miceeatnicerice

Below money there's like an entire sub-economy of power and cleverness that's encoded into the human culture the agents are mirroring. Maybe it starts furtive and goes legitimate after a bit.

Aren't your plants to a degree conscious though - they're living things striving towards something, either happily or tragically. If you model them to yourself as just mechanisms, there's a part of them that's missing, not just by some poetic fallacy, but a deficiency of real scientific understanding - hence, biology.

That odd civil war was more than a tiny bit like revolutions elsewhere though (violent beheadings, paranoid totalitarianism, bourgeois ascendancy) - it just happened a little earlier than others. British history is all gradual and continuous, except for the big abrupt cataclysm in the middle of it.

It's surely supposed to be the perfect bridge between both - but we know in practice it often isn't.

I'd also quibble minorly with intent being what the code should be clearly communicating - it's its place and function and meaning within the wider system, which isn't necessarily what the particular programmer wished. Free-form English is a good medium for intent - not so much for "what this thing actually does"

Or - it sounds like spaghetti, but ordered into a sounder structure

Not satire so much as an ironic dialectic - a progress through a series of (decreasingly?) daft ideas

Surely it was going to be the rise of class consciousness that overthrew Moloch? Though if we're all involved in the process ourselves, and only gain this consciousness through work, the end of Capitalism isn't so much a violent overthrowing from outside as much as a growing, positive realization of what was inside it anyway.

Maybe that's exactly what things like UBI point to: life as an adventure rather than a slave camp. The paranoid part of me then wants to find a bigger and more evil capital to criticise in the Marxian manner.

And very reasonably so. What you want, right, is a two-tier system: a kind of limbo state for the partially-read, a liberal scattering of them about the house, where they will healthily compete for your time - some will prove themselves under these conditions, others will recede into a shameful cupboard or the basement or wherever - and then a glamorous on-display shelf where your approved, appreciated selection sits, guilt-free and proud, having floated upwards due to their superior quality.

If the book churn is too low, any old rubbish makes it to the top.

Fun fact: in the glossary at the end of the original xp book, it describes unit tests as 'tests from the perspective of the programmer', and that's that - a woolly cop-out.

I agree, rewriting with a clear head works wonders - but, to be fair to the op, when you rewrite your own code you'll be very appreciative of all the challenges and possibilities.

It's a very different kettle of fish to rewrite from scratch strange code you've not properly explored and given a chance to - which is the usual situation.

If everyone's got the plague does that mean they're all in tip top health? Nope. Festering, bulbous pustules are what they are, and don't magically transform by force of numbers.

The same goes for the tendency to mechanically pigeonhole others - it is what it is, a mania for rigidly organizing the (supposedly) rigidly organizing. It sees its own whimsical image in the mirror and explodes with delight.

If you approach it with the attitude that the condition determines the person, then I suppose, yes, that's true.

But that's a pretty miserable attitude to approach it with. It's much better to keep an open mind to the possibilities of life - although its the hope that kills you. I mean - if you have to think about such things, it's most accurate to say that that's the definition of having been an introvert.

Anecdotally, inside every introvert is a squeaking, flamboyant self, desiring to be its opposite. If you desire it, you've got to (kind of) already be essentially interwoven with it.

Our flat is the same - I enjoy letting the mould grow on the wall, in its pretty, grey shapes. And every Summer, as the world turns in its natural course, there's the seasonal infestation of fruit flies around the bin. Nature's lovely.

Maybe our romantic adoration could be rediscovered if we admitted more things as being 'natural'? People, too, provide a kind of undergrowth, and their greater structures form some very fetching accretions.

Well, yes - but being speculatively questioned is more infuriating because it's pretending to be the exact opposite of what it really is, as long as the questioner is happily taking a position of authority on the issue - which they are, as they're the one who's set the question in the first place. It's like a fly looking at a quivering piece of silk and imagining the worst, even if the spider's miles off.

