with his near-human species, his concepts of hobbits (off-brand as halflings) and elves (distinct from previous iterations) have deeply resonated with many people.

I’d like to share with you how I use my computer, in a way that is (for me) ADHD friendly and well-suited for implementing my organization system. Tools are important to any organizational and productivity system, and optimizing your tools for your brain and your workflow are important. My computer is my most important productivity tool, where my work happens, and where my life/chore/errand/calendar organization happens, so it should be an interesting example of an optimized key tool.

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

• US Constitution, 14th Amendment, Section 4

The debt ceiling is unconstitutional. We’ve let the Republicans play their games for long enough, in the interest of “stability of the economy” and a general fear of rocking the boat, but that time is over now. President Biden should simply announce that his administration will not follow this brazenly unconstituional law, because unconstitutional is literally what it is, and every Congressperson who wants to use it as leverage is in flagrant violation of their oath of office.

ADHD is a controversial topic, and it’s never been more relevant. Diagnoses are soaring right now, driven up by a variety of interacting forces. Open discussion about ADHD – and the related general concept of “neurodiversity” – has been exploding on the Internet. And recently, there’s been a very unfortunate Adderall shortage.

So I wanted to take an opportunity to share some thoughts about it. I would say that I was taking this opportunity to clear things up, but unfortunately, that might not be possible. The reality is a really muddy situation, and many people’s mental models – including many professionals’ – are oversimplifications.

Today, in liturgical Western Christianity, it is the 10th day of Christmas. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate the extended edition of the holiday!

Unfortunately, this essay is not a celebration of Christmas, but rather an explanation of why I have often found it disappointing recently in life, because of a disconnect between the promise and the reality.

Every time Christmas comes around, I think of a classical sacred choral piece that I’ve performed in multiple different choirs in youth and adulthood, from Mendelssohn’s Christus, namely “Es Wird ein Stern aus Jakob Aufgeh’n” (“There shall come a star out of Jacob”).

Happy December! Happy Winter Holidays! We’re almost done with 2022!

I just had my birthday yesterday, on December 20. I am now 34 years old, which is more than a third of a century! I generally take the opportunity on my birthday to do some reflection on the previous year, and to set a theme for the next year. I wanted to share both with you, my audience.

The past year has been intense for me personally. It’s just been a laundry list of life changes and achievements:

As promised in my previous posts about organization, I will now go into some detail about my own organizational system. But before I start talking about it, and how I came to develop it, I’d like to emphasize a few points, or more specifically, three caveats, lest Zeus strike me down with a thunderbolt for my hubris:

• Caveat the First: My system is a work in progress. Even though it is overall very helpful, it’s always falling apart a little bit. Some parts of it work better than others, and it’s constantly evolving as I try to shore up the parts that fall apart more easily. Sometimes, it’s in a better state than others.
• Caveat the Second: What works for me might well not work for you, dear reader. I reckon you and I have very different brains. Even if a psychiatrist would categorize me and you with all the same formally recognized traits, we still have literally different brains, and literally different histories, cultural backgrounds, and personal struggles.
• Caveat the Third: Nothing in this system is particularly novel. It is however very tweaked to my own personality. I present this not to claim that I’ve developed anything new, but as a worked example of applying existing practices to my own life, in hopes that it will be useful to you.

And it is indeed a very personal system and a continuously evolving system. I am sensitive to minor issues. If a TODO list system is insufficiently ergonomic for me, I’ll get overwhelmed by it, or intimidated by it, disheartened, blocked out by my personal “Wall of Awful”, and I will default to not using any organizational system at all, and simply relying on my natural faculties – my naturally poor prospective memory – to make sure I do the things I need to do.

In my previous post on organization, I concluded with this statement:

As everyone’s brain works differently (whether ADHD or not), people differ tremendously in what their ideal organizational systems are. For me, I am much less productive if I have a less than ideal system – the stakes are very high. But even for people who can be productive on any system, I think that tailoring their system to their brain, their lifestyle, their job and schedule and hobbies, can have amazing results.

Memory Leak

I have an excellent memory. I have a terrible memory.

Well, which one is it?

This is a confusing state to be in. It can be frustrating to people around me. How is it – my father used to ask me when I was in high school – that I could remember all the lessons and readings for my tests in school, and get all the good grades, but couldn’t ever remember to do the simplest task or household chore, or to bring with me the simplest item? And of course the fact that I remember these conversations from so long ago is a bit of a case in point.

I enjoyed Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult. I finished it a couple of months ago, when I was feeling very restless and impatient about everything going on in my life. At the time, I desperately needed fun books to read, but I was simultaneously having a lot of trouble finishing books.

This book pulled me the whole way through when other books were failing to: It was in a setting, the Amish communities, that had always interested me. It was competent enough dealing with that community to not drive me away. It made nuanced and smart enough points to keep me engaged, without being so subtle or so sophisticated as to be too heavy or dry or otherwise difficult to get through. All in all, the perfect balance for where I was just then.

I am an Ivy League-educated professional who regularly has to write for my job, who was always in the top English classes in school. And sometimes, I mix up “your” and “you’re.”

I know how grammar works. I always, if I stop to think about it, can figure out which one to use. I know all the tricks. Most of the time, I don’t have to think about it, and the right one comes out. But sometimes, I’m just thinking in terms of what sounds I would make if I were speaking, and I’m in a rush or just distracted or just glitching, and the wrong one comes out.

We decided to write up our thoughts on each of the short stories nominated for the 2022 Hugo awards. Of course, here be spoilers, spoilers galore. If you don’t want these stories spoiled, go read them, and then come back here.

