One of the most natural inclinations people have is self-justification. Do something odd or questionable? No worries: your brain will happily develop some narrative about why it's perfectly reasonable or at least not your fault. This narrative can be particularly sticky if you're justifying some trait that you never consciously adopted but seemed to be always present. Of course, a good counterpoint is trying to live with other people. Then it's in your face that they think or behave differently, and if you're behaving well you are forced to question your narrative. Or if you're behaving badly you try to impose your narrative on them. What I didn't properly question about myself for many years was my attitude to money. I have all the instincts of a miser: accumulating money, obsessively optimising for 'bargains', and evaluating every purchase in terms of long term value, as if I were trying to achieve some kind of high score at the end of my life. Intelle...
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Well, actually not all of us, really just me (I?). I was listening to a vaguely interesting podcast this morning about David Bessis' book Mathematica, which (apparently?) emphasises the importance of intuition in mathematical thinking rather than logical proofs. In particular, the idea was that being a good mathematician is learning to train your intuition to agree with the reality, battering it into the right shape when you make a mistake instead of just giving up. It can then be a useful guide and inspiration when exploring new mathematical concepts. What most struck me about this idea of 'training your intuition' was that this was analogous to machine learning (LLMs/AI/whatever). You don't really care about the steps or formally proving something, you're just trying to make the outputs of the system agree with reality. Our big advantage over LLMs in this context being that for us reality is more than 'all the text on the internet'. But then I got to thi...
One of my work colleagues has recently moved to Sydney, and was asking me about schools. Public? Selective? Catholic? Private? The second greatest topic of conversation in our blessed city after housing. There are no good answers; I think the most I can contribute is a biased, almost completely unresearched and probably fundamentally incorrect take on why it's such a mess. In the before times, there were three systems. If you were rich, you went to a fancy private school; in such times, this was tautological. All private schools were fancy. Otherwise, if you were Catholic you went to a 'systemic' Catholic school for a smaller amount of money, and if you were neither rich nor Catholic you went to your local government school. Then, the systemic Catholic schools started running out of money as the nuns and monks aged out and they couldn't afford to actually pay teachers, so they extorted the government of the time into funding them since it would be cheaper to do this tha...
I have more ideas than I know what to do with; sadly, this is not because I'm busy, but more that I lack motivation to make time for my own ideas. This is particularly frustrating for programming projects: I enjoy programming for the sake of it, I really want some things to exist, and I'm ok if I'm the only one who ever uses the program... yet usually I can muster at most 10 hours of enthusiasm for any particular project, of which at least half is spent over-thinking (and under-delivering). So, I thought I'd ask the internet what it thought of some of my programming thought bubbles where I've actually got to the point of writing some code. Tell me something sounds boring, or tell me something sounds great. A single comment either way may inspire me to do something, if only through orneriness. And though I've provided links, they're not likely to be useful. Not one of these is MVP-worthy. PythonRepl is the result of hacking on Skulpt to give it some more Lo...
I have a Fuji Xerox CP205 w. Which is a boring colour laser printer from many years ago, and like most laser printers it just keeps working. Unfortunately, it doesn't just work in Linux, so... I searched. Apparently, it uses a something called HBPL. There is/was a package that supported this that has recently disappeared from the internet made by someone who apparently had a few issues with linux distributions. Confusingly, the nominally HBPL printers are supported by the foo2hbpl2 program in the foo2zjs package (named after the separate - ? - ZjStream protocol). Which would imply that my printer should just work, except that this printer was so cheap it was an HBPL1 printer, which apparently was a subtly different format that foo2zjs's HBPL2 program doesn't support. A few HBPL1 printers (not mine) had manufacturer provided binary i386 drivers that people are having fun with . That's not the sort of fun I really want to get into anyway. The good news is that back in ...
A few years ago, I was on playground duty and a charming 17-year-old threw some of his rubbish on the ground. When I told him to sort it out his retort was 'I'm making sure the cleaners have a job'. And this is true, just as if you go and break windows it'll help your local glass company , but. you need to think a bit deeper, right? This kind of immature behaviour reminds me a lot of how Australia interacts with the world, roughly summarised as "do whatever we feel like, as long as we can find some excuse and it might be ok for the economy". After all, we're only one little country anyway, so whatever we do doesn't really matter for the world. Our government is usually just like that 17-year-old: morally vacuous. Obviously, if you're going to harangue politicans for short-sightedness, it's hard to go past climate change. Yes, it's true that Australia contributes a relatively small proportion of the world's emissions, but as a rich count...
Because I was thinking about multi-member electorates , I couldn't help but jot down a few responses to common objections. This is not my first rodeo with off-the-cuff electoral reform proposals ( local copy ); hey, someone's got to be interested in voting systems! (1) By reducing the percentage of votes required to win a seat in parliament, the government will become less stable. Having multi-member electorates would pull us towards a more representative system, but runs the 'risk' of requiring more coalitions: just as frequently happens in Tasmania where both Labor/Greens and Liberal/Greens have formed functional coalitions. Of course, there is the possibility that the coalitions are unstable or unworkable; some countries (e.g. Italy, Israel) are notorious for having chaotic governance because coalition partners can and do easily drop support for the government, or simply end up not being able to form a government in the first place. If you truly do value ...
One of the depressing moments in NSW politics last year was when the former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, fronting ICAC over allegations that she had been improperly influenced due to a personal relationship, said: I don’t think it would be a surprise to anybody that we throw money at seats to keep them. Witness also the ex-Deputy Premier's bizarre pride in being known as Pork Barrelaro . You could read this as overdue acceptance of political reality, but for me it's more concerning. It's an indication that pork-barrelling is on the verge of becoming normalised for our political class, such that they no longer feel the need to pretend it's inappropriate. Stolen from Wikipedia And let's be clear: it is inappropriate. When 95% of grants go to politically advantageous seats with almost no process, and notes are destroyed in contravention of the State Records Act, it smells more like corruption than good governance. The previous year, Berejiklian had (correctly) poi...
