muhuk

I see the similarities but I think if you read the whole thing (I've finished it now) you will find out some differences as well.

I vaguely remember John Cleese talks about innovation/creativity and says something along the lines; writer's block, you just shut up, sit down and be creative. Not exactly with these words of course. Philosopher's Stone is pretty much all about stress. And actually it says `shut up, sit down and be creative` approach would backfire because it would produce stress which is counter-productive for this mode of thinking.

I like the phrase Rich Hickey uses in relation to software design; hammock time. It is open mode, but it also implies peace of mind and a lack of pressure to be creative.

In "Why No-One’s Noticed This Before"[1] the author makes a distinction of `self-consistents` and `confabulators`. I've found this very similar to Robert Pirsig's `classical thinkers` vs `romantics`[2]. It is unfortunate that ZAMM devolves into rationalizing irrational behaviour and ends with a shrug after having raised the reader's expectations. I haven't read all of the material here yet, but so far it all makes sense.

1: http://the-programmers-stone.com/about/why-no-one%E2%80%99s-...

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_M...

I'm not even a coffee aficionado.

   (-> {:a 1 :b 2}
     (->/assoc :a inc)
     (->/as {:keys [b]}             
       (->/when (> b 10)
         (->/assoc :large-b true))))

My take-away, from the last part:

    The state represented by each search node doesn’t have to be limited to a position; 
    on the contrary, it can include an arbitrarly complex set of values. For example, 
    if turning 90 degrees takes the same time as walking from one square to the next, 
    the state of your character can be [position, heading]. Each node now represents 
    not only the position of the character, but also its heading; and the new edges 
    of the graph (implicit or explicit) reflect that.

    Going back to the original 5x5 grid, the starting position of the search now may 
    be [A, East]. The adjacent nodes are now [B, East] and [A, South] - if you want 
    to reach F, you need to correct your heading first, so the path would be 
    [A, East], [A, South], [F, South].

    First-person shooter? At least four dimensions: [X, Y, Z, Heading]. Maybe even
    [X, Y, Z, Heading, Health, Ammo].

You don't know I asked those questions, you only know that your sense impressions have been triggered.

Similarly my eyes sent some signals to my brain and after processing them I have concluded that you have replied to my comment. But wait! I don't really know you replied me, do I?

Since my senses are unreliable and I don't have any other means to interact with reality but my senses, my mind is impotent to deal with reality. What else can I do but go through my life hallucinating and doubting myself or inventing fantasies to keep my sanity.

-----

When you look at the moon (at the right time) you see circle. Then you can decide the moon is circular. Your senses are working just fine, so is your brain. It's your limited knowledge that leads you to wrong conclusions. As you observe and learn more, you integrate more and more concepts and you can eventually arrive to the point that moon is indeed a somewhat spherical object.

Or you can conclude that your senses are lying to you and reality cannot be known. Then you'd never go further than "looks circular, but know knows, right?".

Can something exist yet have no nature?

Can something exist without being (anything)?

http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/72392/handle-move...

(I'm just constantly looking for ways to make my scala code more accessible.)

I think the author confuses the concept (homoiconicity) and it's practical consequences. I think this quote from the comments below summarizes it:

    > But the fact of the matter is that programmers interact with text, not with data structures.
    
    Not Lisp programmers. It's trivial to implement an environment where code will be represented graphically and won't be ever represented as text.
    
    That's, actually, the point: language semantics isn't tied to textual representation.

    - What's stopping us?
    - Geometry.
    - Just ignore it.

Click the speaker button on the bottom left of the text box to listen:

http://translate.google.com/#en/fr/scheme http://translate.google.com/#tr/fr/sikim

They have distinctly different pronunciations.

I should mention that I had moved to another country 3 years ago. The first year I was very social. It was fun and satisfying. But then I started to realize there was a fundamental philosophical difference between me and pretty much everyone else. It's hard to explain objectively. But my observation is `truth is less important than peace and order`. It took me some time to formulate this because I was giving the benefit of doubt to my friends and only responding to what they were actually saying. But when truth is no longer the goal, pretty much anything goes. The second year went by with these awkward conversations.

Then I started to question the value of my friendships. Of course it was the value I was getting at first. But that line of thinking wasn't very useful from a practical perspective. It dawned on me when I started looking at the equation from the other side. What I had to offer wasn't valuable for them. Not only that, it was confusing and sometimes hurtful. It's like you get to paint the world any color you want, then someone comes tells you that the sun shouldn't be green. Of course this was all in my head, it had to be tested.

If you are a valuable friend to me, if you contribute something worthy to my life, I thought, I would at least care if you are dead or not. That was my thesis. So I disconnected from the `cheap communication` channels but kept my phone and of course my email. And that's pretty much the whole story. No one called. Except a few friends that I didn't have doubts about, but I have always been in contact with them, facebook or no facebook.

I sometimes feel lonely. But I will not lower my expectations. Because that would mean asking me to stop saying the world revolves around sun, or that it's not flat. I don't want to pretend everybody is right `in their own way`, no matter how stupid the stuff coming out of their mouth. That would make me unhappy. Now, at least I can be happy.

I agree with you in that independence is valuable trait. Much of the advice is focusing on the offense, meet more people, be more nice. I think independence and self-esteem are better starting points. I would say; work on yourself. If you are bettering yourself, you wouldn't have too much time to feel lonely. Eventually you might meet new people and maybe make some friends. But I think the key is to build yourself up.

The author is focusing catching errors with tests too much, he seems to miss the point that the difficulty of writing adequate unit tests is a symptom of bad design.

    A strain of bacteria, or any microorganism that causes illness or has a superficial resemblance to an insect or bug

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug

Also it's not fun to draw in the tiny little grid. It would make life much easier if the shapes on the right was draggable to the canvas.

I have programmer friends who don't ever use a computer outside of work, who haven't learned a new language (outside of work) in the last 10 years for instance. Learning new languages is not necessarily a creative endeavor. But what happens then is cargo culting and bike shedding much like the way gamers get so demanding about something they don't know how to make.

This is a shortcoming of the justice system.

> A little guy with a legitimate patent may have difficulty convincing large corporations to pay a license fee.

Isn't this also a shortcoming of the justice system, partially if not entirely?

In all these examples the incentives with the primary actors and the middlemen doesn't align.