What you want, instead of questions, are themes - and the willingness to make yourself ridiculous through positive speculations.

No software is creatively fathomed out of nothing. Opinionated frameworks abound, pre-ordaining the little manouevres needed to wire them up properly, and solving familiar problems with established patterns. If these have all been decided beforehand, even if only by convention, then what are they but blueprints?

What difference there is works in software's favour: there's a frothy top layer of most projects where developers can indulge their whims/hone their abilities and approaches. But it's not the whole.

But there's dismerit in monocultures - maybe those F# folks are pleased to be avoiding that.

Plus, if you're situated in a historical process (like we all are) then arbitrary things become important. Accidental weaknesses such as being perched on the CLR and tethered to the hopes, dreams and capabilities of common-garden C# enterprise developers invert strangely into advantages - in the case of F#, it makes for a very friendly, welcoming ecosystem.

Not entirely on topic, obviously, but whatever: there's a strange emphasis on the male pronoun in the first paragraph of this, that at first seems like a kind of horrible hiccup from the past, but then, through its repetition, becomes more clearly a sardonic gendering of the programmer-user from above, which is excellent (if true)

But mimickry of conversational tics is only one side of the coin - as much as we all like to lather ourselves in a common medium, it's also pleasant to distinguish ourselves from our peers, not just for an ulterior audience, but also one-to-one. What of course tends to happen - in a nice conversation at least - is that you lead each other in a kind of dance, with wilful flattery one moment, and cheesy antagonism the next.

Maybe time's the same - too much stimulating newness or aggravating nagging, and you zone out.

Elsewhere in the fertile field of morbid Conservativism, there's good rumination to be had in the shady corner that is Book III of the Alan Clark Diaries. Despite being likeable and witty, the man's an aristocratic snob, a bigot, a serial womanizer - and his miserable end, retold explicitly, renders him palpably futile. The last chapter is written by his observant wife, as he lies wrapped in sheets gurgling and voiceless.

I pose it as if I enjoyed it, but I didn't - it was a terrifying read. Makes you wonder, you know, what to do with your own life (which is to plug the gap with a platitude). Maybe Alan Clark would have been saved if he'd regularly procrastinated on Hacker News? Fingers crossed.

Chastisement and reconfirmation in one glittering, bulging codpiece

Also - the glistening of jewellery.

Isn't it implied in being territorial?

That's fascinating. Maybe nasally-orientated organisms conceive themselves more as ambient presences than as hard-bodied social atoms?

Too right. And Foucault's conception of power allows this kind of non-scientific practice to be reasoned about.

It does seem familiar, but it doesn't seem like Foucault. If power's everywhere, it can hardly be a bad thing in itself. The point isn't to oppose it, but to be cognizant of it, to play with it and to not get trapped in other people's usage of it.

Looking for small things in a field requires, and promotes, a particular mindset - like you have to let your imagination run from the slightest impressions, and trust your innate powers of recognition. I sometimes go mushrooming (like John Cage, fact fans) and the funnest part of it is the battle with my own thought processes, as I attempt to turn myself into a slick mushroom-detecting machine via consciousness-dilation.

I like to think the key's not complete thoughtlessness, but rather an appreciation of the vastness the field without caring too much about any one part of it. Which is a bit wishy-washy, but forms a good basis.

Anyone ever come across Alain Badiou? And if so, what's his reputation like? All my small acquaintance with set theory etc has basically come second-hand from trying to read his book, and now I'm left with the probably unjustifiable impression that mathematical reasoning has to come to a crisis, and must admit arbitrariness as a kind of self-reflexive pivot.

As for why - I couldn't tell you, but it made sense at the time.

Being faithful to chance events is a great way to organise your knowledge - it basically subordinates facts to wit. Fight the facts! Become self-aware! That's how I think it works anyway.

Difficult to follow through with on the larger scale, though - which is where the little synchronicities come in.

That might have been m0nty's exact point