Short story: I'm going to be a Fusion Party candidate for Grayndler in the next Australian federal election. I even made a Facebook page and a Twitter account , and wrote a political ramble below. Regardless of what one thinks of Dunbar's number and the reasoning behind it, human brains evolved in the context of a small number of people. Maybe there were a hundred people in your group, and you knew people in a few other groups. If you even knew of the existence of a thousand people, you'd probably qualify as some kind of social butterfly. So it's mind-blowingly amazing that we've managed to organise ourselves into societies of millions. But because we can't grasp that many people we've had to rely on what I think of as cultural shorthand. We can't care about everyone as individuals and figure out what's best for each of them, so we instead rely on caring about ideas: religion, political ideology, nationalism, feminism, human rights, and so on. ...
I'm a capitalist. Why? I believe that money is the best proxy we've found for getting things done based on need. But I hate that it encourages companies to produce new goods constantly, and that this is a much more successful business strategy than trying to sell second hand goods. One of the curses of rich countries is that the overhead to fix/recirculate goods easily becomes too high relative to people's wages, and many useful items sit around unused.
One of my favourite ideas is that of a Local optimum , a mathematical concept that can be applied more broadly. If you've never heard of the term, it's that starting somewhere you may incrementally improve but never discover that a better solution exists. For instance, imagine you're in the 10th century, trying to develop the fastest means of transportation. The current state of the art is the horse; you therefore decide to spend time breeding better horses. You make a small improvement, but with this approach you have no chance of discovering any of the many technologies that have now replaced the horse. (1) Pseudo-mathematically, this might look something like:
As a programming father you need to be concerned about your budget. This means resisting the temptation to buy the most amazing hardware, and not running power-hungry CPUs all day. Ok, I lie - I'm not really that concerned about our budget, and I could afford to buy a new computer. I must admit to reading a pamphlet for our upcoming council election... and part of the reason I can afford a new computer is that I enjoy cost optimisation (ok, stinginess). But what's even more fun is that the best way to be stingy is to use three different gadgets instead of just one.
Content warning: this is directed purely at programmers. At work we're deciding what configuration file format to use for a new piece of software, where the configuration will have to be produced or modified by non-expert users. Of course, as the developers of the project, it's always easy to forget about these, your most important users: those who won't have a deep engagement with your project and how amazing it can be, but to whom it is only a minor help or hindrance on their path to 'getting shit done'. Broadly, I think there are three choices you can make: the bad choice: design a system around the sum of the complexity involved the 'nice' choice: design a system that focuses on providing a straightforward view to the median user but is extensible enough that any kind of complexity can be represented the lazy choice: design a system that only really accounts for non-expert users, forcing others to either water-down their dreams or build elaborate...
A slightly amended version of this was subsequently published in the online version of the SMH I have a confession to make. I was one of the 394 candidates on the NSW Upper House ballot paper. And I want to apologise for its ridiculous number of boxes, more than any sane person should need to consider. It doesn't serve democracy to offer so many choices that are ignored. Last time we had a 'tablecloth', the 1999 NSW election, it inspired reform of dubious utility. The bar was raised for party registration, which clearly hasn't been sufficient, and requiring 15 candidates on a group ticket only increases the amount of paper used. Even the system of optional preferential voting and above the line numbering, which makes it easier to vote as you would wish, adds to voter confusion due to the subtle differences from the federal system. If we accept that the minuscule number of people who vote for individuals below the line have no impact on the result, and that we ...
I'm happy that we're not all using COBOL and Fortran. Unfortunately, we're (almost) all still using some variant of the Bourne shell. There's no reason you have to... unless you want to worry about boring things like other people reading or running your code. So I've spent some time fiddling with es (it's a functional type shell with sane quoting rules; Jordan, you know you want it).
I often claim to live in the present; the past is a foreign land, and many will know how I feel about those. One of the many implications of this attitude is that I forget... and unfortunately, this includes forgetting 'ideas', which tend to blaze through my awareness only to fizzle in the atmosphere of my ongoing lethargy. When I went to write this post, I finally remembered a meta idea . Oddly, however, I'm intensely proud of having ideas. So, in one more effort to build not this pride upon sand, I thought I'd try to 'open-source' my brain, spending my limited enthusiasm for an idea by writing it on the indestructible clay of the internet instead of merely being intensely distracted for a few hours. What odds that this will be the last post I make on this blog? * Anyway, today's idea, which isn't all that exciting after all that waffle: Auto-completion seems to be pervasive nowadays, what with phones and word processors finishing words, and G...
I always had this idea that we were a trifle self-absorbed when we studied history. Spending most of the time on the last century or two seemed wrong, and what there was of earlier times seemed to have huge gaps in the narrative. (let's forget about nationalistic obsessions for now) But somehow - probably the influence of xkcd - I realised that our scale was odd. After all, if we measure in years, human history is irrelevant (100,000 / billions); what we should be thinking about is the amount of human experience in those years. Perhaps we might see that all the waffle about the dramatic rate of progress is not so much a factor of industrialisation and western-society magic, but more about the number of people around. Thus, a hand-wavy human history where the intervals are normalised by considering the number of people living at the time. The interesting part is the dates - the rest is just me having fun. Apologies for the embarrassingly Eurocentric view. Not sure what I thin...