This is the same concept as Jimmy’s review of the 2021 nominees, and so we shall adapt the explanation from that post:

As an exercise, we read each of these stories and told each other what we thought the themes were, and I reference that throughout these reflections. Themes, as we define them, are thematic statements: the point the story is trying to make. Themes are distinct from thematic concepts, in that they are complete sentences rather than just nouns. They are distinct from premises, in that they are the take-away for the real-world, not a statement about the world of the story. And, to be clear, there can be more than one completely valid answer. Both of us would posit what we thought the theme was, answering independently without consulting each other, and then we would discuss the story in greater detail.

Netflix should become a tech company.

I hear the obvious response already: Jimmy, Netflix is already a tech company!

Counterpoint: Is it though?

Somehow, after two dot-com booms, the markets still have an aesthetic-based definition of what constitutes a “tech company”: If a company – any company – has an expensive enough app, and if its founders talk enough about “disrupting” industries, then it is a “tech company” and is therefore entitled to a valuation completely disconnected from its actual industry. Think WeWork – and think what happened to it as people gradually realized it wasn’t an exciting tech start-up but rather a quite boring real estate company. Turns out, you don’t need an expensive app to run a coworking space.

I’ve been feeling recently like I’ve been spinning my wheels in my personal life. I’m pressing on the metaphorical accelerator as hard as I can, probably too hard for safety, and instead of moving forward, the wheels are just spinning, spinning, spinning. I think a large part of it is my perspective of time. “Time is canceled,” my friends and I would say continuously during the lockdown. And it isn’t back, not yet, not how it used to be, not for me.

NB: These are for the 2021 Hugo awards, not the recently-announced 2022 Hugo awards. That one is coming soon.

I decided to write up my thoughts on each of the short stories nominated for the 2021 Hugo awards. Of course, here be spoilers, spoilers galore. If you don’t want these stories spoiled, go read them, and then come back here.

As an exercise, a friend and I read each of these stories and told each other what we thought the themes were, and I reference that throughout these reflections. Themes, as we define them, are thematic statements: the point the story is trying to make. Themes are distinct from thematic concepts, in that they are complete sentences rather than just nouns. They are distinct from premises, in that they are the take-away for the real-world, not a statement about the world of the story. And, to be clear, there can be more than one completely valid answer. Both my friend and I would posit what we thought the theme was, answering independently without consulting each other, and then we would discuss the story in greater detail.

I like beer, and I like comic books, so I was excited to read The Comic Book Story of Beer.

And it was overall quite a fun read! It contextualized how important beer was in antiquity – including theories that beer catalyzed the agricultural revolution – and how important it’s been in society ever since, taking a social approach to the entire history, while also explaining a lot of the science alongside the primarily social narrative. It was a really fun read, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys beer or who cares about history, which I think is most people.

NOTE: This post has the #programming tag, but is intended to be comprehensible by everyone, programmer or not. In fact, I hope some non-programmers read it, as my goal with this post is to explain some of what it means to be a programmer to non-programmers. Therefore, it is also tagged with “nontechnical”.

What is the most important skill for a software engineer? It’s definitely not any particular programming language; they come and go, and a good programmer can pick them up as they work. It’s not estimating how long a project will take, as important and elusive as that skill is – because fundamentally, no one can, and many, many programmers are successful without having fully built up that skill.

I am out of biking shape. I know I am out of biking shape. The pandemic has not been good to my physical fitness. (For the record, this isn’t a proper edited and outlined and triaged essay, just some notes on my past weekend.)

But as out of shape as I am, I also know it’s only 25 miles from here to Philly on the Schuylkill River Trail, and so I figured maybe I could do it without any additional prep. When I found out that it was less hilly than the longer bike rides I used to do, I was sold, and I did it.

For a time, I tried to cultivate an interest in Go. Not this Go, but this Go. The interest didn’t last long – like chess, I had a hard time getting up to even a fairly basic level of competence. And I quickly developed another enthusiastic interest to replace it – sometimes, an interest just doesn’t work out, and it’s nobody’s fault, and you have to just move on and not get too sad, because there’s plenty of fish in the sea.

In front of Penny in line was a 7 foot tall humanoid with glowing blue skin. She suppressed the urge to ask what species they were, and let the alien order their vegan breakfast burrito. The barista at United Planets’ first-floor Starbucks looked human except for the extra hands. Polycherian, Penny remembered. When the barista handed Penny her order – an egg and cheese sandwich on a bagel – Penny bowed respectfully and said pflintsu – Polycherian for “thank you” – before getting on the elevator.

ENVELOPE HEADER:
Date:      January 5, 2027
To:        Rachel Friedman, President of the United States and Leader of the Free World
From:      The Roots of the Great Trees of Galaxy-Wide Civilization
Subject:   An Offer, an Apology, and an Explanation

The Offer

In the name of the One Almighty God: in the name of the Many Stars through which God is made manifest, in the name of the manifestation of God you call the Sun, and in the name of Original Star from Before Time, we offer you peace, not of a lack of conflict, but of a mutual growth. As branches must look to the vine for sustenance, so must you look towards us, as your own scriptures say, being a reflection of the truth.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the local clergy, and the town council had been planning this concept for over a year. Finally they did it: Right in the town square, they installed a giant loudspeaker. From thenceforth, every two minutes, a booming voice would spread all over town, announcing “Are you sure?”

Foolhardy decisions, they had decreed, would soon be a thing of the past.

The locals seemed to adapt pretty readily. Sales of noise-cancelling headphones boomed for a bit, and people’s sleeping habits were surprisingly unaffected – who notices slightly inferior sleep? And drunk driving statistics were immediately better, which the local paper celebrated triumphantly.